Robot Step-by-Step II

Hey again, everyone, welcome to part two! I decided that it would be crazy to put all the pictures I have of the process in one post, so splitting it up seemed like the smart move. If you came here before Step I, here's a link to that. It's probably best to do things in chronological order.

Step Four: Working into the layers:

Shading the Ground:

 Here I've added more Burnt Sienna to the landscape, especially in the foreground. It's undiluted, so the colour is stronger, and in the hills behind, I've worked in a mix of Burnt Sienna and Yellow Ochre wet-into-wet, and then added a little Titanium White to that mix and worked that wet-into-wet as well.





More after the jump

Robot Step-By-Step

Hey again, fellow travellers. This post is a step-by-step of the process I used to do my Robot with Lady painting.

 I'm posting this because I would like it - I like step-by-step articles on just about anything, because I always like to see processes as they happen, and I figure, write what you love. So here goes:


Step One: Transferring the sketch.
(Doing the sketch I'm treating like a whole other process)

 So this is the start of me transferring the original drawing to the painting surface. I drew the image directly onto tracing paper, turned it over and traced the lines with a soft pencil (e.g.4B). What you see is the result of putting the soft-pencil side of the tracing paper onto the painting surface, and running over the lines with a hard pencil (e.g. 2H) or a ballpoint pen (I used the pen).
     The surface I'm using here is a sheet of hardboard cut to about A4, and coated with a couple of layers of gesso, applied with a housebrush. I like the housebrush, because it gives a grain to the surface that you can really get some paint in (I'll later experiment with applying the gesso with just a flat edge, so that it goes on smooth).

More after the jump.

Painting, permission and plagiarism

I love the tattoo style. One day, I will tattoo. Until then, I practise, and try to develop a style of my own.

Recently, I have remembered being blown the hell away by a gentleman called Derek Noble. I looked him up, and looked at his paintings. I love his work. I think I should reserve a large patch of skin for him.   Right lower leg, I think. Both sides. More likely, I will be able to get him at a convention some year, and he'll do a few hours worth on me. That's all off in the future though. Right now, I want to talk about influences.

It's easy for me to be influenced by another artist. It happens a lot. I imagine it happens like this to a lot of people. You see some new variation on images, some slight change to a set of understood symbols, and you add it to your own artistic vocabulary. I imagine influences apply like this to any creative endeavor (sewing, cooking, woodcarving, writing, film-making etc etc). It can be hard, especially if the new insight you have is really different for you, really profound, really hard hitting, not to fall into near- or outright plagiarism. People want to emulate their heroes. It's really common.

I'm trying hard not to plagiarize. I don't think I am - but seeing Derek's work gave me the confidence - and a sort of grammar of artistic expression - to use something that I have loved for a while. Big fat lines. Big fat fuck-off black lines. Happy man with a chubby marker pen. (of course, it's important to use varied width lines for a nice effect - more of that in the next post.) I swear, it was a revelation. Plagiarism, however, would be to copy something outright, without giving it credit as a copy. It's not creatively healthy to do either, but in science, we stand on the shoulders of giants: I see no reason that I cannot do the same
     To get the idea, imagine you want to write a novel. You have a hard time, though, thinking of how to express yourself just right, in a way you like. Maybe it's a fight scene in your book. So what do you do? You can just hammer at it and hope to stumble across a format that you like, or you can look at novels that have already been written, and see what you like. Emulate it. Take someone else's idea and bash it out of shape and into something that fits you better. Like George R.R. Martin, or Dan Abnett. Those guys write fight scenes almost blow by blow, then pull back for a big picture, then go back in close for a gory finish.

That's what it was like for me to see Derek's work. It was like getting permission to do something I had always wanted to do, and shown how it could be done. Shown the gory finish.

Without much more ado, then, I present Snake Lady, in ten parts: