Two posts in one day? What's the meaning of this?! (To be fair, the Cats one was put together on Monday, I just scheduled it for Wednesday because that is the traditional day for posting Cats.)
Anyway, I had another wobble and was weighing up giving up on art for
probably about the millionth time, then cooled off and quietly got this
done. The sketch is from a while back, my motivation troughed and it's
been languishing on a memory stick for a bit.
The mood music for this one is Titus Alone by Aldous Harding; there's also Titus Groan, which has glossier production and more filled-out instrumentation, but I like the more sparse atmosphere on this one, it's more liminal and eerie. Given the history of the Gormenghast trilogy and the circumstances under which 'Titus Alone' was written, it's also appropriate that it has a comparatively light touch, but that's a tangent for another time. Still, while we're on this subject: Justice for Juno!
As per usual, Blogger is being an absolute shitbag the enemy of image quality, so if it looks an absolute dog's dinner, then right-clicking and selecting 'Open image in new tab' ought to sort it.
Now, onto the WIPs and that...
The sketch as it was left in April.
Lineart started, canvas altered and background started.
Continuing with the background; at this point, layering watercolours just started to look muddy, so I went on to muck about with some different brushes...
Using the oil/acrylic brushes to give the background a bit more texture. It does kind of bug me that these brushes top out at a relatively small size; I would like to be able to do big, rough messy strokes with lots of texture. The watercolour ones are fine, you can get massive brushstrokes with them but for some reason, we have no such luxury with the others.
Added in a layer of white to make Phaios visible there.
Markings painted, there's strong temptation to simplify his arrangement of splodges before finalising any of the currently existing comic pages - we'll be seeing a lot of this lad!
Lines for the churning water, done in thick brushes and chipped away with smaller ones afterwards, usual procedure.
And the water highlights without the lines - I tried a few different approaches here, wasn't happy with them, went back to the tried and tested watercolours, then roughed them up with a wood brush at low opacity. Not the effect I initially had in mind, but going down that route resulted in too much clutter - this more stripped-down approach ended up working out better.
That's it for today, thanks for stopping by and have a lovely evening!
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