watercolour

Watercolour Wednesday: Beeserker

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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.

beeserker

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.

Watercolour Wednesday: Rita

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Some progress on my Decrypting Rita fan-art, which I first previewed on Friday.

naturale edits

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.

Fan-Art Friday: Decrypting Rita

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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.

thumbnail

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.

Inks

 

Bucket of Chicken

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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…RS_Christmas_01

Set Your Goldfish Free

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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.

Mambray Creek

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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.

Ruby Slippers

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Here’s some fan art for the marvelously fun and kitschy webcomic I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space! Lots of comics seem to be having planned breaks in the last week or so, and I was hoping to do fanart for other titles. I only got one done – I’m glad it was this one.

This was going to be a fan-comic to fit in with where the story was up to when it ended the last chapter. Then I realised my punchline had already been used in the comic, so I went on to just make that punchline into a nice painting.

Balance

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I painted this picture as a Christmas present for John back in 2010. When I uploaded it to deviantArt, I promised, “I’ll upload concept and progress sketches to my blog after Christmas.”

Wel’p Christmas came and went and another one too, and it’s finally time for me to fulfil that promise.

The Idea

I wanted to paint a picture that could be quite personal but would also be quite ‘accessible’ to the casual viewer as just a pretty illustration. Based on this I discarded the possibilities of doing portraits and looked instead to find suitable avatars of myself and John. The answer was quite simple – Zodiac animals. What fortune that I had such a great pair of animals to work with, too!

Rawr!

Conflict

Do a google search for ‘dragon tiger’ and you’ll immediately find images of the two locked in combat. Frequently poised over a Yin-Yang symbol, the two animals represent balance.

My first concept sketches attempt to riff on this idea.

Finding my feet with drawing tigers…

<3

Finding nice flowing lines is easy when working in ink.

 

Purpose

The hearts felt hackneyed and the composition uncomfortable. I decided that I wanted to portray the dragon and tiger as an exuberant and harmonised pair. For this I decided to move them in the same direction, as though they were running toward a common goal.

A very tiny thumbnail with the new composition scribbled out. I think I’d intended originally to have the animals in some kind of setting, possibly clouds or a mix of cliffs and flames to go with the elemental years we were born in.

Scribbles to work out the tiger’s pose.

I wanted to present a quite stylised tiger. I had been inspired by a piece of art that had recently been printed on the back cover of ImagineFX.

More experimenting with the style and pose of the tiger.

Unfortunately my laptop was stolen around March 2011 so I’m missing all the Photoshop sketches and any progress scans I took. But for a quick run-down of my process I think it went something like this…

  • Sketches were scanned into Photoshop and composed into a rough arrangement.
  • The sketch was worked on in Photoshop, correcting awkward anatomy and finalising details.
  • The final lines were traced to the watercolour paper (probably straight from my computer screen, as I can’t find a paper-trail (hur hur) to indicate I printed the lines).
  • I laid down washes and underpainting, sprinkling in rubbing alcohol to create texture (it’s most effective in the little bubbles at the top left). I don’t think I used any salt for this painting, and if I did it wasn’t very effective!
  • Lastly I worked up the Dragon and Tiger in a series of layers. The dragon’s scales and the tiger’s stripes were probably added last. I also used a white gel pen to add texture (along the dragon’s hair and in the tiger’s mane).

Like many of my paintings, this one doesn’t have a lot of tonal depth as I was timid about laying down too much paint and being unable to correct mistakes. When choosing a frame and mounting board for the painting I kept this in mind and went for a light mount and a dark, rich frame to bring the viewer’s eye to the painting and complement the tiger’s stripes.

The framed painting now hangs above our bed.

 

Flameface: Process and Progress

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With the KoL calendar contest deadline extended by a week, I had just one weekend to put together a new painting. Here’s some pics from the working process and some explanations of choices I made along the way.

Thinking in 3D

Once I knew that my piece was going to be based on the fire-fighting world event, I knew I had to illustrate Lord Flameface’s castle. And I needed to do so from an awesome angle, showing off the foreboding, smouldering fortress. Lord Flameface’s abode was a delightfully simple assortment of blocks so I knew I’d be onto a good thing if I created a model of the fortress in Google SketchUp first. I’d then use the 3D model to experiment with perspective and composition.

Straight-on view of the fortress model.

The camera angle chosen for the painting.

The Draft

Using my lightbox drafting table, I traced the SketchUp lines onto a sheet of watercolour paper for a test-run. Since this was my first watercolour piece in many months I wanted to get to grips with the paints again, as well as identify any potential problem areas in the image.

I initially planned to place an adventurer at the base of the fortress all kitted out in firefighting gear.

I learned that anywhere I wanted to put the flames down I’d need to leave the white of the paper to shine through. I fiddled with basic portrayals of depth by shading surfaces differently but felt that I’d need something extra for the final thing to make the fortress look hot and fiery.

The draft taught me a bunch of valuable things and particularly helped in setting the pace for the final painting. I realised that I’d have to be patient with use of the blank ink and not hurry with getting the smoky greys in otherwise I wouldn’t be able to paint effective flames.

Additional Elements

I identified some of the areas in the draft that I felt were really lacking and areas I wanted to portray better. I then googled images of fire and hot coals as reference and practised these elements on another spare sheet of watercolour.

Onto the Real Deal!

With the title for my painting decided, I opted to swap out the adventurer for Lord Flameface himself. On a new sheet of watercolour paper I marked out my margins and bleed margins, then sketched in Lord Flameface. I also traced in the fortress. Then, it was onto painting!

Underpainting in yellow.

 

Introducing Reds.

I used Chinese calligraphy ink for the black, allowing me to drop in a lot of pigment at once and let it bleed about on the page.

I let the sky dry before working on the fortress, to reduce the chance of the paint bleeding from the fortress into the sky. You can see the sky has dried a bit lighter than it was when the paint was first dropped in.

 

Final pass to finish off Lord Flameface and make changes to produce a cohesive image.

Finally, I scan the image and balance the colours a bit in Photoshop. The final result can be seen in Tuesday’s post.