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  More Wishing and WashingFeb 27, 2014 6:45 AM PST | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Warning: more watercolor blathering today!
 
Lately I've been spending more time on the penciling stage
 
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trying to make sure there's something to them and they aren't just sort of bloated and cartoony, which is how they tend to come out if I'm not paying attention. : P And I was all happy with how the initial, wet-on-wet layer, which I've been calling the "underpainting" for the sake of convenience, went today
 
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and once again I was thinking hm that could almost work on its own, maybe with a few white ink touch-ups here and there. So I did a test scan of it (no white ink yet), but after doing this I was reminded that it's difficult to use a watercolor that light, because you have to darken it a lot so it doesn't look washed out the screen, and that brings out all the little artifacts in it and it comes out fairly grungy, even if you keep it on the light side of things
 
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So that probably wouldn't have worked. Which is too bad because it would be the best way to preserve all the zip of the pencils, rather than kind of having to redo them in paint, and the underpainting itself tends to be kind of zippy, since it has to be done pretty fast, before any part of it starts drying. But on the plus side, this little investigate did help explain to me why I haven't really been able to recapture the dark richness of page 55, which has been puzzling me for a while, even though I wrote a tutorial on it at the time. But comparing the above photo of today's underpainting with the photo I took back then of page 55's underpainting
 
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shows that I've been going lighter on the underpainting since then, which I guess has been satisfying the control freak in me, but kind of gives me less to work with for the final image. And now I recall that my attitude at the time was that it was okay if the underpainting was messy, since that was just something to work from, and it can always be tightened up afterwards. And that worked really well. So I gotta get back to using more saturated washes to start off with, I think, and not trying to be so dainty and controlled at first by going light on the colors. Although tomorrow's a change to a brighter setting...hm so we'll see how that works.
 
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Oh yeah and I tried a couple experiments in today's page. One was painting wet-on-wet for the second layer, for Selenis and the back wall, to try to get some gradient flow going in them. It *sorta* worked, but apparently doing a second wet-on-wet layer above a first one washes the pigment around so that it collects and dries in little piles, leaving a leathery pattern--which I didn't necessarily want here. So maybe I won't do that so much. : P
 
The other experiment was just working in blue and red, without mixing them into a purple on my palette; if I needed a purple area, I just laid on some red over a wet blue layer. This I think worked pretty well, kind of kept the colors a little more vibrant--and would be particularly good for the underpainting, I figure.
 
(Hm I guess the other thing with page 55 that let it get kind of dark and rich was that the figures are seen mostly in shadow, and at least somewhat against dark backgrounds, whereas since then I've mostly got them from more directly lit angles, or against white backgrounds, which makes it trickier to get that swirly dark look.)
 
 
 
 
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