fanart process post
Because I'm procrastinating on my SGA Reverse Bang piece, I've decided to do a process post about my last fanart, the one for the Trek Reverse Bang. That painting took me a long time, and quite a lot of work spread out of over three months, and maybe some are interested how I get from the first idea to a finished painting.
After I had an idea (basically that I somehow wanted to draw a landing party in front of Vulcan dignitaries with Kirk kneeling and Spock behind him) I eventually started doing scribbles. These are really small and don't look like much of anything if you don't know what the images in my head were (done in an A6 notebook, mostly done on public transport). In them I tried to work out how to arrange the figures, how far or near the viewpoint etc. In one I played with the idea that they could be in a Vulcan assembly that's more like an amphitheater, in another I thought that maybe I'd use the set of the kind we see in the Reboot VSA with the Vulcans much higher etc. I had looked at a lot of screencaptures of Vulcan scenes before. There were more than the ones below, but they really don't look all that interesting.
For a long time before I start any drawing it just exists in my head, and I look at things and just imagine the scene. I have quite a lot of drawing ideas that just get stuck in that stage. And then for some time longer it exists in these incomprehensible scribbles while I daydream about the idea and try to visualize the picture rather than just a scene, if that makes sense. I mean, my initial ideas for fanart aren't like a painting in my mind. But for example for this one I thought about how much I would like to see Kirk kneeling in front of Spock, with Spock being possessive and protective and a D/s vibe, with Vulcan tradition somehow mixed in, etc.
Then try to work out these tiny scribbles into rough pencils. Eventually I settled on the this one that would evolve into the later pencils. The main part on this paper that is, there are some other sketches some for later detail, because I don't arrange these orderly, but have a pile of scrap paper lying around mixed with transparent tracing paper that I use to rework parts when I don't want to bother doing it on my crude homemade lightbox, and I tend to grab one that still has room to try a detail like a hand or something. Anyway, before this arrangement I had tried a similar one but from further away, or something (I couldn't find the paper with that on it again, but I remember that I spent some time on that before scrapping that and starting over)
I had a really hard time with the perspective, because I wanted it to draw from lower than regular eyelevel, and the podium and the giant statues and several people. I tried all sorts of things, like doing floorplans:
also perspective grids, and consulting like three books and it was all very horrible and it turned out that I fail at constructing perspective properly in practice, despite understanding it in principle. I ended up fudging most of it anyway.
Here you can see the pencils evolving that now on an A3 format as the final one was supposed to be:
You can see how some is still really vague and some already detailed, and actually at that point I was under quite a deadline pressure for the rough draft due date, so I concentrated on the foreground first, so that I would have a better chance to have produced something an author would be able to decipher for a story. While I'm doing the main picture I work out details on separate pages, like I looked at references from various canon Vulcan versions (screencaps from TOS, the movies, and Enterprise, as well as Reboot screencaps, canon resources on Vulcan dress styles, weapons and scripts, like prop auction photos, some ancient statue art, etc) and tried to merge these into a picture. I wanted a Vulcan look without reproducing exactly any canon style. Like T'Pau and the gong, helmets and weapons are somewhat like on TOS on Amok Time, but the guards wear robes, and the letters on theirs are the symbols we see on several later robe designs. The statues are inspired by the Vulcan we see on Enterprise, also by the Reboot, but the podium is more like the geometric design from the TOS movies' Vulcan etc.
I also took really crappy photographs of myself holding stuff like a broomstick, or putting my hand in the Vulcan salute, and posing in a bathrobe to simulate robes and how they would fall. It is really quite impossible to photograph yourself from the proper perspective while holding crap. One of the moments where you wish for roommates. All of this resulted in another pile of sketches, like some more of the stuff as what is on the other sketch page above. I spare you most of the photographs, but you can see one of my attempts trying to pose myself to work out how a hand holding a "scroll" (a roll of sandwich paper in this case) would look.
Eventually I arrived at what I have submitted as rough draft:
The perspective still didn't work right, so I asked
astridv for an artbeta, and got a helpful email with the figures slightly rearranged and the perspective adjusted a bit:
I then used my lightbox to transfer the elements onto a new paper but rearranged with the beta in mind. I probably should have used a thicker paper for painting, but because my homemade lightbox is somewhat feeble and I didn't want to loose detail I had already worked on, I ended up with a bit curled paper instead. But these were the final pencils (eta, actually on a closer look I think that this is the pencils before a final change I made, which was to make the right guard's head a bit higher):
I wanted to try out doing just a painting, rather than inking my line art first and coloring it, like it has been my habit before (and I think it turned out quite nicely). I then decided that before starting to paint I should maybe have some idea of light and shadow figured out in advance. I tried different approaches. Like in theory lighting a smaller maquette of your tableau is great. Unfortunately my skills and patience for modelling are stuck on a kindergarten level with toilet paper rolls and play-do, and I can't sculpt either, so my attempts were not all that helpful:
Well. This project featured even more deformed play-do sculpting attempts, but I did not photograph those, so let's not talk about that.
Another idea was to do a digital value study on a small version (I used the rough draft for that, because I actually started this before I had revised my pencils), but this didn't really work for me either:
I tried similar in color too, and that worked even less, so I spare you that.
I was then sick of all that and decided to just start with the painting. To get rid of the white, I did very thin glazes at first:
I then worked from the background to the foreground, i.e. doing the statues first.
The next one looks so different because this was photographed at night with artificial light and a flash, the colors have not changed quite so much that it had become so very yellow:
Actually in my palette I didn't even have a proper yellow, just yellow ochre (also raw and burnt sienna and umber, chromium oxide green, cobalt blue, cadmium red, a violet and titanium white. I used a little black in some places, but most of the shadows and desaturation is by mixing in complementary colors, either directly or by layering. The background was mostly done in many layers of translucent thin color to get colors I liked, only in the highlights thicker and more opaque, mostly where I used white in the mixtures.
I then did the clothes of the people, then their skin and hair, and finally the braziers and fire in the foreground, but I forgot to make photos of all those steps.
In the foreground I used thicker colors and only a couple of layers, and the paint has more structure as you can see in the hi-res detail I posted:
It was really fiddly for me to get this thin lines with a brush in acrylic paint, like the wrinkles on T'Pau's face because those are thinner than what a 0.1 fineliner produces (I drew the Vulcan script on the chair with black fineliner to get them even and then did color glazes over that, so you can compare the line thickness in the detail). I frequently wished that I had worked larger than A3.
After I had an idea (basically that I somehow wanted to draw a landing party in front of Vulcan dignitaries with Kirk kneeling and Spock behind him) I eventually started doing scribbles. These are really small and don't look like much of anything if you don't know what the images in my head were (done in an A6 notebook, mostly done on public transport). In them I tried to work out how to arrange the figures, how far or near the viewpoint etc. In one I played with the idea that they could be in a Vulcan assembly that's more like an amphitheater, in another I thought that maybe I'd use the set of the kind we see in the Reboot VSA with the Vulcans much higher etc. I had looked at a lot of screencaptures of Vulcan scenes before. There were more than the ones below, but they really don't look all that interesting.
For a long time before I start any drawing it just exists in my head, and I look at things and just imagine the scene. I have quite a lot of drawing ideas that just get stuck in that stage. And then for some time longer it exists in these incomprehensible scribbles while I daydream about the idea and try to visualize the picture rather than just a scene, if that makes sense. I mean, my initial ideas for fanart aren't like a painting in my mind. But for example for this one I thought about how much I would like to see Kirk kneeling in front of Spock, with Spock being possessive and protective and a D/s vibe, with Vulcan tradition somehow mixed in, etc.
Then try to work out these tiny scribbles into rough pencils. Eventually I settled on the this one that would evolve into the later pencils. The main part on this paper that is, there are some other sketches some for later detail, because I don't arrange these orderly, but have a pile of scrap paper lying around mixed with transparent tracing paper that I use to rework parts when I don't want to bother doing it on my crude homemade lightbox, and I tend to grab one that still has room to try a detail like a hand or something. Anyway, before this arrangement I had tried a similar one but from further away, or something (I couldn't find the paper with that on it again, but I remember that I spent some time on that before scrapping that and starting over)
I had a really hard time with the perspective, because I wanted it to draw from lower than regular eyelevel, and the podium and the giant statues and several people. I tried all sorts of things, like doing floorplans:
also perspective grids, and consulting like three books and it was all very horrible and it turned out that I fail at constructing perspective properly in practice, despite understanding it in principle. I ended up fudging most of it anyway.
Here you can see the pencils evolving that now on an A3 format as the final one was supposed to be:
You can see how some is still really vague and some already detailed, and actually at that point I was under quite a deadline pressure for the rough draft due date, so I concentrated on the foreground first, so that I would have a better chance to have produced something an author would be able to decipher for a story. While I'm doing the main picture I work out details on separate pages, like I looked at references from various canon Vulcan versions (screencaps from TOS, the movies, and Enterprise, as well as Reboot screencaps, canon resources on Vulcan dress styles, weapons and scripts, like prop auction photos, some ancient statue art, etc) and tried to merge these into a picture. I wanted a Vulcan look without reproducing exactly any canon style. Like T'Pau and the gong, helmets and weapons are somewhat like on TOS on Amok Time, but the guards wear robes, and the letters on theirs are the symbols we see on several later robe designs. The statues are inspired by the Vulcan we see on Enterprise, also by the Reboot, but the podium is more like the geometric design from the TOS movies' Vulcan etc.
I also took really crappy photographs of myself holding stuff like a broomstick, or putting my hand in the Vulcan salute, and posing in a bathrobe to simulate robes and how they would fall. It is really quite impossible to photograph yourself from the proper perspective while holding crap. One of the moments where you wish for roommates. All of this resulted in another pile of sketches, like some more of the stuff as what is on the other sketch page above. I spare you most of the photographs, but you can see one of my attempts trying to pose myself to work out how a hand holding a "scroll" (a roll of sandwich paper in this case) would look.
Eventually I arrived at what I have submitted as rough draft:
The perspective still didn't work right, so I asked
astridv for an artbeta, and got a helpful email with the figures slightly rearranged and the perspective adjusted a bit:
I then used my lightbox to transfer the elements onto a new paper but rearranged with the beta in mind. I probably should have used a thicker paper for painting, but because my homemade lightbox is somewhat feeble and I didn't want to loose detail I had already worked on, I ended up with a bit curled paper instead. But these were the final pencils (eta, actually on a closer look I think that this is the pencils before a final change I made, which was to make the right guard's head a bit higher):
I wanted to try out doing just a painting, rather than inking my line art first and coloring it, like it has been my habit before (and I think it turned out quite nicely). I then decided that before starting to paint I should maybe have some idea of light and shadow figured out in advance. I tried different approaches. Like in theory lighting a smaller maquette of your tableau is great. Unfortunately my skills and patience for modelling are stuck on a kindergarten level with toilet paper rolls and play-do, and I can't sculpt either, so my attempts were not all that helpful:
Well. This project featured even more deformed play-do sculpting attempts, but I did not photograph those, so let's not talk about that.
Another idea was to do a digital value study on a small version (I used the rough draft for that, because I actually started this before I had revised my pencils), but this didn't really work for me either:
I tried similar in color too, and that worked even less, so I spare you that.
I was then sick of all that and decided to just start with the painting. To get rid of the white, I did very thin glazes at first:
I then worked from the background to the foreground, i.e. doing the statues first.
The next one looks so different because this was photographed at night with artificial light and a flash, the colors have not changed quite so much that it had become so very yellow:
Actually in my palette I didn't even have a proper yellow, just yellow ochre (also raw and burnt sienna and umber, chromium oxide green, cobalt blue, cadmium red, a violet and titanium white. I used a little black in some places, but most of the shadows and desaturation is by mixing in complementary colors, either directly or by layering. The background was mostly done in many layers of translucent thin color to get colors I liked, only in the highlights thicker and more opaque, mostly where I used white in the mixtures.
I then did the clothes of the people, then their skin and hair, and finally the braziers and fire in the foreground, but I forgot to make photos of all those steps.
In the foreground I used thicker colors and only a couple of layers, and the paint has more structure as you can see in the hi-res detail I posted:
It was really fiddly for me to get this thin lines with a brush in acrylic paint, like the wrinkles on T'Pau's face because those are thinner than what a 0.1 fineliner produces (I drew the Vulcan script on the chair with black fineliner to get them even and then did color glazes over that, so you can compare the line thickness in the detail). I frequently wished that I had worked larger than A3.