Sonntag, 30. Oktober 2011

Making of "Truce"

There are a lot of ideas bothering me about this picture. I think, it's the first comparable one, that made me sad drawing, because to declaring a truce with one's monsters means that one has to have some monsters in the first place. The older I get, the more irrational and shapeless are these monsters, but living in a world where the Wild Things Are is also a vow for solitude.

Vincent offers a truce to the monster's but he doesnt seem to be very happy about it and here is, how that picture came into being:

The sketch. Photoshop. I keep a file where I just pile up scenes and sketches from the Vincent/Gabriel universe. This was one of them. They are usually even more rough.

(photography) ink-drawing. On a ... light-table I traced the sketch on an A3 format with blue pencil and sharpened the lines with blue ink. At this point i had in mind to color the character quite dark and make the monster behind his back a starfield with a gradient to white to backlight the character. But... 

.. I let the colors go wild (photography again). Using a mixture of inks and watercolor as well as salt and some effect-spray (that did not work well - the effect is just a bit visible on the upper right). I could not control the colors and did not bother to after a while. I made sure, that there were enough interesting shapes to create the monster's from later.

The scan.

Heavy use of overlay and multiply to create focus.

At this point I asked a friend, seven, for help, because even though I like the focus on the poison green monsters, this was not, what i had in mind. Als the feel for this area as a room got lost. She advised me to tone down the green.

Which I did, in the End: 



Also, check out dashed. It's a crude but fun drawing tool, without an eraser! and an amazing function: one can drag a cutout over any place of the paint-chat-like-window and see a little video of how that area was created. I like that feature: (Click to go to "dashed"

Sonntag, 23. Oktober 2011

Dark Paper!

During the past evenings i kept oiling my rusty traditional gears...
It's not that my days are totally packed, but i have so much on my mind, that it's hard for me to focus. But - nevermind!

4 years ago I handed in a proposal for a comic project. Unfortunately the answer was: Yeees, we really like it, wait half a year and we'll talk about it! And this kept going for 1 1/2 years. The constant excitement and hope and disappointment got to me and I decided to let it be. One day, when I am through with studies, I plan to take off some month and just concentrate on finishing one of the projects connected with this world : )



First one copied from a editorial, the other ones without reference, but totally out of proportion. partly it's becaus the left character is way smaller than the right character, but that doesn't explain the really small hand :X. And there needs to be a way to protrait these two characters together without them looking weird. meh. last one an oekaki.



Thanks for looking in!