A colony of cockroaches has taken up residence in our home. I drew an ink sketch of one of the little free-loaders and then transformed it into a super-villain.

I began just playing around and an hour (and 20 layers )  later, I had a jack o’lantern. I’m working very loose so I’m not sure How things would go if I was to tighten it up. There are scads of lighting issues, but I was all funned out.

I like the implication that the pumpkin is witnessing something magical just out of view.

Inspired by Jon Burgerman, I started this visual excursion as a linear composition in Illustrator, added some color, some texture, then brought it into Photoshop where the mayhem really began. I stacked about 30 layers of various opacities and blending modes, painted with some handmade and standard brushes (occasionally with layer effects) and generally stumbled around until I had something I liked.

Working organically is time consuming but fun. It’s also a good way to develop an eye for creating focus since one decision or set of decisions can send the composition careening in a direction that lacks punch and emphasis. Rather than doing too much subtracting of layers that were counter-productive, I opted instead to adjust the opacity or blend mode, or just add another layer to compensate and correct.

I’ve moved to the next stage of painting. Not finished, but getting there. Right now I’m not happy with the focus so I may try to spotlight the foreground a little more with some lighting effects. Also the colors are a little to bright so I’ll need to do something about that. Even though I started with an overall cool underlying hue (blue), I want to make the image visually consistent with the first image that had a yellow underpainting.

Here are some process shots for the second gouache robot/guardian-inspired painting. This time I started with a blue ground. Unlike the first one, I skipped a step. Rather than brush ink the figure after transferring him to the prepared page (a la graphite transfer), I decided to jump right into painting after darkening the lines with a ballpoint. I ended up doing ink touchups last time anyway and  figured I’d save some time and work. Stay tuned for the finished painting.

Step 1: Free hand drawing with my ink-filled waterbrush.

Step 2: Redraw with pencil, rub 6B pencil lead on the back side of the drawing and trace with ball-point pen to transfer image onto the prepared sketchbook page.

Step 3: Begin filling in flat sections of color.

This gouache sketch started out as me using up some extra paint by painting an entire page yellow. Once that was done, I sketched a running figure in a funky futuristic armor. I redrew the sketch larger and worked out some details.

After carbonizing the back of the enlarged sketch with a 4B pencil, I traced the drawing with a pen, transferring a light pencil image onto the yellow background.

I inked the drawing with my rapidograph ink-filled Niji brushpen. I then began painting, filling up the inked areas with various colors. They were really bright and obnoxious so I went over them with a muddy red to mute them. I added the highlights with slightly dirty white paint and the shadows with blue. I left the goggles yellow.

In the background I doodled a futuristic city, adding some shadows and  few ink lines. I painting in the ground plane and added orange to the top corners to add focus to the main figure.

I still have paint left over so I began drawing 2…

Sometimes the hardest thing is just to overcome an artistic block or to tackle a project out of the gnawing unease that it won’t turn out as planned. I wanted to draw a sequential page (or more) but the stories that I had in my mental queue weren’t inspiring me to act. I needed something to get the artistic ball rolling so I decided to take a more free-form tack. I drew the first thing that came to mind ( a tropical river ravine ) and asked myself “What next?”. It turns out there’s  a guy in there ready to run and cannonball into the river below. Where did he come from? Why is he there? What happens next? These are all questions to explore. Instant story starter!

I wanted to do a goauche painting and found a nice window view to sketch from. I’m really loose in my use of the materials and I hate wasting paint so I try to use my various tiny mixtures through the painting in order to minimize waste. This has the beneficial effect of creating unity. I haven’t been able to find any really excellent books that deal with this medium alone. I’m in awe when I see smoothly and realistically modeled gouache paintings. However, I enjoy flat illustration usage as well.

If anyone knows of any helpful print or web resources drop a comment, per favoré

“The thing I saw shining in your eyes…was enjoyment of life…What you knew… was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place”

—G.K. Chesterton

Ballpont, rapidograph ink and watercolors. Color added at Panama Red.