Scribbles & Scribings

 
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I’m still hard at work on a last “winter” project for the season, a companion piece to the Dragon of Autumn. I posted the scanned ink drawing a few posts ago, and here’s the colored version. My poor hand was a bit cramped after all of these snowflakes! But they’re only one small part of the whole project. I’m currently much further along than this, but I don’t want to post any “spoilers” just yet.

I’ve been really enjoying my new computer… working on the Dragon of Autumn was painfully slow, with files taking up to 20 minutes to save, even with separate elements like the frame and textures in separate files to keep the file sizes as small as possible. Now I’m working on an even larger file and there’s almost no lag at all. Ahhh, so nice! Now the only thing slowing me down is everything else in my schedule! But I hope to finish this one by next week, so I can turn my thoughts to warm, sunny, springtime…

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Like the rest of the Mid-Atlantic, this week our house was covered in an awful lot of the stuff pictured above. Fortunately, in between a LOT of shoveling and some neglected housework, I still had the energy to get caught up on some of my drawings. I guess there are some good things about being snowed in! The above is some of the artwork that will be used in the next piece in my “Dragons of the Year” series; go ahead, guess what season it’s for.

I’ve actually made a fair bit of progress, and I’ll be posting bits of it over the next couple of weeks until its finished. Right now I can’t wait to start working on “Spring!”

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone out there (whether or not you live in the US where it’s being formally and nationalistically observed) has a moment this week to spend with their family and/or friends and reflect on all of the good things in their life. I have quite a long list myself, including my wonderful extended family, all of my dear friends (both online and offline) and my dear husband and the life we’ve been building together. I love that I have the freedom to pursue my art and maintain a comfortable life at the same time, and am grateful for all of the blessings, large and small, that have filled my life. I just finished making pies for tomorrow’s dinner with my husband watching goofy old movie serials on our little kitchen TV and you know what? It’s a pretty good way to end the day. Especially taking into account that the rest of the day was spent cleaning the whole house because we’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

I don’t have any more thematic artwork to post at the moment (we’ll see if I get a chance tomorrow, but it seems unlikely) but I thought that regular visitors to my blog would appreciate seeing a little work-in-progress. Yes, I have finished ALL of the ink drawings for my Chinese Zodiac series: The Ox, The Pig, The Dragon, and The Monkey. The Ox is actually a re-drawing of the Ox I did way back at the beginning this year, the first of the series (since this IS the year of the Ox) but I decided it just didn’t hold up to the rest of the drawings I did since then. Two of these are partially colored, and the only one that should take an exceptionally long time is The Dragon — I just can’t help throwing all the bells and whistles into a Dragon, after all.

I don’t know about anyone else, but as much fun as I’ve had doing these (and they have been very fun) I will be happy when they’re done. I’m a bit eager to start in on the next project. I’ll be posting shiny new color versions of the whole series everywhere as soon as they’re done… with any luck in the next couple of weeks!

Have a great holiday, those that are having one!

It’s been a busy week, but I wanted to post this little extra tidbit to follow on from last week’s post where I described the process I followed to make this image. Here are the same steps, now in fancy animated gif format. It might take a little while to load, so sit back and enjoy!

To make up for the short break in my posting schedule, I have something a little extra today: a work-in-progress breakdown of how I produced my latest image.  All of the images below can be clicked for a larger view.

(Or, if you want you can just skip ahead to the finished product!)

First, after figuring out most of the details in pencil first, I use my light table to help create the ink drawing. I’ve been using a brush-pen lately, using the fixed-width Micron pens only for the fine details.

As you can see, the leaves were all drawn out separately, because I think I want to reuse them on a future project.

Next the ink drawings are scanned in and cleaned up a bit in Photoshop. I worked on paper that was 17×12 inches because that’s the largest size that will fit on my scanner. My A3 scanner is my current favorite “toy” because it lets me draw larger without having to piece things together after scanning them in sections, saving me SO much time and hassle. Here you can see where I’ve tinted some of the lines where I wanted a more subtle effect.

Next, I blocked in the color areas with flat colors. Doing this first simplifies things a lot later on, when I can use the wand tool to isolate different areas. Usually I put the ink drawing on a separate layer set to “multiply” so the white areas become invisible and color on the layer beneath it. Keeping everything on separate layers make it so much easier to make changes later if I need to.

Adding details to the color is next. At this point I put an approximation of the final background color in, because a plain white background makes it very hard to figure out the correct tonal range and color balance.

Now I start adding shadows and highlights on separate layers. This is where it really starts taking shape. I always use the shading I already included on the ink drawing as my guide, but because I knew I’d be adding shadows at this step I didn’t do much crosshatching where the more subtle shadows would be.

Next it’s time to consider the background. The leaves were all colored separately, so I could arrange them however I liked. Because my file sizes were getting very large, I built the leaf frame in a separate file and then copied it into the main file with the dragon.

The leaves were overwhelming the dragon, so I faded everything back a little bit to make sure they stay in the background.

It’s almost done, but I felt there was something missing. I wanted to add a little bit of texture to everything, to give it the feel of real autumn leaves. So I broke out my watercolors and made some nice, crinkly textures, which I then scanned in.

And now, with the textures layered into place, the image is finished!

Smile for your closeup… there’s a good dragon!

This image is available for sale on prints, cards and T-shirts at my RedBubble site… check it out!

I learned a couple of things working on this project:

1. I really like working the textures into my ink drawings, I think it adds a dimension that was missing before.
2. I also liked working with really bright, vivid colors instead of soft tints all the time.
3. I really need to invest in a new computer, my little Powerbook was gasping as I was creating all of the colors in hi-res and the extra layers from the texture files didn’t help matters. By the end the file was taking almost 20 minutes to save.

For most of my color illustrations, I have downsampled the scan file to a lower resolution to make the colors, and then upsampled the finished color layers back into the full-resolution ink scan. The full-resolution color file tends to be massive (this one would have been well over 1GB if I’d kept everything in a single file) and that approach minimizes how much I have to work with such a huge file. The drawback is that the upsampling softens the colors a bit giving them a watercolor feeling I don’t always want. This time I tried to do everything in the high-resolution file so it’d stay sharp and bright, but it made my computer run painfully slow.

This was a little divergence from my zodiac series, but it was a refreshing one. Now, back to work!

UPDATE:  If you just can’t get enough step-by-step excitement, I’ve also made an animated GIF showing this sequence… in motion!

I’ve been a negligent netizen again, barely keeping up with any of my online activities.  I think I’m going to have to start doing Illustration Friday again, just to keep me updating, in addition to getting back in the groove in other online arenas.

So what have I been doing? Well, it’s been a bit of a hectic time out in the real world, which has sapped a lot of my attention. But I’ve also been drawing! I’ve been making some real headway on a personal project. Want a sneak preview?

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Yup, that’s the Ox from my last installment up in the corner, next to another nearly-finished drawing. The bottom row has concept sketches, another nearly-finished image, and one that’s been traced onto the bristol and ready to ink. Some of you will probably recognize the Chinese Zodiac taking shape here. As with most of my personal projects, I have to fight the urge to over-think things. As it is, you can see that I started this series before I got my A3 scanner, at which point I realized I could switch to a larger size paper — which I’m loving! I’m still debating a bit what to do with the backgrounds: make a full scene like I did with the Ox, or keep it abstract… full color or more monochrome. One of the beauties of working digitally is being able to play with options, so I’ll probably end up with  more than one version of each.

I’m actually further along than this picture indicates — the Tiger is inked now and looks fantastic, if I do say so myself. The scales on the Snake, however, are killing me! More updates when I start scanning these babies. When this series is done I’ll be making several nice products available to buy, so if you’re interested… stay tuned!

I’ve also slowly been adding new pieces to my RedBubble profile… mostly the more elaborate work from my portfolio. If you ever wanted a print or a notecard of one of my pieces, go check it out; all of the products I’ve ordered from them have been gorgeous and high-quality:

I’m still taking suggestions, so if there were any images from this blog that you absolutely had to have a nice printed copy of, let me know and I’ll make it available.

Another update soon, I promise!

Time was a bit short this week for this week’s Illustration Friday topic, tho I found it quite intriguing. I’m in the midst of a project, which will be a series, which could fit, but it’s still in progress. So that’s what I’m posting today: work in progress! As always, click to enlarge.
Like many artists, every piece I make starts out something like this. Once I have my basic idea I doodle and sketch until I’ve worked out all the proportions, poses, and details to my satisfaction. Because I work in ink I have to get as much figured out in the pencil sketch and underdrawing as possible, while I can still erase easily. Sometimes there are layers of tracing paper and/or photocopies of previous sketches taped down as I refine the layout. Sometimes these sketch pages are more satisfying than the finished piece! Usually there’s one that really stands out on the page, but sometimes it’s harder to choose.

I was looking for some of my older work that would qualify, but couldn’t find anything already digitized. Which has me a bit worried, since one project was done digitally. when I have a chance this weekend I’m going to have to go through my miscellaneous backup CDs to look for it. I’m forcing myself to be better about backups, but I don’t have the same hardware for my home system as I do at work, which automates the process so I don’t have to think about. In fact, I have redundant multiple backups at work, which has saved my butt more than once. But at home my backups tend to be in batches of CDs which can get a bit messy as each one is in whatever filing system that seemed like a good idea at the time so the same file might be on more than one disk but in a different folder.  And after two house moves and three computers every now and then I uncover another stash of disks, but I think I’ve gotten them all now. What I’m overdue for is a big session of going through all the disks with the multiple versions of my files and the final versions of everything to make multiple copies of my master archive. And getting a decent firewire drive. Can’t have too many backups!