Finally!
Today’s damp is the intended monday DAMP. It’s for a weekly sketch group at : http://www.avivor.com/blog/?p=453 hosted on the blog of the wonderful aviv or. Much like john hodgeman and the giants, one day i shall steal aviv or’s MAGIC DRAWING TALISMAN. yes yes.
CLICK FOR LARGE VIEW, YOU PERSON!
It was done with acrylic, aquarelle pencils, and pens.
The process was : a line drawing (included below) using my wonderful red and blue pencil. This is after a lot and a lot of sketching, of course. Then i traced it with a pen onto another paper (to preserve the original in case of mishaps). Then i used it for the acrylic paint – i had to use a real light background so that i could see the lines through. Then began the process of filling a color spot, then retracing onto acrylic the important pen lines below, then fixing over them with acrylic, then redrawing the pen lines using mostly the indentation…. not helping was the fact that the pen lines often smeared under my damp brushes. The background pattern and the throne lines were done with aquarelle pencils, and with A LOT of background music. It was fun, i listened to ol’ jhonnie coulton.
My intention was to make simple, minimally detailed charcters read against a repetitious complex background. Did it work?
My biggest problem was the king’s nose, which is ilegible, i think. Maybe i’ll fix that. Maybe ‘ll just get better.
Anyhoo, here’s today’s practice, rather meager. The traces are kinda ok, but have a lot of problem. My main problem is that a lot of time i cheat – using the see-through layer in photoshop to fix it… two dimensionally, rather than nailing the construction. you can see it in the steps – these are the points where i scanned before going on : the red ones are constructions, the blue are where i start phoning it in. Oh well, practice makes better.
Oh, and as if this post wasn’t blabby enough, let me blab furtherly! Ran across this on the tinykittenteeth comics, and i just had to share :
Go to tiny kitten teeth dot com for more wonderfull beautifull cartoony madness!
I’ll ask permission to post the image. If i can’t, go to :
http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/2009/03/30/tigerbuttah-has-fashion-cents/
The person making tiny kitten teeth also studies at the great john k blog, and i think you can see improvement! the earlier comics, while certainly having a unique funky style, are very very hard to read visually – all the colors are neon bright and a lot of pages are cluttered with geomatric information. The newer comics (just a few months older, actually!) have more sensible composition and you can read the characters against the background.
Compare this early ones : http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/2009/01/27/ride-that-bus/ http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/2009/01/28/finding-a-seat/
To these newer ones :
http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/2009/08/26/a-caveat-prior-to-mingling/
http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/2009/08/25/prelude-to-mingling/
http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/2009/08/18/brown-leaves-et-al-2/
Unbelievable! tinykittenteeth – THE BOOK – will sell like hot cakes! Not to undermine the trippiness of the first ones, i think the color and readability of the later ones are astounding. I guess i had tiny kitten teeth and mary blair on my mind when i draw today’s DAMP. Tinykittenteeth – if you’re reading this, please share with us your magical secret process (invloving “paints, inks and watercolor paper”). I struggled a lot with my mouse painting.
And for whoever read this post – It’s a lot of fun criticizing someone who is much more skilled than you, you guys should try it too!
THE SCORE : Stays on four (that rhymed! optimus prime!). But i dont have a little graphic, so i’ll change it when i hit minus 3, which i do have. Well, enough blab for today, readies!
the DAily Master Piece 