First posts are always a bit tricky, but I think I’m just going to acknowledge that and move right on. It’s an art blog! There will be pretty pictures! What more do you need to know?
I’ve been looking at lots of stuff on Stumbleupon recently, which is usually how most of my art starts. I see something cool looking, and I want to have a go myself. This time it was some nice watercolour work over here, the second entry (Geliografic) on the list. On top of that, I dug out a couple of volumes of Kabuki I have lying around. Despite all the controversy going on about David Mack and his really obvious tracing habits, he does do some nice watercolour-esque painting on occasion, though I think it’s actually acrylics he uses. Regardless, don’t take this as an endorsement. David Mack is a twat.
Anyway, in typical form, what I ended up with didn’t really resemble the stuff I was looking at at all, but I think that’s probably the best way to use reference – as a springboard rather than a crutch. I painted this as some gift art for the lovely folks over at October 31st who probably deserve more nice things.
After all this talk about watercolours I couldn’t actually be bothered cracking open my watercolours and instead just dicked around in Photoshop to see if I could get a similar effect. Turns out low opacity hard edged round brushes are sort of the way to go, though it’s not like it really ended up looking anything like proper watercolours, probably because watercolours go light-to-dark whereas I used the magic of digital painting to completely disregard that and paint from a dark background up. Plus the subject matter is woefully well-trodden by me, a pretty lady standing dramatically in front of a cityscape silhouette is essentially a big ball of all the things I like to draw. Kind of like my own personal artistic chicken soup.
Lessons learned: I like the opacity slider in Photoshop. I need to find some new subject matter. David Mack is a twat.