The volcano demon, also known as a magical tabby cat, is celebrating her victory. There’s a lot going on in this picture and I’m still learning how to use bezier curves. It’s fun and I plan to practice hard and get good at using the pen tool. When I say good, I really mean okay, competent.
Besides doing the laundry and vacuuming, I watched a shit ton of Youtube videos about cataracts and lens replacement. With my set of physiological needs (myopia and severe astigmatism), I’m thinking that I’ll be getting monofocus lenses, which means that I’ll still be wearing glasses.
One of the virtues of monofocus lenses is their price. The cost of treating both eyes is about $5,000 cheaper than with tri-focal lenses. I’ll need glasses for intermediate and close vision but I’m okay with that.
I’ll be glad when I get this surgery worked out. Then I can think about something other than my eyes.
I’ve been looking through The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, a massive compendium of American newspaper comic that covers from 1860 to 1980. Comic artists were doing amazing stuff, all of it with pen and ink drawing colored with watercolor or gouache. All of this graphic richness inspired me to forage in the supply pantry for my neglected watercolor paints.
I used my Cotman paints on Alley Oop and my Daniel Smith paints on Betty Burro. Daniel Smith paints are more brilliant than the Cotman paints, but they’re both fine for what I’m doing. The workflow included scanning the painting then loading it into Krita for cleanup.
Watercolor is definitely scary. It takes a leap of faith to put the wet brush on the paper. There’s no going back.
Drawn and painted with Rebelle 4
Today I’m feeling less overall pain in my upper back and left shoulder. I’ve been practicing a strict hang-loose treatment for my left arm, with no lifting of any kind, not even lifting my iPad Pro. Only when you have a bad shoulder do you realize how heavy “light” devices really are.
For the sketch above I used Rebelle 4’s fountain pen brush. For feel, it’s no match for my low-end Lamy fountain pen and some cheap drawing paper from a Big Box store. But, for speed and versatility, digital wins every time. On the other hand, for timelessness and original art, real ink wins every time. Fortunately, we live in an time when we can use both and love both digital and traditional tools. That abundance creates a problem for me: I get confused when I have too many chose. I need to be able to pick one tool and get really good at it.
My goal is to finish this book by the end of June. I’m also starting a part-time job that run for the months of April and May. I’ll be very busy for the next 120 days. I need 11 months for the first book and nine for the second. I know I’m pushing it try to finish this book in six.
After much deep thought I’ve decided to do book three using ink and watercolor wash, which is pretty much what I did for the first book in this series. My reasons are for changing are simple — ink and wash is faster. Also, to make things go more quickly, I’m going to minimize backgrounds and even eliminate them for some pages. Backgrounds always take me way too long. I love a good background, but they’re time consuming.
This is a potential background image for page four, The kids will be looking down on a crowd of animals who are also going to the circus. I say potential background because I may come up with something else tomorrow. I hope that I’ll be satisfied with this one. I’m trying to spend less time painting background images for this book — they’re hard to do and they take up a lot of my time. To get to this painting, which I like, there were 20 that I didn’t like.
I painted this with Clip Studio Paint’s default Round Watercolor brush. To get the texture to look right for a 300dpi image, it’s necessary to scale up the texture in the brush settings.
Now that the Al Fresco Art Club has officially meets on Saturdays, my Sundays are free for doing research and free-form doodling. My “research” consists of watching Youtube videos about Clip Studio Paint and learning languages. For the time being I’m not going to learn Finnish. Instead I’ll be going back to learning Japanese.
I also watched an excellent Clip Studio Paint webinar by Simone Fereirra called Creating Watercolor Style Illustrations in Clip Studio Paint.. He goes through his workflow in great detail. He’s an impressive teacher.
For the picture above I used Clip Studio Paint’s Real Pencil for the line work, the Round Watercolor brush to paint the fish, and the Soft Airbrush to spray in the background.
Today’s Alfresco Art Club challenge was to do a digital painting. I started my project with the iPad and Artrage, but eventually became frustrated. I moved to my desktop computer and used Clip Studio Paint. To paint this lemon. I used the default watercolor and gouache brushes.
Uploads now working…here’s that picture.
Having problems uploading images to this blog. It’s been happening lately. The problem is related to my ISP. Download is cool at about 120MB/sec, but only 0.10MB/sec upload. That sucks.
Today’s work was to check out Clip Studio Paint’s watercolor brushes, which I used for today’s image. I also used CSP’s built in 3D modeling program to create some reference images. It’s cool to have 3D as part of the the drawing package. TTYL.
Today was not productive. My Windows 10 machine mysteriously froze up. After various attempts to get things working, I resorted to a reset. The reset re-installs Windows 10 and keeps my personal files intact. All of the programs I’ve installed have been deleted, including Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, InDesign, and a hundred more that I rarely use. That’s fine. I’ll reinstall them when I need them, if ever. After the reset, everything seems to be working normally. I’m assuming I’ll be back on track tomorrow. Until then, keep the faith.
On the art front, I bought a Domestika water color course given by the Argentinian illustrator Flor Kaneshiro. It’s called Watercolor Illustration with Japanese Influence. It’s inspiring.
