Art Anyway

[rowyn]

This weekend, having finished the art card project, I found that I kept thinking about doing art anyway. By midday Saturday, I gave up and decided to work on a new picture. During my multiple art supply runs, I'd come across something called "Aquabord™". It's "Claybord™ textured", and appears to be a piece of the kind of board used to make clipboards (chipboard, maybe?) coated in some kind of clay. ursulav had sung the praises of clayboard before, so I was curious about it. This stuff was supposed to be for watercolors, and one of the things that annoys me the most about watercolors is the way the medium warps the paper. Well, this stuff clearly wasn't going to warp for anything short of being thrown in a pool for a couple of days, so I picked up a package of three 5"x7" boards.

5"x7" is four times the size of the art cards I've been working with. Huge!

I spent an hour or two looking at pictures of otters and references in DragonArt. At one point in DragonArt, J. Peffer illustrates the principal of giving your figures realistic-looking anatomy, but not by directly basing them on real animals. In so doing, she draws this adorable cat-dragon -- kind of a dragon-skin on top of a cat body. It's so cute! I kinda wanted to do that with this figure, but didn't.



The gigantic pale purple tree in the background is the trunk of the World Tree, so many miles away that distortion from the atmosphere turns it hazy and blue, the way distant mountains look on Earth. I tried to make it obvious that's what was going on by having a receding line of mountains in the nearer distance, but I'm not sure it works. I got the idea from an illustration haikujaguar did which had the World Tree trunk in the distance like this, and thought it was so cool I had to try it myself.

I scanned in the early sketches to, so those who like to see the process can

Many artists who do much better work than I have nifty processes for getting line work onto the painting surface. Many sketch until they get a basis they particularly like, then do something to transfer the final sketch from cheap sketchbook paper onto an expensive final medium. Some use lightboards and trace. Ursula Vernon once described making digitial sketches and projecting them onto the canvas to trace. haikujaguar scans her sketches in, then prints them on watercolor paper.

I am cheap. I do thumbnail sketches until I get the pose down, and then re-draw my favorite of the sketches onto the final media. With the art cards, I was cheap and lazy, so I didn't even bother thumbnailing, just drew straight on the card.



So this is me, trying to figure out how to draw otters, mainly, since I don't have much practice with otters. You can see how cheap I am by the fact that I'm sketching on a piece of paper that has marker bleed-through marks on it, from a marker piece I'd been working on with this sheet behind it. I like the lower right one, so I worked on variants of that pose some more.



These are on stray pieces of beige construction paper, because I still don't care if I ever see these scraps again. I'm trying to make the critter a bit pudgy, hindquarters larger than the fore, because otters are pudgy-looking animals to me -- long, but not thin tube-rats like ferrets.



This is the last sketch that I scanned. After I scanned this and before I started to paint it, I thought 'oh yeah, I should pay attention to composition.' Both Lynx's advice ('don't have the only figure looking off the page') and the rule of thirds suggested I should put something else in, maybe in the upper or lower left section. So I sketched the bird in to give my hybrid something to look at.



And this is my color test. I thought the white caps on the mountains were a little too stark, so for the final I used a greyer shade and less of it. And I made the bird brown and near-white instead of red -- I didn't like the red anyway, and I didn't want the bird to stand out more than my main figure.

I did enjoy painting the bird, actually. The wing pattern was fun to do.

Comments

[jimmy-hollaman.livejournal.com]

you are doing good. keep up the art! (its addictive isn't it, i am enjoying my 1,000 piece art/words project i am doing....)

[rowyn]

I guess it does get addictive. :) I don't know how long I'm gonna keep it up, though. I get frustrated with the problems that I can't figure out how to do better, like fur texture. It's not that I necessarily want to do realistic fur in every picture I ever do, but I'd like it to be an option. I want to know how to do it so that if I don't it's because I decided not to, not because I couldn't. Same with realistic lighting. If I don't figure these things out, I expect I'm gonna quit this art kick.

Oddly, I'd much rather that I'd written something than that I'd painted something, but I'd rather be painting than be writing, it seems.

[jimmy-hollaman.livejournal.com]

for fur i have been doing a layering effect, but have found that if i do more than 3 colors one has to be thinner lines than the rest (and oddly enough, usually the darkest color. (good luck on finding what works for you...)

we all need to do the creative thing every once in a while. I write, i do art, if i didn't do this i think i might explode.... :)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Oooh, that's a really nice one. n.n Poor bird, though... or do otter-dragons still stick to fish?

As for the background... yeah, it works I think. Someday someone's going to have to draw a picture of the world tree sky as described in the book. I suspect it would look very silly. Or at least busy.

[rowyn]

I was thinking of putting the sun-lantern in, but then thought "that would put my figures in shadow with the sun behind them, and my lighting is unrealistic enough already".

I don't actually remember what the other sky-oddities were -- I'll look them up if I do another World Tree illo. I'm not actually sure the tree should trunk be visible in Kytheria, since the Kytheria branches are all the ones at the top. On the other hand, I seem to recall Sythyry talking about being in the shadow of the trunk from time to time, so maybe.

Or maybe it's still growing! :)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I think it said somewhere that it's still growing, and Ketheria is just the top level of branches... for now. One of the branches in the back looks awfully high up, though.

Other oddities I can remember offhand: A moon with a hole in it, a giant floating cani head, and the serpent that swims around polishing the stars.

[rowyn]

Oh, and Lut had the same thought about the bird: "Shouldn't it be more alarmed? You should do a sequel picture, with no bird and a few feathers dangling from the otter-dragon's mouth."

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

*giggle* Maybe it just swooped up from behind and the bird hasn't had time to react yet.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Great work! Though perhaps give the bird more curve instead of being a straight line next time you draw flying birds? While I don't observe birds flying so much, artwise it seems unnatural for living things to be perfectly straight.

[rowyn]

That makes sense, yeah. The pictures of birds I saw mostly have them flying pretty level, but one doesn't have to draw them that way. :)

[the-vulture.livejournal.com]

Very nicely composed! I like the lines of movement. I also like the texture of the paper. :)

[rowyn]

Thank you! I am really trying to have compositions that are more interesting than "this is what I think would be behind this figure". :) The surface is actually textured claybord(tm) instead of paper -- it's a hard rigid board covered in something clay-like.