Saturday is concepts/walkthroughs day!
Here are the sketches and scribbles that went on to become the painting I posted on Wednesday.
The original concept was all about the raaaage in the foreground character and didn’t focus so much on the background pair.
A first play with the ink.
Building on the composition and the characters.
Final thumbnail.
Some different style experiments.
The first of a couple of builds for which I collaborated with my father (ie, palmed off the hard work to).
The concept for this comes, of course, from KoL. The epic weapon of the disco bandit is a banjo crafted out of a disco ball. Serendipitously, just as the idea to create the thing came to me, a fellow student at life-drawing classes showed me some photos of instruments made out of food tins. I started googling around and found that banjos made of cookie tins are actually quite widely made by artists and traveling musicians (the can itself is a great storage device) and there are many guides to making them around the place.
Eventually, my internet travels led me to a site explaining how to create a banjo out of a gourd, and this became the basis of the disco banjo.
I bought a disco ball from Cheap-as-Chips and peeled off mirror sections until I found the seam along which the hemispheres of the ball were connected. Lots of photos from this stage, cos I had a lot of fun with it! Except when the thing first split open and noxious plasticy fumes filled my lungs.
Lifting off the first piece.
A stanley knife was sufficient to break into the plastic.
Leaving a bisected disco ball on a career-disco bandit’s keyboard is like leaving a severed horse head on someone’s pillow.
Testing the resonance of the ball using some fishing wire, a spare violin bridge and some newspaper.
Once the disco ball was dealt with, I purchased a drum head, banjo strings and guitar pegs and drafted some timber guides for my father to do the woodwork.
Disco bongo. An 8″ drum head fits perfectly over the half-disco ball.
The neck.
A piece to go inside the banjo body in order to support the shape of the disco ball and provide a mounting point for the neck.
Preparing a hole for the timber to go through. I used a piece of paper of the same size/shape as the cross-section of the wood as my guide.
Sadly there are no more progress shots from here on as I passed everything over to my dad and he assembled the whole thing with expert craftsmanship.
Suddenly, it’s done!
I used the many left over mirror sections to decorate the drum head.
The tailpiece is a separate piece of timber, screwed from the outside of the ball to the bracer piece on the inside. It also sits over the rim of the drum to hold things in place.
The banjo is fretless and tuned in fifths as I played ‘cello way back when.
I’m making paint swatches!
These swatches are modelled after the ones described here. The basic idea is to test the paint’s behaviour and characteristics.
The tests are:
In addition, the top labelling indicates the colour code in its brand range and the pigments used in the colour. The bottom is obviously the colour’s name.
The swatches I’ve made so far:
These swatches aren’t totally reliable as they’re made from pan colours – so the ratio of paint to water can’t be controlled in a methodical manner as described in the handprint guide. It’s also why I’ve yet to put in the tint lines for the blues as I’m pondering a better way to control them. Even considering that they might not be totally reliable as a standardised set of information about pigments, however, the swatches are still useful as a guide to the way I use my paints.
Oops, didn’t have stuff ready for today. But luckily, Connell has put together an extra-special guest post this week! I feel really excited and privileged to be able to share this with you all.
So, today I thought I’d share with you the creation of the wedding cake for myself and my lovely wife Helena. We’ve been married 3 months already! Time flies when you have an awesome wife~
So, our wedding was very geeky in theme, but not to a degree that it overshadowed the importance of the day. But for the cake, we knew that traditional was not going to cut it. Looking online, we quickly fell in love with the many Mario cakes that people have made over the years. The idea we had was to make a custom wedding topper made to look like us, and place that on top of a cake where each tier had the appearance of a Mario level.
The initial design for the topper was Helena and I high fiving, which we thought would be a very cute idea. To account for our rather amusing height difference, Helena was to be standing on a Mario item box:
We have a friend who makes his own toys, and had hoped he’d be able to hook us up with someone who could make a specific resin toy of this design. Sadly, for size we wanted, it was going to be expensive and time consuming, and instead, we found a local cake topper designer who uses wooden pegs and makes custom clothing for each topper, which all looked incredibly cute. We sent her descriptions of our clothes (including Helena’s wedding dress, so I didn’t get to see the topper until the night of the wedding), and I designed faces to look closer to my art style than hers:
With this being made, we had to find a cakemaker who would be up to the challenge of making our cake. A local cakemaker Helena found showed some pretty amazing talent, and once we’d met her and tasted her cake (oh my god her cakes) we knew we had the right cake craftsperson.
So, I had to design the thing. I wanted each tier to be unique, and thought it would be cute if each level was as if they were connected via pipes, making the entire cake effectively one Mario level. Firstly came a basic planning stage, the cakemaker and I had to come to an agreement on what was feasible based on the limitations of icing. Here’s the sketch we started with:
Initially it was only two tiers, but the cakemaker recommended a third (who can say no to more cake?). With that, the top tier was also going to be a cliff rather than the sky and trees I settled on. While the top tier could have been made with a darker brown, it really wouldn’t have been as unique as I wanted.  From those decisions, an overall cake plan was determined:
With that worked out, I searched for as many Mario images as I could find. I ended up chosing the look of New Super Mario Brothers, the colours in that game have an almost… sugary feel to them already (for want of a better, more correct phrase). The first step was to create the building blocks that I’d be needing for all the tiers: blocks, goombas, pipes, pirhana plants, and so on:
And once that was done, I started building Mario levels, which was actually kind of fun! I made sure to keep in as many nods to classic Mario level design as possible. The final designs are quite large, as I designed to scale, so they’re linked below.
And with that, the planning was complete! And the result was completely and utterly worth it:
In the end, the cake designer took some liberties in the design, but that was to be expected. I loved how the colours came out, and of course, the taste… As for the topper, I think it is so damned cute.
Helena and I still have the top tier with the topper on it kept in a case – the actual tier is Styrofoam, and the sugar icing will keep for a very, very long time. Best wedding cake ever? I think so.
Thanks Connell! I hope you’ll provide another post about the other awesome cakes that made an appearance on the night, too! Every table was graced with its own original cake and an accompanying story. Our table especially enjoyed our Pikmin themed cake, but I couldn’t resist sneaking over to the Tetris brownie table and playing some pretend Tetris… I mean, uh, congratulations to you and Helena!
A step through of the creation of the booklet comic.
Step 0: I write a script. It starts from a bit of stream of consciousness as I play around with what the characters would say. I then split the script into scene and dialogue transitions – working out the pacing. Where would be the best spot to move the panel focus? How do I fit all this text onto the page? My original script gets sliced in a way that needs four pages. I revise and re-revise on this, now that I have an idea of the tone of the comic.
Step 1: Once I’m happy with the script (ie, once I realise that time is short and there’s no point in rehashing it if I’m not going to be able to draw the comic by the print deadline), I rough the panels. This really happens in tandem with step 0, as sometimes it isn’t clear how the dialogue is going to work and how the characters are going to feel on the page without doing some thumbnails.
I drew myself into a corner on my first attempt at the comic exactly because I’d failed to take into account the dialogue when initially imagining my panels. I’ll put up the failed page tomorrow.
Step 2: I’m fiddling with the speech bubble style. I want to give off a bit of a manga feel, so I do some font-hunting and find one that looks good in all caps and has a lenient publishing/royalty policy. I also put some thought into the design of my word balloons – instead of going for perfectly rounded ones I emulate the dynamic shapes seen in manga. I also choose tall word balloons where possible, like those used to accommodate the vertical dialogue in Japanese works.
Step 3: Inking. I’ve taken the blue roughs, printed them onto watercolour paper, and inked over them using a dip pen. I enjoy using the dip pen to create the lineart as it’s easy to manipulate line weights and I get a really crisp line. I’m also coming up against time – so my choice to go with real media is to force myself away from obsessiveness about perfection. There are flaws in this lineart, but at least I’ve gotten it done.
Step 4: Corrections. Errors and untidy lines are tweaked in Photoshop.
Step 5: I’ve printed out the new lineart again. The mistake? Doing it on my inkjet printer, which I’d previously found to be acceptably waterproof when working over light print like pale blue, but which has obvious bleed issues when using black ink. I’ve also lost a fair bit of detail in the lineart.
I’d used my inkjet to save time and because I’d had other issues with painting on laser printed lineart in the past. The answer is probably to just work on the one piece of paper from start to end, but I did need to make corrections throughout this piece so it wouldn’t have been the right solution in this case either. Perhaps I should do colours first and lineart last?
Initial colour choices here. The important one was making the distinction between the first and second scenes. My panel layout shows a passage of time through the wide gap between the third and fourth rows of the comic in the second page. The colours serve to further emphasise that the characters are in a different setting.
Step 6: I’ve finished most of the colours, and this isn’t so much a step as an experiment. Here I’m trying to restore the original lineart that got ruined by the poor print quality and the bleeding of the inks that happened when I was watercolouring over them. I’ve done some Photoshop magic to try fill the blacks in based on the colours around them and have laid the original lineart over the top. It looks crisper, but the colours that were evident where the colour meets the black are lost, and many areas appear washed out or to have a weird rim around them.
The finished comic
I decide to not bother with a perfect lineart restoration as some areas where the colour meets the lineart actually rather appeal to me. I focus on cleaning up the areas of highest detail and where the restorations are easier. Also, I’ve added Ayvee’s bow in the second-to-last panel digitally, making sure to get the texture of the colouring consistent.
Based on the panel I put together for AVCon. I had kinda wanted to make the presentation come from the point of view of a beginner learning about the medium but I didn’t have quite enough time to lock down the tone and focus of the presentation. Still went pretty well and I had an interested, engaged audience. Let’s get straight into things.
Advantages of Watercolour:
Watercolours are a surprisingly versatile medium and produce a range of beautiful results. The transparency of the paint means that watercolour paintings often have a light, bright or effortless feeling to them.
There’s also a charming unpredictability about floating pigment in water. While in an acrylic, oil or even digital image you can get a lot of expressiveness into the painting through brush strokes, expressiveness in watercolour paintings is often about walking the line between controlling the medium and letting the unexpected happen.
I enjoy watercolours because they are a tidy medium. All I need is my box of colours, a brush and some water and I can dive straight into a painting. Watercolours are also teaching me discipline and are encouraging me to make careful choices about colour and what I commit to paper. Often there’s no taking back something once it’s put down, which leads to the next section…
Challenges
Watercolour can be quite unforgiving. One of the great skills required by watercolour artists is being able to leave the whites of an image untouched. This way, the white of the paper serves to provide the highlights. Although there is often white paint included in watercolour sets, you will never achieve the same effect as leaving the paper clean. I think of a painting as one that is drawn without white available at all. In short, with watercolours you cannot paint white over your picture like you might do with acrylics, oils, pastels or in a digital image.
Layering colours can also be tricky as the transparency of the paint usually means that the colour beneath is evident. Again, if you have painted over a section in the wrong colour you will have difficulty restoring it and painting over it likely won’t work well. On the other hand, if you’re glazing an area to give it a hint of a new colour, you must be careful to use a thin wash. Although the colour below may be evident even with a thicker wash, details can be lost. A painter also has to be careful to not disturb the pigment that is sitting on the paper on layers of paint they’ve previously applied.
Finally, working with a wet medium of course means dealing with different behaviours as the paper or paint have different wetness. Painting onto a wet sheet of paper will give a vastly different result to painting on a dry sheet. This means that the watercolour painter must learn to gain familiarity with the way that the paint acts. They must also learn patience!
Some art links demonstrating what is possible with watercolour:
Next up: materials.
Last December, I started making a plushy version of everyone’s favourite crazy clump – the Katamari. To summarise the Katamari games in a few words, “you roll around a ball, picking up anything and everything in your way”.
The Katamari ball is basically a truncated icosahedron (fun fact, “truncated icosahedron” was briefly my nickname in year 5 as I was too nerdy to be a “square”). If you don’t know what a truncated icosahedron is, think of a soccer ball. In the Katamari, the faces that are pentagons become the knobbly nodes. To make my Katamari, I created a truncated icosahedron net based on one from Wikipedia, as my truncated icosahedron would exclude the pentagons.
The two net halves
After cutting out the two main sections of fabric, I started sewing furiously! It took most of the day, but I was able to sew together the nets, and add ten of the twelve knobs.
Me and my Katamari
After getting that far, I left it. I wanted to add magnets, but had none on hand. The Katamari went to the back of my mind, and I was lazy in finding where to get magnets from. Anyway, last Thursday, I finally ordered some magnets and have put them in the Katamari. The result is quite satisfying!
Tidying up in a messy way
The Katamari can hold the scissors pretty well! It takes two magnets to hold them quite firmly, but the weight of the scissors can make the Katamari tend to fall over. This might behave a bit better when I add the final two nodes. For objects that it has trouble holding onto with magnetic forces, the nodes are distributed fairly evenly over the surface, so objects can be balanced quite comfortably between them (as is the case with the box of staples in the image above). Objects can also be balanced on ones that are stuck on, like the brush. So there are a few ways to make the Katamari hold objects, and the overall effect is exactly what I was aiming for. The Katamari makes a great pincushion!
There is still some troubleshooting left to go. I will have to think about how to colour the Katamari – whether to use a variety of coloured materials, or to use fabric paints. I will likely have to glue the magnets to the insides of the nodes. And I will have to work out how to get the last two nodes onto the Katamari neatly. After I get those things sorted out, I’ll probably make a number of Katamari and maybe even some Team Fortress 2 Sticky Bombs.
A few weeks ago, I bought myself a new set of watercolour pans. My old set, a Van Gogh 12-pan set, (really great for travelling with!) has served me well for many years, but it recently dawned on me that with the limited colours provided, there would be hues that I’d never be able to achieve in my paintings. I first tried supplementing my paints with some old tubes, but having worked with pans for so long it felt inconvenient to deal with tubes.
So I started researching. I was lead to the Winsor & Newton Cotman range, watercolours designed as affordable alternatives to the high end artists’ colours. I narrowed my choice down to two kits, the Cotman Studio Set, and the Cotman Half-Pan Studio Set. The decision came down to – less colours with larger paint cakes, or more colours?
I chose the half-pan set, which includes every colour in the Cotman range. Many watercolour artists will use, and advise use of, a handful of colours for all of their paintings. This is something I was aware of before making my purchase, so why did I go for the larger set?
Well, I suppose after using only twelve colours for so long, I felt like spreading out a bit. There are colours in this set that can be mixed fairly closely, but that would rely on me mixing them accurately each time, and often the mix feels less lively than a straight colour. My hopes are to use watercolours in my comics – and being able to reliably produce the same colour on the fly seems like a great advantage to me.
Eventually, I figure that I’ll find that I’m using certain colours more than others, and those colours may eventually form my working palette. For now, I’m learning about the new colours I have and the way they behave. I also made myself a colour chart to help me remember what appears where in the set!
The new and old watercolour kits, ready for action!
Getting these new colours has been a great experience. From learning what was available, to shopping around online to get the best price (I paid less than $60 for the set), to the anticipation and excitement, waiting for it to come to my mailbox… and finally, being able to paint with them! I’ll be posting art soon, I promise!
Finally, I’ll just mention this kit contains five repeat colours. In my pre-purchase research I was unable to find out what they were. Now that I have the set, I can inform that the colours are: Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine, Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black and Chinese White.
