comic | episodes & e-books | store | about
< previous post | next post > | all news from Sep. 2019 News archive | News search | RSS
 
  Painting tips from A* pages pastSep 03, 2019 8:25 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Found some painting techniques I used in old A* pages that I want to keep in mind for those occasions where they may come in handy—I knew there was a reason I obsessively stream and archive to YouTube videos of me drawing and painting every A* page! ; D
 
- From page 29:88: Wet-on-wet layers for skin and other shading effects - Watercolor is well known for being able to build up layered areas of rich color, and it's something I've gotten away from trying, mmmaybe after being burned by muddled messes that got away from me on a few pages. : o But when it works, it looks really cool, with a translucent, illuminated quality. So eh I should probably find ways to work in more layering here and there and get better at it.
 
- From page 29:107: Use a medium-sized brush to fill complex areas - Recently I've been working on an expressive style done with a big brush and a small brush, and I'd forgotten that the handy thing about a *medium*-sized brush is that you can use it to fill in irregularly-shaped areas that the big brush is too clumsy for, and the small brush is too small for; for instance, for Selenis' jacket on the last page (38:25), if I'd had a medium brush to fill in the jacket, I could have got the edges of the collar sharper. And in general I've been avoiding filled-in interlocked complicated volumes for this very reason—subconsciously, I guess, but I'd started to suspect there was something I was missing. ; ) In particular, if you can pull this off, you can make a sharp-looking shape that doesn't have to have lines around it, and that can make for a pretty cool, streamlined look. I have one old medium brush left but it's banged up from being used for paint mixing for years. So I've ordered some sharp new medium brushes and we'll see if they do actually come in handy now and then!
 
Update 9/11: Turns out the small brush actually works better for this—I just use the small brush to do the edge bits, and fill in the rest of the space quickly behind it with the big brush. : ) But I'll be able to use those medium brushes for paint mixing and white ink once I finally work my way through my collection of the old medium brushes I've been using for that. ; )
 
- From page 35:45: Low contrast can work - I've been practicing a sort of graphic thick-and-thin line style lately, often going right to high-contrast, dark lines, but a more subtle approach of building up areas of lower-contrast can work better in certain situations, and isn't necessarily harder to "read" as a viewer; in fact, it can be less distracting than a network of heavy lines across the page.
 
All three of these techniques take a little patience, which is something I sometimes have in short supply in my need to get a page done each day. But for the past week I've somehow been able to get the drawing done in a more timely fashion than I had been for a while, and that I guess has given me a little unaccustomed extra time to think about more subtle things I could be doing in the painting. I want to keep the painting energetic and exciting, but mayyybe I'll be able to figure out ways to make some of these things work for it, too.
 
 
 
 
·····
 
 
 
 
 
< previous post | next post > | all news from Sep. 2019 News archive | News search | RSS
 
© Copyright 2024 Ben Chamberlain. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy