They look simple but I tried masking these with sticky tape and cutting the square stencils from that, which was fiddly. Tore the paper a bit on lifting the masking though, which makes me wary of using sticky tape again in the future. Might just need some more practice or to use slightly different tape.
Two paintings inspired by “A Short Hike” – one from last year, one from more recently. I really love this game and recommend it wholeheartedly! Maybe at some point I’ll draw Claire doing something other than sitting and taking in the sights.
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.
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.
Apparently I haven’t yet posted about these here!
I painted these cover plates as a personal project after a commission fell through. I had been wanting to create a Splatoon themed cover plate for a long time but it took a while to come up with an idea and composition that I liked.
Here’s the initial concept sketch. As always when I create cover plate designs I try to ensure the top and bottom plates are appealing designs in their own right, as well as working together to create a scene.
After getting the lineart worked out, I put in some basic colours. I had an idea of a rainbow of ink lines. I then had the idea to add some fireworks in the top panel. Don’t worry, they’re not exploding squids!
I then print out the lines and transfer them to the cover plates. Here’s the various steps of the process.
Top left: blank cover plate
Top right: printed lineart. I scribble over the back of the piece of paper with pencil so that the graphite can be transferred
Bottom left: lineart which has been traced over while stuck in place on the cover plate
Bottom right: the transferred image, traced over with pencil a second time to better define the linework.
Now onto painting!
Starting to apply the washes of colour. The yellow splotches that are visible on the top plate are globs of masking fluid. The masking fluid protects the white of the surface as I paint over it. Masking fluid has also been applied to the fireworks.
The masking fluid has been removed and the firework colours have been added.
More work on the fireworks, some white added to the ink trails to define the movement of the jumping squids.
Putting in colours on the bottom plate. I decided for an eclectic background with lots of ink patches.
Adding skintones. More white highlighting on the inkling on the top plate.
Almost done! Just some extra highlights to add.
Here are some glamour shots of the cover plates being modeled on my not-new 3DS XL.
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.
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.
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!
Is it any secret that I love Ranma 1/2? Ranma is the first anime that I watched, way back when. I believe it was the OVA How to Boil Water. Good times.
This painting has a way closer camera than I normally ever use. It put me quite out of my comfort zone – not a bad thing, but there are definitely issues with it as a result. Well, it’s practice!
