Just a quickie for today’s post. These custom Wii Remote backs are another experiment in using watercolour on not-paper surfaces.
One of the tricks with painting these is taking into account that there’s a larger surface area to paint than is necessarily usable due to the curve of the wiimote.
These guys sold at AVCon so hopefully they’ve gone to a good home! I may open up custom Wii Remote commissions at some point.
As promised, here’s my next experiment in laser-cutting + watercolour detailing. I’m really happy with the results!
Here are some extra pictures to show you the process from idea to finished product.
As usual, it all starts with a sketch!
Once I’m happy with the sketch, I trace over it with vector lines in Illustrator and use these to laser cut my designs. Remember what I said yesterday about priming the MDF and masking it? I do the exact same thing with these!
The technique for painting these is also the same as in yesterday’s post! I peel the masking off each area that I want to paint, going from darker colours to lighter ones. I then apply colour in careful washes of watercolour paint.
Once they’re done, I apply a gloss varnish over them. This protects the watercolour paint and gives things a nice smooth feel.
I need to work out a good process for sealing the paint before putting the varnish on, as you can see with the picture below some of the colours bled or faded a bit when I put the varnish on.
There’s some variation between each piece – even though they have the same lineart they are each hand painted and finished!
Pins on the back so that I can use them as brooches. I’m also testing to see if they are durable enough to use on keyrings.
Okay that’s all for today – Stay Fresh!
It’s that time of year again – Blaugust!
I’ll be attempting to blog once a day, but my posts this year will be relatively light-on. Also looking at my posting schedule it’s even more fan-art based than usual.
So with that said, let’s kick off Splatoon week!
Splatoon has been slowly consuming all my free time with its tight gameplay and colourful world. So it’s no wonder that I’ve been doing art based around it!
These little guys are a little over an inch each and are laser cut on my new shiny laser engraving machine. (That in itself deserves a blog post I don’t feel qualified to write yet).
I first prime the MDF with a gesso that makes it suitable for painting watercolours on. Then I put masking tape over the top to protect the surface of the MDF. After engraving the design into the squids, I lift the masking on the areas that I’ll be painting black.
I use acrylic paint or a black marker to fill in the black parts and after letting it dry I move on to the coloured part, which I fill in with a watercolour wash. I’m able to mix a multitude of bright, awesome colours with my watercolour paints, making each pin unique.
Finally, the squids are sealed over with a spray varnish. I have to use at least one layer of spray varnish as any varnish applied with a brush or sponge risks smearing the watercolour paint.
This multi-media approach to laser engraved designs is something I hope to expand on! I’ll share another experiment tomorrow.
Want your own Squid Pin? Head over to my store and grab one for yourself!
Despite the fact that I don’t have a New 3DS, I procured a set of blank cover plates and customised them with my Smash Bros mains!
Part of the fun in composing this piece was determining how to design an image that would be engaging and interesting when split along the middle. I think this design works quite well, each half is interesting in its own right!
Here are some progress pics. I started with a sketch and colour test in Photoshop before transferring the design to the cover plates, which were primed with Daniel Smith’s Watercolour Ground. It’s an interesting surface to work on – I found I had to be very careful when applying layers as reworking any area disturbed the layer beneath.
It’s finally done! I don’t do a lot of digital art so although this painting got off to a blazing start, I quickly hit a wall and then it languished around for months because I found it too exhausting and physically straining to work on (digital painting hurts my wrists way more than traditional painting, plus my posture is bad). Well I’m super proud to say that I knocked down the wall and got this painting done.
You can order prints of this painting in my Storenvy shop on TeePublic. Make sure you order a Poster or Canvas print to get the picture printing all the way to the edges!
There’s also a t-shirt version available on TeePublic! It’s on sale for its first 72 hours, $14 now, $20 later.
I can’t remember how the idea itself struck me, but the inspiration for this piece is quite obviously CM Coolidge’s famous series paintings of dogs engaging in human-like behaviour and pastimes. Many of these featured dramatic moments in games of poker.
Render done in Blender to aid painting of the cards and chips.
I knew that the feature of my piece would be the cheeky Duck Hunt Duo gloating over their winning hand. While the image most resembles the paired paintings A Bold Bluff/Waterloo The scenario is borrowed from Poker Sympathy and the general theme of the bulldog getting beaten even though he holds 4 aces (His Station and Four Aces, Pinched With Four Aces – the inspiration for the title of the piece).
Detail of the chips and cards after I painted over the renders
First up I had to determine who would be seated at the table and who the unlucky loser would be. My inclusion criteria was pretty much any canid that appeared as a character, assist trophy or background element. I missed a few characters in the first pass and had to add them to the painting as I went. I thought about including Master Core’s beast form but letting in things that were simply beastly rather than canid would open the door to other things, like the Ultimate Chimera.
Close up of Isabelle and the drinks she’s serving.
As for the loser – as luck would have it, Smash 4’s Nintendog was changed to be a bulldog. I think it’s a perfect match – the bulldog puts his hands up in protest, thus resembling his appearance as an Assist Trophy.
I tried very hard to include everyone but I’m sure I missed something… even though my friends on Facebook didn’t call me out on any missing characters. (Well, they didn’t tell me I’d missed Lucario, or the Animal Crossing guys either). If you think I’ve missed something major I might have a go at adding them in, but for a minor appearance I think they’ll just have to miss out. (I remembered Tails pretty late on, but I didn’t think he was prominent enough a cameo to feature.)
I got the painting printed as a wrapped canvas print. It’s about 75cm x 50cm. I think the poster prints come out nicer though, they preserve the details a bit better.
A suggestion from Reddit – an Aztec styled Captain Falcon. John suggested styling him after an Eagle Warrior but I think I would have had trouble reconciling the costume and the character if I went that way. Plus, I’d already started inking by the time he made that suggestion.
A commission piece! Luna from DotA 2. My scanner was quite kind to it, I think. However the scan doesn’t show the sparkly effects it has – I used some fancy sparkly watercolours to glaze over a few spots. Not sure whether I overdid it a bit, this non-sparkly version does look pretty good as it is!
This one’s less an art project but still something I’m quite pleased to have designed and made.
John and I have been playing a lot of Dominion lately. We now own five of the sets – Intrigue, Seaside, Hinterlands, Dark Ages and Guilds.
These boxes take up a fair bit of space on our shelf!
Due to the amount of space they take and how much fuss it can be to shuffle around all these boxes when we want to play, I decided to work out an alternative solution for storing all the game components.
Solution? Binders!
Back in my Pokémon trading card days, whenever I was in a pinch and needed new storage for cards, my mum would make these sleeves out of ordinary A4 protector sleeves. They wouldn’t fit the Pokémon cards perfectly, but they would be good for sticking a bunch of duplicate cards in one slot, which most off-the-shelf card sleeve pages wouldn’t allow.
Multiple-cards-in-one-slot is exactly what I needed for Dominion, so I decided to make my own sleeves!
To seal the plastic together, I borrowed an old device of my mum’s – it’s a contraption with two heating elements that when pressed down heat plastic between them to melt the plastic and create a seal. It’s designed to seal up sandwich bags and the like, but also works on other plastics.
I measured out the height of each card and made horizontal cuts along the sheet protector on the front of the sleeve. This gave me pockets for the cards. Then I sealed the sheets to make 9 pockets per sheet!
For one sheet I sealed it in quarters – this way it can fit a larger stack of cards or even a stack of the mats used in Seaside
But for other components I decided to use these zip-up sleeves.
Finally I printed out some labels with each of the card names. If I did this over again I think I might try and match the label to look like the name section of the card, and put the sticker up at the top of each pocket.
My first prototype used a normal document binder, but I was concerned that traveling with the cards would allow for cards to escape! So I got these zip-up binders instead. This way it keeps any potential escapees confined to safety.
Just a quickie for today’s post. I started working on it pretty late and the rushed-ness shows.
Also it goes to show I’m just as bad at painting the interior of a car as I am at painting the exterior. Putting the steering wheel on the left felt a bit weird too!
So I finally stopped procrastinating and started on more Megas for today’s post. And I drew a Mega Manectric I was pretty happy with.
And then I realised I’d made a rather large error.
Can you spot what it is?
If you compare this with the WIP of Tyranitar from last week you’ll notice that I’ve not laid down both strips of tape in the middle of the paper. My awesome Manectric sketch is completely misplaced! Luckily I realised before inking. You can see here that I’ve started to transpose the sketch further to the right, starting with Manectric’s snout. But as for getting finished art up today, wel’p, I don’t think it’s happening.
Oh well, there’s always next week!