Watercolours

Caress – Step-by-step

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I’ve been trying to do a phoenix picture for a while, but none of my concept sketches were working. Late last night I started on this piece though, and quite liked it. The bird isn’t a phoenix but oh well. Here’s some pictures I took during the painting process.

After doodling some concepts for the painting, I choose one I like and working from that concept, draw the image straight onto watercolour paper. I’ve included some shading to give me some information about light and dark areas. I struggled with the face planes for a bit but was able to scribble tests of what looked good for the fall of light by scanning the sketch and putting shadows down digitally in a trial and error manner. Once I was happy with the stark shadows on the girl’s face I copied these shadows over to the sketch.

 

 

Here’s the drawing submerged in our laundry sink. This is to stretch the paper – something I don’t normally do but wanted to trial this time. The idea is to get the paper to expand by soaking in all the water…

…Then tape it down securely to a board so that it remains stretched. When reapplying water during the painting process, the paper will not warp, or at least if it does warp, it will subsequently dry flat as the tape is keeping the paper stretched.

Once I have the image taped down, I put down some initial colours:

Then I let the picture dry (well, force it to dry with some encouragement from a hairdryer) and work mostly wet-on-dry for the rest of the painting process. I have problems with my tape – the paper pulled itself free from the tape as it shrinks and ended up cockling. I use this opportunity to take a progress scan:

I then soak the back of the painting to make the paper expand again and try taping it to my board again. It works okay but the painting still gets unstuck from the tape as it dries. Guess I need stronger tape. I’m not a fan of the gum tape stuff but maybe it’s the way to go…

Here’s the finished picture:

My big mistake in this painting was trying to use bruising and scratching techniques to get the feathers done. It really didn’t work out and I spent some time trying to work out how to heal over the paper. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. I’ve also done a pretty dodgy scan, the colours and contrast really didn’t come out great on my scanner. Come visit me and see it in person some time!

 

Colour swatches

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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:

  • Opacity – black lines near the top. The first is drawn before the paint is applied, the second after.
  • Staining – the white band below the black lines – this area was swabbed after a day to see how much paint would lift
  • Backrun – the band near the bottom was created by swiping a brush with clean water over the swatch.
  • Tinting – The narrow band between the two blocks – tests the characteristics of a rather diluted pigment and can be compared against the main swatch to determine the ‘strength’ of the pigments.
  • Wet-in-wet – the bottom band. The block is brushed with clear water then paint is applied in the left. The test is to see how much of the paint bleeds into the wet patch and how it behaves when it does so.

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.

The AVCon Booklet Comic: The Making Of

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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.

An Introduction to Watercolours, Part 1

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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:

  • Reuben Negron – Realism in Watercolours!. Beware most of his gallery is NSFW, but the linked image is fine
  • Stephanie Pui-Mun Law – I love the fantasy art of this artist. An inspiration. She readily shares works in progress and shares her knowledge on her blog
  • Levi Dansam – A recent discovery. The art feels thoughtful, perhaps because of the blend of finely controlled forms and areas where the paint just flows.
  • Cari Corene – Another recent finding. I wonder if her art gets much digital enhancement… but does it matter? The colours here, even if do they appear duller in real life, are superb

Next up: materials.

Recent works.

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Contests and requests – keeping me on my toes by stretching my normal artistic fare.

My entry into the AVCon 2011 T-shirt design comp:

I’ve started taking character illustration requests for the Kingdom of Loathing again:

A sample picture (this is my Disco Bandit character ‘Silks’ from my old comic)

A painting for a player named ‘Brocrates’:

A painting for player ‘Ereinion’:

Simple Self Portrait

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I was inspired after attending the ACSA’s 2010 graduate exhibition. Today was the last day of the exhibition so I was glad to catch the show before it ended.

Since I’ve been dabbling in watercolours lately, the watercolour portraits by Ruby Chew were really awesome to see. When I’d caught glimpses of the graduates putting up their work I had no idea that there would be her 52 marvellous mini portraits included alongside her large canvas paintings.

With Ruby’s works fresh in my mind I thought about restricting my palette to just the three primary colours to depict myself. I’m no master in watercolours or portraiture, but this was a fun exercise that I’ll probably try out some more over the weekend.

Sketch

Watercolour Self Portrait

Yu Long’s development

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A couple of WIP scans. Click for biggenning.

I’m trying to push the colours and depth of tone in this one. Usually I get a bit wussy and hesitant about adding more and more glazes over bits that I’ve already spent so much time on. It’s going to be interesting trying to emphasise the whites.