My painting subject for this week was a Dogbane Leaf Beetle which has beautiful irridenscent colours. The colours of some invertibrates are amazing. It has this really long horn on the front of it’s head. I chose the amazing scarab beetle called the Hercules Beetle, ( Dynastes hercules). Here is the beautiful cover for issue 003… (A trade paperback is a softback collection of about 6 comics into a book.) It’s been out for a while but I haven’t been able to get hold of just yet. On top of that, I’m hoping to get the trade paperback of the new Marvel Mace Windu – Jedi of the Republic comic soon. I really love being able to know this stuff. The fact that you can hear people’s thoughts and internal struggles in a book is just beautiful. This is something I have always loved about books which will always put books above film as a form of media for me. The most wonderful thing about the book is that it’s written from Mace’s point of view so we can hear his thoughts and follow his feelings and decisions. The book is by Matthew Stover and it’s called Shatterpoint. Also I recently finished re-reading what is now a Star Wars Legends novel about Mace Windu which also influenced my choice. He was wonderfully portrayed by the legendary Samuel L Jackson which is always a big bonus. In the prequal trilogy Mace always seemed solid, reliable and powerfully incorruptible as a character. Sometimes I just get caught by the weirdness of reality! October Ink Days 12 and 13 – The Hero and the Beetleįor my hero I chose Mace Windu from Disney’s Star Wars. I like the final picture but feel a bit sad that I didn’t find more fantasy changes to make to my insect. Here’s the final image (I added a shadow in photoshop)… My final step was to paint the wings and body with watercolour and then touch up the black once the paint was dry. Next I made a simple ink outline drawing…Īfter that I went over this in detail as if I were making an ink drawing… Once that was done I had a go at adding similar patterned protrusions to parts of the creature’s legs but this seemed to unbalance the picture and I worried that they might reduce the striking nature of the colours later on, so I rubbed them out and just kept the moth antennae. I began this by adding the kind of comb like antennae which are usually found on moths. I really liked it’s striking colours and decided to make a sketch…Īt first I planned to use the real bug as a basis for a more fanciful “line and wash” painting. I was looking through Wikipedia at various invertebrates when I came across the Firebug (Pyrrhocoris apterus). “Young Adults” Part 3 # 3 – The young man who loves to cook insects. Next I worked this up into an ink illustration and added a caption… Then, to tie the fly image into my theme of pollution, I added an engine, an exhaust and had him smoking a cigarette. This time I broke the normal insect biology of head, thorax and abdomen to get a creature that looked a little more cute. I kept playing around with the idea until I came up with another fly. This image didn’t really go anywhere, but was useful to get my brain warmed up to my task. In playing around with this theme I first drew a rather odd-looking anthropomorphised fly… I used a fly as my main character in this design because flies are creatures we, as humans, see as dirty, and so they can act as an icon for all kind of corruption including pollution. So last year around Christmas time I had a go at creating a cartoon with a slightly sideways take on the subject of pollution. To me, my jokes seem funny, but it’s quite rare that other folk see what I’m getting at. Unlike my sister, who is naturally hilarious, I have quite a weird sense of humour. This week’s October Illustration is done in more of a cartoon style. (I had painted a simple gradient wash with watercolour but it looked flat and boring so I added some shapes with a large soft brush tool in Photoshop and then ran a filter over them to draw the changes together and soften them.) Here’s the final piece… Then I used watercolour to colour and tone my image and then played around a little with my background using Photoshop. Gradually I worked my way around the picture… So, rather than struggling with that, I decided to draw in sections and then ink each section before I carried on. Because I was drawing in a spiral I was concerned that as I moved around the paper I might smudge earlier work. In the end I went for a spiral but I wanted the shape to form the structure of the picture but not be something that the viewer notices right away so I drew on some very light guidelines. I tried several ideas for the main shape of my picture. I decided to use foliage in a particular shape with a small animal, like a butterfly as the main focus.įirst I worked out what sort of shape I wanted… I wanted to try using watercolour on an ink drawing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |