Mittwoch, 5. August 2015

MARF Productions - Monthly Challenge (August)

This months topic: Gouache with coloured pencils and/or chalk pastels

Inspirational artist:
Michael Lauritano

example works:
Jimmy: Dream Sequenz 1
Jimmy: Dream Sequenz 5



Step 1.

So, Jana and I are currently in the last two weeks of our final exam. And I am startig to get rather nostalgic and emotional -thats why I decided to do a marf-themed illustration this month to hold this moment in time :D (which is not cheesy at all).
For some time now I've been fascinated by the super different body types Jana and I have. She is rather skinny and long, everything about her is thin and fragile. I, on the other hand, am rather short (my hands and feet are tiny), got a round face and a wider bodystructure.
We spoke about that one time and both agreeed it was a bit of a grandma weatherwax and nanny ogg thing going on. Making the sketches I also had to think of Professor McGonagall and Professor Sprout (or Mrs Weasly). 
Well, anyway, I found that difference rather charming in kontrast so I decided to do an illustration about it. I also wanted to depict a pose jana often takes up that has just a lot of fun curves to draw. So yea...there you go, thats my topic for this month :)

Oh, and it is by all means totally how we look. Just kidding, it was a spontaneous decision to draw this and I had no reference whatsoever. So Janas pose looks in real life way cooler. And I dont have a signature pose yet, so thats just me standing there. I have to think about one, though. hm.



Step 2.

The painting-part. Since this challenge is focusing on gouache underpaintings i digged out my paints, as well as some water-soluble coloured pencils. (Blue coloured pencils are also very useful for sketching before painting - if you do not use to much force while drawing they almost completely vanish when getting in contact with water.)

Normally I start with applying a wet coat to the area that I want to paint on. Depending on which effects I want to create I either wait a short amount of time or a long one until applying the first colours. In this case I wanted a rather clean look, so I let it dry to the point that the colours did not fade anymore but did not get that super sharp edges, yet. Then I simply started adding colours, not going into much detail but creating the main underlaying colors and soft gradients.



Step 3.

Then I waited for it to dry and got my faber castells. I used to only work with very cheap coloured pencils and depending on which ones they totally did the deed. But they are often very hard and if you work on watercolor paper that is not completely dried (although the paper feels relatively dry after a short amount of time, it takes a few hours to dry completely) you only get rills in the paper and not much colour applied.

So, when the paper was dried, I mainly traced the outlines with different colours (red for skin, grey/brown for the dress, blue for the jeans) and got a few more details in it (hands, hair, face). I think that adding a coloured pencils layer onto a painting whatsoever is very time efficient and you often dont even have to do that much to get a great result. This took me about half an hour.


Step 4.

I scanned it and adjusted a little bit the colours. I could have cut out the background more smoothly, but for now its fine with me. All in all this one was done super quickly and that definitely is one of the reasons it made so much fun. I think this months technique can be nice for simple sketches and quick illustrations.

(I just realised, that the faces look a bit weird with both of them just staring happily past each other. Well, jana and I usually dont look each other in the eyes, anyway, because who does that...)