Added 1 new A* page:Man, I don't... So apparently if I stay up all night trying to paint or draw something, finally at the desperate end some sort of miracle will occur and the image is salvaged. THIS time--having decided to go with all brush today, since yesterday I was all big marker and got sort of frustrated with its lack of precision--but I did skip pencil again today, and just went straight to ink--I just could not seem to get the guy in the background (no we don't know his name just yet) to come out right; he somehow came out pretty well in marker yesterday, and maybe I was trying to duplicate that too much or something--duplication almost never works for me, which will tell you something about my general lack of proper artistic discipline :p--but anyway I couldn't even seem to get the rough proportion of his head and face to match his body, much less get his face to match the facial characteristics I wanted it to have (the more I worked it, the more he would end up looking like eh generic clean cut young dude). Here are a couple earlier stages, before I finished everything else and really sat down to get him right, and you can already see maybe that things weren't set up very well for his face:
(^ Have you noticed I seem to paint bottles on walls a lot? Strange.)
I ended up blotting it out with white ink and repainting it...um...a lot of times. Finally it built up too much and I had to just sort of scrape/rub it off and start back fresh; this works because the white ink I use is not waterproof, so wetting it will always lift it off. It was kind of interesting to do that because it revealed the original face or two at the bottom; I was also rather surprised the paper was holding up as well as it did under all this abuse--only a few little tippy top layer flakes came off even with all that scrubbing and repainting.
So I did start over from the bottom a few times, and his face still refused to come out. Finally--and I was getting tired of the black mushing into the white beneath it--I decided I might as well try blotting the face out with black ink, then drawing it in white ink--generally the opposite of how one works with ink on white paper, where you put black ink on the white paper to create the forms. I always did think that going from black to white with the old Lasso Tool I used when drawing A* digitally--although I didn't usually do it in that order--could give a perhaps stronger sense of lighting, if pulled off correctly, since when adding white you're sort of "painting with light," as it were. Anyway I can't even really remember if I got it all covered over in black, because really the next thing I can remember, the deeply shaded, very individual face you see--touched up and brought out a bit more--in the final page was there staring back at me.
(Who does this look like? I know it looks like some eh actor or entertainer or something, but I just can't quite place it. I had been looking at a photo of Harry Lennix shortly before it happened, but his face wasn't really what I was after, for the most part, and I don't see much of him in the drawing.)
Um... So yeah I don't quite know how that happened; I only know that every face I draw from now on will feel inadequate by comparison as I futilely strive to recapture that lifelike a rendering. Hum! So let's just enjoy this one for what it is, and tomorrow we'll be back to (relative) stick figures. =p
Actually we could be back to something pretty primal tomorrow because my Pilot Parallel Pen is arriving, and goodness knows what that's going to do.
Hm and today I *did* find a white ink that purports to be waterproof--Deleter White #2, a Japanese brand that one has to import in one doesn't happen to be in Japan--and if it IS, then does that put an end to this weird mystery miracle method? And anyway would it be bad because I'd just keep on building up layer after layer of white and black waterproof ink until I had a veritable relief map coming up off the paper? Hum. Well, I guess we'll find out. I did see a user review somewhere saying that it's more like water *resistant* than water*proof*, whatever that means exactly.
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