Alola, Starters!
Today’s second post is a painting of the starting Pokémon from Sun/Moon’s new Alola Region. I painted this one shortly after the starters were announced.
Watercolours
Neophyte
whoa, I nearly fell off the Blaugust [band]wagon, which is a shame as I’m pretty sure I still have enough old art to post to get me through the month.
Here’s yet another picture of a squidkid! This was the first painting I did after purchasing some new white paints. When painting with watercolour, it’s generally advised to avoid using white paint. To maximise that magical watercolour look, an artist should aim to have white highlights represented by the white of the paper. The shoulder and arm highlights for example, are parts of this painting that I’m pleased about as those highlights were made by leaving the paper unpainted.
For small rim highlights I generally use a white gel pen, but the lines usually only come out at a certain width – I want to instead get lively looking highlights that integrate with the rest of the image. The paint I’ve used is Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bleed Proof White – it’s very good at blocking colours and is good at making lovely striking splatters.
I like the way I painted the forms of this face, but the anatomy freaks me out a bit. Also I “tidied” this scan on a monitor with bad contrast, I need to fix it up again. Once again, whites being troublesome!
Phlox
Hey I actually did a thing I said I was gonna do! Today’s post is the completed painting of Team Altaira’s captain, Phlox.
I used masking fluid to mask out the lettering on the shirt and the warning icons on the weapons. Other highlights were done with white gel pen and paint. The splatter on the right boot was created by blowing on ink patches; this time I tried using a straw to more tightly control the direction of the splatters. Additional splatter effects were created by tapping on a paintbrush held above the paper.
Starry Visions
I painted this series of TARDIS inspired brooch designs! They’re one-of-a-kind watercolour pieces. I had a lot of fun working on the colour washes for each of them. The impressionist Van Gogh-ish designs were suggested by a friend, I mixed gouache with my watercolours to give a more oil-painty feel to them.
FalleN (June Oceanink Offensive Prize 1/7)
The player described his squid thusly: “He’s very cocky”. I did my best to get that across in his portrait.
The face seems to have picked up a bit of splotchiness, not sure if that’s from the scan or if the art did just turn out like that. I did have trouble deciding how to tone the skin as it was described as being “tan”.
Insert Title Here
Today I was going to write a post-mortem of the Splatoon LANs I ran at AVCon this year, but after coming home from work I fell asleep on the floor and have slept almost all evening.
So instead it’s squid art! There’s going to be a lot of Splatoon art this month, as I have portraits that are due for competition winners and old art that I need to scan.
These squids were drawn while I was at the Pokémon Regionals back in May.
I actually inked them after putting down the paint. Here’s a photo from before the inking was done.
Through Mists
I spent the night trying to get my scanner to work with my laptop. Since upgrading past OSX Snow Leopard (quite a few years ago now), the Epson-provided scanner software stopped working for me. Epson provided drivers to work with the inbuilt Image Capture software, but I discovered that the RGB channels would be misaligned. Finding this unsatisfactory, I experimented with different drivers and software, and somehow broke the Image Capture compatibility – although the software recognised the scanner it would sit indefinitely waiting for the scanner to respond.
A few days ago I noticed Epson had released new drivers so I was hopeful that they would work. Unfortunately, that proved not to be the case. I dug through all the old driver files, manually deleted as much as I could find, reset all printer/scanner settings (that’s quite sad actually as I have a bunch of printer presets lost now), reinstalled the full 2GB bundle of drivers for all Epson products, purged VueScan from my system, turned my computer off and on again and finally, somehow, the scanner is back to mostly working in the buggy way it did three years ago.
Having to fix the channels in Photoshop is less inconvenient than having to boot up an entirely separate machine just to scan documents, so I guess I’ll live with it for now. Not being able to easily scan documents is one of the reasons why I’ve been less prolific outside of Facebook/Twitter, where I’ve been taking photos of my finished pieces with some “artfully” thrown in paintbrushes and pencils to embellish the scene. So hopefully with an easier access to scanning I can share a bit more art here.
Anyway I can’t go another blog post without posting a bit of art, so here’s a painting inspired by a photo of a friend. The original photo included a lot of fog and interesting lighting effects, in the end this painting kind of took its own path.
Shown above is a photo of the WIP, taken just before I started painting. I initially struggled to draw this as a realistic rendering, but ultimately decided to just draw a figure posed the same as the reference photo instead.
When it came time to painting it I was almost going to go for full colour but early into the painting process the pink started to emerge as a highlight colour throughout the piece so I refrained from including other colours.
Digimon 3DS XL Cover Plates
I completed this cover plate commission about a month ago. It’s a hand-painted shell cover for the new 3DS XL. The shell is primed with a gesso that allows me to paint it with watercolour paints, and the completed design is sealed with a spray varnish.
Email me at ale@chenonetta.com if you’re interested in getting your own cover plate commission. Commissions take a month or two to complete (depending on whether I have appropriate cover plates on hand). Prices start from ~$80 AUD if you can supply your own cover plates.
Digimon 3DS Cover Plates
You may remember the watercolour 3DS cover plates that I posted a while ago. While at AVCon I had them displayed at my art table. Lots of people were interested in having their own custom plates created, but they didn’t own the new 3DS.
So I had a look around and found some cover shells that I could prime and paint. Here’s one of my commissions in progress, custom cover shells for the new 3DS XL. The client asked for a design featuring Agumon, Gabumon and their warp evolutions. I initially had the rookie classes appearing on the top plate, then I realised it would make more sense to put their Mega forms in the background. It meant I could fit the crests in there too.
Next step is to get the paint on these! A little nerve-wracking, to be honest, but the primed watercolour-ground surface tends to be quite forgiving.
My commission queue is currently full, but if you would like your own customised 3DS cover plate you can email me at ale@chenonetta.com for more details!
Horned Owl
Having a little bit of trouble with the colours on these tonight, as the lights in our living room are now emitting a rather yellow glow. Its having quite an effect on the colours I’m perceiving as I paint. In the end I decided to chuck a lot of black in there to make some very contrasting shadows.