Welcome to WAYWO! I am your fuzzy host for this evening, Marko the Werelynx. Tonight I'll be posting some pictures of my most recent projects, explaining a bit about the techniques and materials I use and then It'll be your turn to answer the question--
What Are You Working On?
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I like to work with brushes. Here's a look at the brushes I was using this last week:
The top three are soft-bristled, synthetic sable, round brushes. I used the topmost brush to apply some small details to an oil painting-- mostly because the longest round brush, with the dark green handle, although a favorite-- doesn't hold a point very well when loaded with thin paint. The middle round brush in the photo I use exclusively for applying ink. No sense in getting the bristles saturated with oil paint and then trying to work with something water-based like ink. Then there are the three flat brushes. The bottom brush has soft bristles and I use it for blending. The other two flats have stiff, natural fiber bristles and they work well for applying thick paints.
The Oil Painting
This is one of my long term projects that I keep picking away at when I've got a couple of hours to spare. When I paint I like to limit the palette, use fewer colors. I think it helps the painting hold together better. I probably have well over a hundred tubes of oil paint but to make this painting I'm just using Ivory Black, Titanium White, Raw Umber, Cadmium Yellow and a rusty "English" red-- 5 different pigments.
I had primed an old square-ish hunk of particle board and set it aside over a year ago. This year has mostly been bogged down with dull and dreary graphic design work on the computer. One day, I just had to paint something. It had been far too long since I had done a painting so I drug out that already primed board and -- thinking about the steampunk comic book idea I've been toying with, scribbled a rough impression of a few figures and a bit of skyline, maybe a dirigible? It was impulsive and not exactly great technique to go straight in and slather on a frenzied underpainting of Burnt Sienna acrylic:
If I'd been following proper procedures I'd have done a whole series of sketches and studies to have the picture all arranged and the tones and values of the colors already decided. I ended up with wretchedly vague outlines for everything and only a beautiful photograph of Prague at sunset from a book to give me an idea of what colors I wanted to use. But the important thing was to have finally taken up my brushes again to start a new painting.
Here's a look at how the painting began to change as I applied the oil paint using the stiff flat brushes:
Earlier today I managed to sit down for a minute and work on the painting some more; using the flat brushes for the sky and the broad areas on the figures. I spent most of my time working on the details with the round brushes:
With the sun setting I was left with some rather sharp, artificial lighting to take the latest photo of my painting:
Hopefully it won't be too long now before I can call it finished.
Inking with Brushes
When I take one of my pencil drawings and add ink to it my favorite tool is a brush. A fat, soft-bristled, round brush that comes to a sharp point is the tool of choice of many comic book artists for applying ink. It is by far the most flexible and indeed the fastest way to ink a drawing-- well, with a bit of practice.
For ink any old brand of India ink will do. I like to mix a little dab of black gouache into it to increase its opacity.
We were clearing out some old books and toys from the boys' bedroom last weekend and the photograph of a tortoise on a book about turtles caught my eye and I decided to draw the tortoise's head in one of my sketchbooks:
Now this next project was a bit more ambitious. I've decided that I'd like to get into the self-published eBook business. It's an idea that has been bubbling at the back of my brain for some time. One night, as I was getting into bed, I had an idea for a short story-- I sat up and jotted a rough outline of the plot and some thoughts on the characters. The next morning I took a sheet of bristol board (a.k.a. card stock paper)-- about 11" x 16" and drew this:
Something of an illustration or character sketch to accompany the story.
I may go back and add a couple of days worth of work on it with my brush slowly building up crosshatching to give the drawing a full range of tone but in the meantime I decided to scan it and try adding all of the gray tones digitally. It requires an image manipulation program that allows you to work in layers with a choice of how those layers are blended together to form your image. My drawing was on one layer, set to "multiply" and under that layer I could add as many layers and areas of gray as I could ever want. I ended up with this:
That last picture is already available, at a much higher resolution and quality, for printing on a wide variety of clothing and other assorted swag over at my print-on-demand online shop. I'm trying to get a lot more designs up there this week and I'm hoping to have something like an etsy shop set up where I can offer my original drawings and my pottery and ceramic sculptures. I've been thinking of joining zibbet because their basic services are cheaper-- any advice?
Well, with the graphic design project that never dies hopefully getting crushed in a printing press this upcoming week and a website I'm designing for a friend nearing completion I doubt I'll have much time for these little projects of mine in the near future but it was fun while it lasted.
And that's what I've been working on. Now it's your turn ...
10:18 PM PT: Welcome to any late arrivals and repeat readers! Fixed the link to my online shop. Thanks again to Mangrove Blues for pointing out the problem!