{"id":306,"date":"2012-08-11T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T23:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/?p=306"},"modified":"2016-02-18T11:35:29","modified_gmt":"2016-02-18T02:05:29","slug":"flameface-process-and-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/flameface-process-and-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Flameface: Process and Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Thinking in 3D<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Straight-on view of the fortress model.<\/p><\/div>\n

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The camera angle chosen for the painting.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Draft<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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I initially planned to place an adventurer at the base of the fortress all kitted out in firefighting gear.<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Additional Elements<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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Onto the Real Deal!<\/h2>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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Underpainting in yellow.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Introducing Reds.<\/p><\/div>\n

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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.<\/p><\/div>\n

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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.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Final pass to finish off Lord Flameface and make changes to produce a cohesive image.<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally, I scan the image and balance the colours a bit in Photoshop. The final result can be seen in Tuesday’s post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,36],"tags":[361,76,75,91],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-admin","4":"post-306","6":"format-standard","7":"category-watercolours","8":"category-wip","9":"post_tag-fanart","10":"post_tag-kingdom-of-loathing","11":"post_tag-kol","12":"post_tag-watercolour"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}