Inside the Door

Making good use of that left-over gouache. It really grabs graphite and colored pencils. I inked over the top with my Niji waterbrush.

Catch Up

I was gone last weekend so here are two sketches to make up for the lapse. One is ink over red pencil. The other is gouache (using up excess paint by painting several blank pages with a colored ground which will prove a nice alternative to the occasionally austere white).

Wilderness Lessons

I was asked to create an illustration of a wilderness scene. After kicking around some ideas that were mostly Photoshop image composites, I was asked to do something with natural media.

I painted the background with gouache and a smidge of a  new long-drying acrylic sample I had on hand from a local art store. I painted directly onto some computer paper which I had taped onto a portable lap desk. I kept working the image over adding color before moving on to texture.

I ended up incorporating some paper towel into the painting (the mountain range, lower left corner, and area behind the tree). I sponged the painting with paper towel and flicked paint to add more texture. I wanted a really physically tactile painting.

When I was happy, I moved on to the tree which I painted in a similar fashion on a different piece of paper. On the version shown here I actually created a negative out of the drawing of the tree. I liked the contrast and openness; the Joshua tree is almost a doorway into something beyond the desert landscape.

I created some texture to scan using bubble wrap and cellophane, scanned every thing and brought it into Photoshop for compositing. When I scanned the background, I placed piece of cellophane directly on the glass, creating some interesting reflection lines which I liked.

I played around with layers and blending modes and added some texture with a custom brush and incorporated a gradient overlay.

I sent the client 4 variations but like this one the best overall.

Desert bloom

Honeybear a la Thiebaud

I really like Wayne Thiebaud’s nearly edible paintings (thanks Mykelle). His layering of rich, luminous color and texture are so enjoyable and engaging. Common objects attain a kind of sublime transcendence, forcing the viewer to see them in a new way.

Menace From the Deep

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.

Gouache Guardian

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…

Window painting

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

Robo Pal 3000

I felt like painting something so I pulled out the gouache tubes and my waterbrush pen. This started out as freeform pencil lines on bristol board. I looked at the doodle until I could “see” the character and then just developed the lines. After scanning I applied some Photoshop fun and…Voila!

Oddbits

I thought it might be fun to just start drawing combinations of animals and objects. The top several were first drawn with a LePlume brushpen which accounts for the much more even lines. The bottom two were drawn with my ink-filled Niji which accounts for the more expressive and varied linework. Colored with gouache and watercolor.