Marriage has been a recurring lens through which to warp perspectives while viewing the everyday banalities and commonalities that are shared between partners. In other words, the "where do you get your ideas" question is perhaps best not answered within earshot of one's partner.
This is what the Bristol board and India-inked piece looks like right after applying the water-soluble watercolor/wash pencils that I prefer, and right before the "just add water" stage of discovery & delight. A note here that the bluegray goop that is seen here covering what will remain pure paper white (ex: the eyeballs + drool puddles + highlights & horns). As of lately I have been playing with Pebeo Drawing Gum, as opposed to the usual Winsor & Newton liquid latex frisket for blocking out areas that I want watercolor to stay away from, which is well-worth the tediousness of application - though rubbing it away is a fun reveal.
In the end, I still remain super satisfied with the way the watercolor version turned out - as opposed to the utter failure of the next piece in this posting.
Marriage and the requisite behavioral modifications that follow, often encompasses uncomfortable and even disturbing - if not downright disgusting - details of dutiful domestication duties.
This one shares DNA with an older xmas panel, and was influenced by a recent re-reading of books by the master of the macabre, Gahan Wilson's work. In fact, I personally mulled over it's appropriateness with the readership demographics of the newspaper. What's kinda funny is the reputation of being a cartoonist leads to a common assumption of weirdness, whereas the reality is somewhat more boring. It's just that this'll stick in some folks memories because of how it goes against the usual nonsense as far as depictions of body parts.
Boy do I ever loath how the demo panel turned out after manually coloring in front of class... just a garish, hideous palette. The digital version is so superior.
You can see the progression in the sketchbook, and enlarged off to the side separate images of both the initial doodle and the marker rough, which was further enhanced with just a touch of color when I posted the weekly teaser over on The Book of Faces.
Very pleased with the print version of this one ("Hand in Marriage") as it's dialed down to the ideal palette as far as digital coloring goes. Compared + contrasted against the original rendering - posted below - you can see some before & after mild tweaking. As of this writing (about a week before the post goes up), I'll be swinging by the local print shop and autographing + personalizing a frame-ready color print for some folks in honor of their marriage, which, the next day afterwards, they read this particular panel when it ran in the paper, and wanted to commemorate the occasion with said cartoon. My kinda folks.
Here is the final manifestation as a demo piece done for Intermediate Drawing where we were experimenting with colored pencil. No blending or solvents here, just laborious build-up of layers of hatching + crosshatching.
PS: Quick note on exactly just how bad Artist's Loft - the Michael's in-house brand - colored pencils are. Well, actually in my experience pretty much everything from portfolios to pens is poor quality. Exhibit "A" is pictured whilst attempting to color this particular panel in, subject to breakage - especially when whittling with a knife, as I am fond of doing to achieve a textured grip farther up the shaft (plus bonus fragrance of cedar, unless they're cheap wood pulp like most low-grade pencils are now). Hell, even Crayola is a better product, as the eternal challenge with art teachers is balancing economic bang-for-the-buck versus crippling an aspiring talent in its formative incubation by dooming their pieces to less-than desired outcomes. In the classroom I use Blick for students, and Faber-Castel and/or Prismacolor at home to ensure best results.
No comments:
Post a Comment