An extra watercolour painting this week because one of my favourite webcomics is holding a fanart contest. How I wanted to paint something for this comic during August, but none of the characters fit the arbitrary naming rules I’d set for the month.
For an evening’s worth of work I’m pretty pleased with this. Ville’s face looks pretty silly though.
The last painting for Blaugust! (which is spilling into September because my original schedule had the lineart for this teed up for last Friday).
Ushala at World’s End is a fairly new comic which I’ve had the pleasure of reading since not long after its debut. I’ve actually scribbled Ushala a couple of times before, if not drawn inspiration from her design.
This painting dates from around April (and is what you would have gotten as my cop-out post if I was feeling too lazy to do a new painting)
Whilst this marker sketch is a little more recent. It’s not really Ushala, but I’m pretty sure I had her in mind when I was drawing the skull and huge hair.
My favourite part of Ushala’s design is her nose! It’s closely followed by her crown.
We’re getting closer to the end of Blaugust and my enthusiasm has visibly waned. Truth is I have content for at least a couple of the missing updates, but I can’t quite get things together to my satisfaction. Anyway, let’s have a look at this week’s fanart, which was also almost a no-show. Fortunately my attempts to procrastinate ended up spurring me into this piece – I was doing some watercolour scribbles and decided to turn it into the painting for the week.
Last week we had an alien – Zurida, and this week it’s another alien – Ethma from The End.
Because this started out as an unrelated sketch, I had to do some work to coax the composition and colours into the final image. I had a bit of fun with the vivid colours in the shadows, but I think my attempts to introduce darker tones didn’t work across bird-Ethma’s face.
We’re going from green hair to green skin this week, and over the week I’ve learned that I should have drawn Trigona with three fingers. I make up for it today.
Today’s piece features Zurida, alien villain from The Superfogeys, a comic about superheros somewhat past their prime. She’s accompanied by her son, Percy, as they walk past [spoilers spoilers in fact the rest of this post is probably going to be spoilers].
This art depicts a scene that I imagined occurring not long ago in the story (although after showing John my pencils, he questioned whether or not this might actually have happened, I simply retorted that I wanted to draw it so there)
I had a good time thinking about what might be running through Zurida’s head here. Is she proud of her handiwork? Is she just getting on with the task at hand with no time to be sentimental? Perhaps she feels a twinge of regret – not because she’s done wrong, but because she’s granted Michelle eternal youth, while she herself has grown old.
Speaking of old, I did put in a token effort to portray Zurida’s age, but it was all quite secondary to getting the perspective and foreshortening right.
Finally, I liked the juxtaposition provided by Percy’s presence. He has an innocence and dumbness about him, in this picture he definitely wants to linger a bit longer and let the cogs in his head move as he makes the connection between Michelle and his mother.
[edit] Argument settled. The whole time I thought Zurida had been running things out of the Society of Heroes, but no, duh, it was her palace.
Today I reveal the other common thread between the characters I’m featuring this month – their names all end in “a”*. Today’s character is Trigona Ambrose, from the comic Beeserker. She’s featured here with the Beeserker and Scootsie – or better known to some as Imposter Minineko.
Where are the Scienceman Twins? I don’t know! Maybe they are too busy with their new game or something.
The artist behind Beeserker is an old buddy from the depths of the internet ages, and an inspiration to all who aspire to maintain regularly updating blogs. Kyatt’s blog, Burn the Internet updated daily for five years until he decided to retire it from daily use on its fifth anniversary. Secretly I’m a little relieved, as I have a habit of checking Burn the Internet once every few months – or more – and forgetting where I’d last checked up until, inevitably leaving me reading the archives until 3am in the mornings.
Moving to this picture after last week’s painting was interesting. There were certainly some common threads – both comics feature robots and restricted colour palettes, though the kinds of colours available are quite different. A lot of what drove the direction of this week’s painting was the fact that I started the art tonight, so I didn’t want to be ambitious. I went for bold colours and lines (I used a sharpie for some of the inking!) and didn’t worry about fancy backgrounds. I’m pretty pleased with the result.
*Initially I planned to feature five ladies with three-syllable names ending in “a”. However I wasn’t very excited by two of them so they were cut. Bad luck Rumika and Marina.
Some progress on my Decrypting Rita fan-art, which I first previewed on Friday.
On the left – the art as-scanned. On the right, I’ve experimented with digitally deepening some of the shadows. Not quite happy with things yet, but it’s late and time to head to bed.
I was really not sure how I was going to tackle the colours for this one, considering the source material’s approach to colour!
I just had to conquer my fears and dive into it. I got a chance to use some new brown ink (the result of forgetting to empty my wallet before entering an art store), which I’ve used in the shadows across all but Rita1. I was thinking it’d work well to unify the colours across the image but I decided not to use it with the blues.
I reckon I’ll try out some more paintings with the new ink, might be good for some life drawing studies.
Meanwhile I need to work out how to get darker shadows with my watercolours. It’s been a problem in my last few paintings. Might just need to use black ink for it.
This month I’ll be featuring fan art for five different webcomics. The plan was to do inks on Friday and watercolour them on Wednesday, but I might end up using Wednesday for different arts.Anyway, there are a few themes for the characters featured this month. They’re all ladies. Many of them have layered personae or alternate identities.
The most complicated of these is Rita – or Ritas – from Egypt Urnash’s aptly named Decrypting Rita. The story revolves around the reality warping adventures of the various Ritas. Frequently told as multiple stories in one, the comic employs many clever visual tricks to keep the action moving across the four main realities.
I started the thumbnail for this one on Tuesday, when I realised that I wanted to substitute Rita in for one of the five characters I’d be featuring this month. The scribble quickly evolved and suddenly Rita went from being the week 5 post to being the first one of the month.
The thumbnail has been done over a couple of other scribbles – the figures in the middle right and in the top left are part of completely separate ideas. (One of them is a sketch of someone on the bus. The other is just a figure extrapolated from random lines on the page)
Here’s the picture transferred to watercolour paper and inked. I completely winged the fingers because I’d left the hands as mittens in my sketch. Mostly I think I got away with it except for Robot Rita’s right hand.
When Red String artist Gina put out the call for guest art with a Christmas theme, I initially thought of something fun with Reika and Miharu decorating a tree together. Then I had a second think about the theme, Christmas dates, and how Christmas is celebrated in Japan.
I tossed out ideas of roaring fires and did a bit of research, and to my surprise I found that Christmas in Japan is celebrated with… KFC! Suddenly cuddles by the fireplace became cuddles and a bucket of chicken. All I had to do was pick which couple to paint…
This isn’t the painting I set out to paint, but I forced myself to see it through once it got going. The whole reason why I started this one is because I was dissatisfied with the way one of my other paintings was working out, so leaving yet another work abandoned seemed silly.
I don’t think it’s finished yet, but I’m not sure if I’ll push it much further either.
We spent the last weekend camping up at Mambray Creek. It’s the first time I’ve been camping in a long while, and it was such a lovely place. The wildlife was a highlight.
Although I took my paints with me, I forgot to bring my usual brushes! That caused a bit of panic, but I found that I had a Chinese calligraphy brush on me. I usually only use the calligraphy brushes with black ink, so I decided to make the best of matters and create a painting in greyscale.
When I finished the above painting I realised that I’d probably done myself a favour by forgetting the other brushes. Working in just black ink meant that I didn’t need to juggle the complexities of colour. I was able to work things up in tones, and if I got something in the wrong spot I was able to water it down or build up the things around it in order to make up for the mistake. That would be much harder to correct if I put the wrong colour down!
My suspicions were confirmed when I made an attempt at painting a vista scene over the hills using my watercolours. I ran into problems of managing colour, depth of field, and the problem of picking subject matter that didn’t have well defined forms. I abandoned that painting after not too long.
On Sunday I felt a desire to draw rocks.
At first I started this painting with a view straight into a wall of rock, and not long in I was going a little crazy. John however pointed out this view, just facing a little further up the track from where I was seated, which made for a much easier composition. With the shape of the left tree and the negative space around the rock edges it made it much easier to work out what I was looking at when I looked up and down between my painting and the reference.
Overall, a fun weekend with some nice art to boot. And I might even be convinced to go out and walk and enjoy the great outdoors more often now that I have some confidence that I can get some worthwhile paintings done.