fanart process: Methos with a mutant baby
I'm not sure whether anyone is interested, seeing how the art itself got very little reaction (only two comments and one kudo so far *sulk*), but since I took the pictures of the in-between stages, I might as well post them.
I started with googling for references of people carrying babies in slings, like this one
also pictures of Methos, though seriously, considering how popular the character is there is a real lack of high resolution images of him.
I also took a bunch of photos of myself holding my hands and arms in particular positions, which included wearing a sticker onto which I had drawn the Watcher tattoo, trying to figure out how a sweater looks scrunched up and such. Because all the different references I used for this, that were different sizes, resolutions and such, I used a grid method to combine them and still have the relative sizes and proportions right. Eventually that resulted in this preliminary pencil sketch:
I then tried to do a digital color study with that to figure out the color mood, but I sucked at it, and it came out a mess, so I just decided to try for some color harmony by picking a palette heavy on earth tones, i.e. yellow ocre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and then ultramarine, titanium white and just a little cadmium red.
Then I transfered the initial sketch to the expensive paper with my homemade lightbox, and started with a wash of yellow ocre so the paper won't be so white.
I then started with the clothes leaving skin for later because I have always such a hard time figuring out what color skin needs to appear to look okay, so usually I want all the other color first. I took pictures somewhat irregularly while painting.
You can see that I moved the mouth a little bit upwards as a late correction because it just looked odd once I had begun painting it.
I started with googling for references of people carrying babies in slings, like this one
also pictures of Methos, though seriously, considering how popular the character is there is a real lack of high resolution images of him.
I also took a bunch of photos of myself holding my hands and arms in particular positions, which included wearing a sticker onto which I had drawn the Watcher tattoo, trying to figure out how a sweater looks scrunched up and such. Because all the different references I used for this, that were different sizes, resolutions and such, I used a grid method to combine them and still have the relative sizes and proportions right. Eventually that resulted in this preliminary pencil sketch:
I then tried to do a digital color study with that to figure out the color mood, but I sucked at it, and it came out a mess, so I just decided to try for some color harmony by picking a palette heavy on earth tones, i.e. yellow ocre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and then ultramarine, titanium white and just a little cadmium red.
Then I transfered the initial sketch to the expensive paper with my homemade lightbox, and started with a wash of yellow ocre so the paper won't be so white.
I then started with the clothes leaving skin for later because I have always such a hard time figuring out what color skin needs to appear to look okay, so usually I want all the other color first. I took pictures somewhat irregularly while painting.
You can see that I moved the mouth a little bit upwards as a late correction because it just looked odd once I had begun painting it.