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  Please Spatter Don't Hurt 'EmFeb 22, 2018 12:51 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Well, I'm running late. : P But here's a photo I took of today's page as I got it ready for being spattered with watercolor and white ink "snowflakes":
 
Image
 
The spattering is achieved by flicking an ink-loaded metal pen nib (at the left end of that white-ink-coated pen-shaped thingy above the painting) across a plastic card. Always wear your safety goggles! (Not just for the ink spatter, but also those pen nibs can break and fling a pointy shard of metal across the room.)
 
The slightly yellow, black-edged look you see over Selenis in the photo is a couple re-used sheets of overhead transparency film, traced over with a smear-proof marker ("Slick Writer" it seems to be called), and cut with an X-Acto knife to fit her profile—oh and the dime in the middle was there to push them flat on the page. : P So they form a mask that will prevent her, in the foreground of the image, from getting any "background" snowflakes spattered on her; and after I did the background snowflakes, I removed the mask overlays and did a few more white ink spatters over the whole page. So Selenis got a few snowflakes over her (including a too-huge one almost completely covering her right—our left—hand, that I had to blot (mostly) off), but not as many as the background areas got, which hopefully lends a tiny bit of depth to the snowfall effect.
 
Hm it could be improved if I was able to spatter consistently bigger snowflakes in the "foreground," but that would take a separate jar of white ink, less diluted—and that can risk it spattering in a "stringy" way that wouldn't look snow-flakey at all. Ideally I guess I would just get better at painting large snowflakes by hand, as I tried in some of this episode's earlier pages, but that turned out to be a little tricky to pull off in a seamless way—which is to say, I can't paint nearly as coolly and effortlessly as ink spatter looks! Also spatter is just way more fun to do. : P
 
(The spatter-coated white paper pages around the painting are left over blank or doodled-on pages of various paper types I used for A* before switching to the heavy watercolor paper I use now. I can move them around to form crude, quick masks, but this Selenis was too detailed for that, so I just used them to protect my drawing board and dining table from getting any more starry than they already are. ; )
 
 
 
 
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