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robertsloan2 β Reef
Published: 2006-02-24 05:14:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 5312; Favourites: 42; Downloads: 103
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Yarka pan student watercolors, Cretacolor Aqua Monolith watercolor pencils, Prismacolor and Verithin colored pencils on 90lb Blick student watercolor paper. 8" diameter. Finished with Krylon Gloss Acrylic Spray Varnish to prevent wax bloom.There are no plants shown in this scene. From left to right, Sea Anemone, red Tube Worm, green Brain Coral, two damselfish, a cluster of Nutting's Sponges, a Vase Sponge, Tube Sponges and behind those, Elkhorn Coral. Another cluster of Tube Sponges is visible, blued near the apparent horizon that is probably a dropoff to deeper water. Signature is floating over the Sea Anemone on the left.
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Comments: 99
Thank you! It's still one of my own all time favorites.
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You're welcome
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Thank you! This one was the first reef scene I was ever satisfied with -- I've been trying for years and years.
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Really? Well ,this one is beautiful.I love the colors.
You're very welcome
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I get into those colors all the time, and definitely want to do other reef pieces. I'm also tempted to use those colors in my bathroom when we get around to the painting and decorating in the house -- I get to decorate the downstairs bathroom as I like it, and have considered "reef" as a color key for some time!
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Sounds lovely. I'd let you do mine
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Thanks!
I have a row of cabinets in there that are neat, currently painted white but each cabinet door is a separate panel. I might work out mini-murals on the panels or do one continuous design broken up by the borders like a tryptich, but with four panels.
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That would look very nice. It sounds like a nice job. You get to keep it when you're done too.
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I love this, it so beautiful and vibrant. It puts a instant smile on my face.
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Thanks! I like it too, it's one of the pieces I matted and hung right by my desk.
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Thanks! Yeah, I guess it's a little odd doing a round piece. I hadn't thought about it while I was doing it, just did it that way for fun and enjoyed it. I still haven't matted it, and can't wait till I can get the round mat cutter and can mount it perfectly. The round shape reminded me of being able to look out a porthole under the waterline when I first came up with it.
I guess I could have done it in an octagon and might do another with an octagon. That'd make the mat cutting a lot easier, since I've done octagonal mats in the past. I might make the outer mat on it octagonal after I cut a circular one when I get the Logan Circle and Oval mat cutter. Don't know if I'll get that while I'm living here or wait till I move since it's a fairly large item and moderately expensive.
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Yeah a octagon would be cool! You don't see many of them around but yeah it would be unquie and practical.
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It's also really easy to cut with a straight mat cutter and a triangle. You mark it up for a square the size of the octagon, then use the triangle to knock the corners off to make all 8 sides the same -- just throw the ruler across the corners and eyeball it fiddling till they all match and get the angle right by the triangle. Then once it's marked up, cut each segment as a little straight line and work around it.
I've done even octagons like I'd do around this round one, and also done uneven octagons where I just knocked the corners off to look cool.
I also sometimes did pointed cutouts in the sides of rectangles to jazz it up and make it look more interesting than plain rectangles or squares. Mat cutting is its own fun hobby, and once I got started doing it again I've been gradually getting back into doing the cool stuff again. My first ones were all simple one layer ones, but today's was a two layer and looks really nice.
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Wow, I love the rich use of colours! Amazing piece of art work!
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Thank you! This one I did pretty much in my favorite colors. I can't say how many times I've looked at scenes like Reef and wanted to draw them or fallen in love with the colors, so this one's so personal in its colors.
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I like this a lot. ^-^ Cheery reef scene, wonderful colors, really adorable.
I do not know how you have the patience for this though. I've been spending so much cursed time on one onion plant and lots of little pebbles for my betta picture it's driving me nuts. And I still have lots to go x.x I think I need to take a break from colored pencils and move to oil paints and soft pastels for a bit.
This does make we want to dabble in watercolor more though...
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Thank you! Actually, I don't always have the patience for this and sometimes like doing small textured-application drawings like the entire series of Graphitints pieces I've done recently. I do big textureless Prismacolor drawings when I'm in the mood for it and sometimes overlap them with other faster styles of art in between. Some of my patience also comes from getting sick, because once the sketch is in working on one of these slow, slow Prismacolor works is something I can do in bed.
I also use shortcuts. I did a strong underpainting on Reef and I think that got it done in about half the time. I'm also doing different sorts of mixing and layering, and use my Prismacolor Colorless Blender a lot. You're talking about the central issue of working with Prismacolors when you talk about The Patience To Do It. lol
I bought two books by Bet Borgeson, Colored Pencil for the Serious Beginner and Basic Colored Pencil Techniques. Both books have a lot of shortcuts for getting dramatic results, exact color mixing and dramatic textureless effects with fewer layers. These books were very useful. For years I did good Prismacolor paintings -- I do go with the people who call the textureless ones "paintings" especially when the strokes are invisible or "painterly" the hard way with a dozen layers of pencil to get rid of every little speck of white from the paper and shade and mix the colors precisely. I'm now getting the same effects with a lot less work. When that first layer is done with watercolor or watercolor pencils and then washed, it speeds the process by more than one layer.
Oil paints and soft pastels are much faster. I like using soft pastels too and tend to just scale up my subjects a bit so that I can still get the details I want into the drawing. Oils take a long time to dry the way I do them, thinner and more turpentine-thinned the earlier the layers, oilier and richer the outer layers. If you stop at the stage where it's right from the tube it's not that bad but oil glazes take a long, long time to dry, and when I do those again I'll enjoy doing some thoroughly layered oil paintings. Soft pastels are a breeze. I love using velour paper or colored art paper for them -- yet another shortcut.
Watercolor's fun. I'm starting to get to paint better by way of using watercolor pencils more and then looking at the effects and getting them again with the paint. It's really a lot of fun and I've gotten so much better at it just this year. Last year's watercolors are pretty bad, but I keep them in my Gallery anyway so that I can see my progress.
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Yeah, the one down side to oils, for all their beauty and effects, they take forever to dry. But I've been looking around and apparently the Lukas tend to usually dry in 2 days, which is good news.
I guess the under painting, be it with markers or something else is worth the time to do in the end, it does take the pressure off to cover every little bit of white. I should do more stuff with my Ticonderogas on top of markers...I don't know why the pain in the arse pencils come out so well like they do, guess it's worth to fight with them. X.x
It looks like I shall have two more books still to add to my collection.
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Ooooh yes. Underpainting with markers is a wonderful combination. Markers are quick and don't take any time sitting around watching paint dry, which watercolors sometimes do but I love them anyway. I mean to get some Prismacolor Markers and use them primarily for underpainting till my underpaintings start to look like real art.
Another related trick is to use colored paper. I mostly used colored paper with pastels for speed and convenience -- it's much cooler looking to do a subject without a background when the paper's pretty and makes a fine background by itself than on white. So for my book I stocked up on Canson Mi-Tientes, the paper that supported me throughout my street art years and eliminated backgrounds from all my street portraits and most of my landscapes that came out loose on the appropriate color of paper. I'd pick the paper to fit the subject.
Once I got the paper I started using Prismacolors on it. Every one of the pieces I did on bold Canson Mi-Tientes colors has gotten a lot more Favorites! The best one I did was Ferns, Moss and Water on kelly green Mi-Tientes. I was looking at the Brights pad and at first thought the colors were just way too over the top, till I realized how that'd look shining through one of those intimate high-summer moss and grass and ferns scenes where even the light is green coming down through the leaves. I did a card and a sunset on royal blue. I did another sunset on bright red. All of them got a lot of Favorites compared to colored pencil landscapes on white.
Reef was on white but I underpainted it thoroughly with watercolor and got the basic values in on the underpainting, so it was comparable to the ones I did on colored paper. I actually have a nice piece of turquoise Mi-Tientes out and ready to do another reef without underpainting either in pastel, pastel pencils or colored pencils but haven't decided the best way to do it yet. I'm also considering using gouache to underpaint a bright red chunk of branching coral on it so that it gets that eyepopping in both directions, but it may work better without.
I haven't dipped into the darks or neutrals yet but I know those will work well too and that it behaves the same way with colored pencils as it does with pastels. The main difference is that on a colored pencil drawing, if I want it textureless, I need to go over the blank paper portions with my colorless blender to keep the waxy texture the same between color established by paper and drawn parts.
It's definitely worth the time to do an underpainting. It doesn't have to be that detailed. I learned it in Chicago from Karen River, doing Prismacolor portraits of our favorite media stars. She shocked me by underpainting a face with screaming pumpkin orange instead of any tan or flesh tone -- and then demonstrated how to tone it down till the orange really was just a soft unifying color under everything else. That takes going over all of the face, not using the underpainting as any of the middle tones.
I haven't tried Ticonderoga colored pencils since I was a child. I remember I had some and was fascinated with the name, ran into it in a history lesson and thought that was interesting. But I don't remember how hard they are or how they handle. Soft colored pencils work faster than hard ones, at least over broad and medium sized areas. From your calling them the pain in the arse pencils I'd guess they're pretty hard and don't give as much coverage as Prismacolors.
You're giving me ideas in this conversation too, because I have these two interesting dry mediums both of which work very well on colored paper. *Peachfuzz has successfully used pastel as underpainting, going over it with her Crayolas. Her pastel technique is to rub a sponge applicator on the sticks, so it's a very thin coat of pastel for the underpainting. I would suspect any smudging medium, tortillons, sponge applicators or a cloth, would work for it if you're just using a smooth thin layer to tint the paper and then draw over it with translucent colored pencil. It wouldn't work at all the other way around because pastels need some tooth to grip.
I think it'd probably work best to use pastel pencils and then smudge them because I can wet down my pastel pencils. They're watersoluble. If they don't work but I use watercolor paper, it can be saved with a quick wash to dissolve it and turn it into a normal underpainting applied fast with soft pastel pencils.
I also found out dramatically that using fixative on watersoluble colored pencils doesn't dissolve them! The thinner in the fixative doesn't turn them into watercolor. I tried it on Derwent Graphitints because the difference between wet and dry applications is so total and obvious. Though one thing I haven't dared try is to do a dry drawing and instead of doing a wash, lightly mist it with a spray bottle of water and let it dry without moving it around at all. That could look pretty cool actually.
Those books are great. I joined the North Light Book Club for a second time and got another batch of three freebie promotional books for signing up, four books for $23 total with shipping included. They're very cool. If you like them and sign up, say that Robert A. Sloan recommended you because if I get four recommendations they'll give me a bonus book again.
I join annually and get free books every time. Their prices are sometimes higher than Amazon's, but not on the introductory offer. You can also elect NOT to have the selections mailed out if you forget to respond to the club, which is why I was able to do it or I'd get swamped with unwanted books. For some reason in every single book club I've ever joined, the Main Selection is always a) a book I already have, or b) a book I didn't want. Usually somewhere three or four titles down on the Alternate Selections there's a real temptation, but the Main Selections are inevitably junk or something I already got.
I must just really be into books.
That's neat about the Lukas oils! There are some resin mediums that are fast-drying too, check the Lukas mediums and also the variety of Gamblin mediums because some are nice and quick but not as fast as acrylics.
I do acrylics too and have everything I need to do them again, but haven't gotten around to doing any. I ordered the canvas boards to do them, but just haven't been into getting all that set up. I think some of it is the amount of space in my room. My desk barely has space to set down my mouse, the largest space is about a seven inch square mousing area, the rest is all piled with stuff. Therefore no place to conveniently put a palette, no empty table near the armchair, no easy setup area for painting. Since I will be moving in a few months, I don't worry too much about it. I think I'll paint again when I've got space with a table and armchair, preferably two tables so that my painting stuff is off to one side and my laptop is nowhere near it if I've got my computer flipped open for things like in-progress blogging and breaks.
Street Sketching is all about pastels on colored paper and getting a beginner up to "salable, gets the likeness" from zero. A pretty specific subject, with portraits the biggest section followed by "landscapes with tourist attractions," pets, and decorative types of salable street art like florals or still lifes. Traditional subjects done fast and reasonably accurate with every timesaver I know so the tourist doesn't have to sit still beyond their patience and can just happily pay and carry it away.
After that, I plan to do a colored pencils book.
I've been studying a lot of other colored pencils books both to learn the style of how-to, improve my art till it's publishable (getting there), and to decide what the main benefits of my book would be to someone that already owned half a dozen and loves colored pencils enough that my book's a collectible must. It should have at least one original-to-me good tip right in the Materials section, the part that gets excerpted on Amazon. I bought most of the ones I have because something in that chapter taught me something I'd never heard of. It should have more good original techniques other authors didn't explore in the middle and the end, plus all the basics that get covered in all the books but explained in my plain language. Just for the readers who didn't even have an art book and got mine because they got a neat set of colored pencils for a gift once and wanted to do something cool with 'em.
One thing that none of my books touched on in talking about materials is a minor gap to me: gift sets.
Every time I look at my catalog and online suppliers, there's these neat Gift Sets on clearance or sale, or just good priced collections of a little of this and a little of that. Sketching sets, or colored pencils sets with a few Art Stix in them, or several of the different types of colored pencils and sticks the company produces in a targeted range or a very simple small spectrum range. Things like the Derwent Color Collection -- three versions all with multiple mediums in increasing range and price, or the Prismacolor Landscape Sketch Kit (VERY well chosen palette and materials, I bought that one and don't regret it).
Two authors mentioned "Don't get the giant wood box sets unless you really like them, they're more expensive and not worth it unless you really like that sort of thing." Most of them suggest ignoring large sets and picking out a personal palette from open stock in stores. That's the most expensive way to buy colored pencils that I know of. Sure, it gives the advantage of mixing brands, but it's more per pencil that way.
I'll be recommending that readers look for a giant set in an artist grade brand, anchor their colored pencils collection with that and then fill it out with nonduplicate colors in open stock. Because if they get it on sale from a catalog it'll come in about half price and throw in all those interesting odd colors you don't use very often that are so useful that one time you need it. Also sometimes colors that are unappealing taken as themselves turn out to be just right for a particular subject or become a key ingredient in a favorite mix.
What you said brought me back to one key element in this colored pencils book. The thing that I think will make mine valuable to someone who's already got Gary Greene and Bet Borgeson and Lee Hammond and Bernard Poulin at hand.
The cheap childen's sets, the pain in the arse pencils, are better for the things they're better at. It's worth fighting with them when that's the effect you want.
Prismacolor produces Prismacolor Verithins, which have a harder narrower lead that holds a fine point. 36 colors that are matches for the same-name colors in the soft thick-core artist pencils. They also do the cheaper Prismacolor Scholar pencils now, which I have yet to try but intend to. I have a feeling that those will come out midway in hardness between the cheapest Verithins and most expensive Prismacolors and Art Stix.
Graphite pencil drawing, there comes a point where instead of finding your favorite hardness, it starts working best to have a batch of different pencils in different hardnesses. I wound up buying two tins of Prismacolor Turquoise pencils to have everything from 9H to 9B available whether I'm drawing or just undersketching. They rock.
The biggest difference between the inexpensive children's pencils and the expensive artist grade pencils all the authors recommend is that most kid pencils have hard leads. RoseArt has the hardest leads with the least pigment. RoseArt drove me nuts. I had a bunch of them, several friends gave me spare sets of RoseArt and eventually I tested them along with several brands with my housemate Starweaver Blue in the Pomegranate Experiment.
I did a drawing of an actual pomegranate in Prismacolor, then copied the same layers in the same colors using only colors that I had in the other sets. We matched colors across Prismacolor, Design Spectracolor, Cretacolor Aqua Monolith, Crayola and RoseArt doing the same layers with the same pressure to see the difference. Big surprise, the RoseArt fruit looked faint and faded, the Prismacolors and Design Spectracolors looked best, Aqua Monoliths (dry) and Crayola were in between.
But the way I used Verithins, which I didn't have then, was to sharpen them fine and do small details. I did Verithins Violets as a textured drawing letting the white show through and it came out great, using just the Verithins. They handle differently. If I'd done that over an underpainting it would've had a very different look, but still a good one.
I decided to start collecting multiple sets and testing them for hardness, coverage, pigment, color range and how they handle. Colored pencils are most often wax-based. Prismacolor, Crayola and most of the kid pencils have a wax-based binder. Derwent colored pencils are clay-based and have a "dry" feeling and a texture much more like using graphite pencils. I haven't tried the oil-based Caran d'Ache Pablos or Lyra Rembrandt colored pencils yet but heard those are softer than Prismacolors. Heh, that'd rock, Prismacolors are pretty soft. And last in the list of binders, all the watersoluble colored pencils seem to have their own texture and that wonderful quality of being able to melt them with water washes.
In the books I found out I could do that to Prismacolors using turpenoid or other thinners that'd work with oil paints. Great news. I get into wet effects more and more anyway, but using mineral thinners like that is inconvenient compared to just grabbing Aqua Monoliths or other watercolor pencils for the wet layer. Prismacolors also thin and blend using a Prismacolor Marker colorless blender -- it gave a very neat effect but also stained the tip of the colorless blender a little so now that one's reserved for thinning and blending Prismacolor drawings.
I think there is a reason the pain in the arse pencils come out so well like they do. While I warm up to doing the colored pencils book, I'm testing everything from supremely expensive artist brands to the little $2.97 tin of Faber-Castell Red Line colored pencils that I picked up on Clearance at Blick, especially anything that's still available. It was only the tin set that got discontinued, they have the same pencils in cardboard boxes and they're pretty good for cheapies.
So in the interests of my research... how are the Ticonderogas? I haven't actually picked up a set yet, and I'm curious about exactly what techniques you use to make them come out so well over an underpainting done with markers. I'm planning on getting a 24-color set of the markers to fool with and learn the marker techniques with, not sure I'll really need much more than that unless I start getting really good with them and I like the carrycase more than the studio stackers. But if there's a slow difficult but rewarding technique Ticonderogas shine in, I'd love to know it!
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I can barely do anything with acrylics...i dont know why, they seem too gluey instead of pastey like oils are. Odd.
I wouldn't say Ticons are hard, they're difficult to manuver is more like it. They're not quite wax and not quite oil, almost gives an impression of being sticky without actually being sticky. X.x It makes them hard to blend easily, even though they go on thick. It makes having the full 48 set the best bet. [link] This piece was a big blending experiment, heavy layers they take to get it right, which isn't nearly as hard to do as it sounds unless if you're going *thick* black on a light color like: [link] The black leather pieces there. The same blue and black was used for the black fur, light blue copic marker. The ime was most spent on the black and the light blue background. But for the really impressive thing I've done had to be the mane on this piece: [link] It just glows, and it really does have that 'glow' in real life, almost a 3d effect. It's really just the basic matter of keeping them sharp for fine detail and knowing their nature of hating to blend. It can be done, it just takes a lot of effort, so limiting how many youll blend is key.
*swandog does some amazing stuff with Caran d'Ache, and she said they are harder than prisma, but softer than Derwent, which makes me really want to try them. Prismacolor is so soft it's kinda all over the place, lol.
RoseArt...oh the joys of RoseArt...those pencils are so washed out in their color its not even funny, however huskie666 can pull them off and make them look amazing. But with the style of fur texture she does, it's now understandable how and why.
Never thought of pastels are being an underpainting, thats a neat idea.
I've been kinda fighting the urger to get pastel pencils at the moment. I work better on a smaller scale, and they would be great, from what I've heard, theyre not worth it except for sketching, but i probably will try them later. Friday I shall be placing an order with Blick (finally!) and on that list is rembrant half stick pastels with a free pad, grey paper stumps, 36 verithins, 36 yarka pastels, a prisma colorless blender pencil, a couple of colors i need in prisma, a kneaded eraser, and a notesketch book to take to the zoo.
I've been curious about the Prismacolor Art Stixs a bit. x.x
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Ooooh what a neat order! Verithins rock. If you love Prismacolors but they go all over the place, Verithins are like Prismacolors with manageable hardness. Between your Rembrandt pastels and Yarka pastels you'll have both the brights and the sweet soft Yarka muted colors. Prismacolor's colorless blender pencil works on any colored pencils, not just Prismacolors. Kneaded erasers rock and so do Notesketch books. I love mine. I got the larger size horizontal split with tall narrow blank area and column of lines for writing on and use it for fantasy notes.
The paper's very smooth, high quality and thin, so it has a lot of pages and it's easy to draw small detailed pieces in it as well as make some goodsized notes on them. That rocks.
Art Stix are great for filling in large areas. I use them mostly on the end rather than turning them on the side for a naturally created chisel point 1/4" wide, and if I need a sharp point I just twirl it. In the right kind of case, Art Stix can also be a very portable set because you can keep rolling it on its corners to get fresh sharp points while using it to do details and fill in fast with them, it's Prismacolor lead material shaped into a long square stick 1/4" wide. It matches perfectly, so if you have Prismacolors you can go smoothly into an area filled in with Art Stix and edge it up with Prismas and Verithins.
I hadn't thought of pastels as an underpainting either but I have to try it sometime. Stumps are neat too, and those can be sharpened in a pencil sharpener or with sandpaper if they get dull or too dirty. Tortillons just wear out, and the point smashes in, but you can poke it pointy again with a long toothpick or something like that. Stumps cost more and last longer.
Ticonderogas sound interesting. A different texture like that would produce very different effects, and I like that glow you got with them. I will definitely try them someday, the full 48-set was what I had in mind because of my comprehensive color chart project. I suspect RoseArt can be made to look good with the type of techniques that work if you're using a 6H pencil for the drawing, and that they'd shine for doing very faint hard fine lines and going into them with other colored pencils. Or very fine small details and going into them with other pencils, sort of like Verithins to the Verithins.
Hmm. I'll have to try Pablos for myself and decide whether I think they're softer or harder than Prismacolors. I may try weird experiments like put a row of different pencils together in one of those music-line chalk-holders so that I'm pressing on all of them with exactly the same pressure and know it mechanically to test them. There's got to be some way to get an accurate hardness rating. I've now heard two versions; =elegaer says softer than Prismas, *swandog says harder than Prismas but softer than Derwents.
My Derwents feel reasonably soft, not as hard as described, but they do have a dry, graphite-like feeling to them and that's something so different texturally that I can see why they seem harder than they are. It seems to take getting used to and it helps to have fooled with graphite pencils recently too, and Graphitints. They seemed harder years ago.
Also, Derwent claims the Studio pencils with their narrower leads were designed to sharpen to a fine point and go into small details, supporting the Artist set. It's entirely possible that Derwent Studio are harder than Derwent Artist by about the proportion of Prismacolors to Verithins. I won't know till I get some Studios again. I'm sure the colors are the same, but the narrower leads may have a slightly different formula.
Acrylics dry fast. Super fast. Faster than watercolors almost. The way I use them, I mix in lots of acrylic gloss medium and glaze translucent and transparent layers over each other until I have an oil-like luminous effect, usually with a lot of realism. I've noticed many other artists using acrylics have a tendency to bright flat plastic hues -- they mix them, but in shading a subject will just shade with black and tint with white and do the subject monochrome rather than tinting it warmer or cooler or bringing in other colors into the mixture. Even mixing along the color wheel like yellow >orange > red seems to come out plastic-toy looking more than realistic colors.
It's something about the way they dry fast that suggests taht treatment, I guess. A book of "aliens" paintings by a famous fantasy and science fiction illustrator, most of the aliens (I read most of the books they were from) looked more like plastic toys than real creatures. Sure, they had purple or green or blue skin but it was shaded monochrome or around the color wheel. Even neutrals seemed to come out with a very limited range of hues rather than the richer mixtures oils suggest.
I've seen that kind of bright flat palette in many acrylic paintings, as if something about the paint really makes artists want to use pure hues from the tube and just shade light or dark instead of toning the mixtures with the other colors in the painting. It makes the subjects look like cutouts to do that and breaks realism. In oils, when someone like Boris or Frazetta uses a bright colors palette because something about the scene looks better with the blue-purple-green giant serpent facing the bronzy hero and the scarlet-garbed heroine, the colors don't look as unreal. They blend and the artists use complements to strengthen the colors and blend them softer on the edges and aren't afraid to mute the palette to create distance keeping the brightest accents forward.
All this gives a lot of acrylic paintings a pop art sort of look with layered bright monochrome elements that may be very accurately molded and rounded but look like they're seen through the blue or red transparent filter next to the other color with a sharp color edge. I tend to mix a lot of neutrals and muted colors in acrylics to break up that plastic brightness and that helps give it an oils look rather than acrylics look. I should do one again to show that. Pthalo blue acrylic is beautiful and I'd love to do a reef in that with some bright foreground fish and corals. That was my favorite color when I first tried acrylics as a child in an art class, though I don't remember doing anything very effective with it since I didn't know how to do peacocks and get them anatomically accurate or reefs or anything natural that color.
Oils are very forgiving. They're pasty, they can be thinned to transparent drippy paint like watercolor with turpentine or fattened with oil or resin to stay pasty and be more transparent, they work right out of the tube too, and they mix on the canvas because the underlayers smear up into the overlayers usually. I do a sepia value painting as an underpainting before putting any colors into an oil painting and that does great things for them. An old artist in New Orleans taught me that, and it always works to do it in sepia specifically even if it's going to have a lot of cool colors like a person in blue light or a sea picture or a reef. The brown darks blend with the colors over them to make rich deep blacks or whatever it is that have an echo of something more natural than other colors of underpainting would. I didn't believe it till I tried it, but the sepia value painting done with very thin turpentine-mixed sepia that dries fast unifies everything else no matter what color it is. It also keeps me from ignoring the values in the painting in favor of matching colors, because I can tell if it looks great as a brown monochrome or not. If it looks good in the underpainting it looks good finished.
It usually looks good at the sepia underpainting stage and someday I'll do one that I just keep at that stage and detail enough that it's a finished monochrome sepia painting. I just like the way that looks and it's like seeing an ink wash painting from a watercolorist, it's one of those things that works. You know what I mean if you've ever done it, and if you haven't you have something cool to look forward to.
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I'll probably have to invest in the Art Stixs soon enough, I would love to coming up in the summer. Only problem is X3 Anthro and Fantasy artists have a hard time getting anywhere in a state that's art is mostly quilting and landscapes, but I cant ever conform and be a 'proper' artist like i have a feeling people are going to say to me.
I was so close to giving in and ordering oil paints from ASW instead of this order, but a friend said to wait on the oils and she's never wrong, so yeah. I adore the idea of a notesketch, especially for taking down notes of critters, can't wait to fill it up with all sorts of crittery goodness!
I kill tortillons all the time, it would be a waste for me to get them, so I'm going with the stumps for the reason of sharpening alone, a better investment in the long run.
I think the key with Roseart is to have a light hand for laying out the flow, then layer like crazy with what you need layered. I think the black in Roseart would be what I would probably use the most, for the fact most blacks tend to layer too easily for much some kinds of 'fur work'.
Apparently being an artist means having a big desire to 'tinker' with all sorts of things. I really need to get a job to support my tinkering, especially now that you said Derwents have a graphite like feel. Can they smudge anything like graphite?
Acrylic having a plastic look would be the best way to have explained it, it's difficult to get them not to look plastic, and on that note, I will probably be starting some of my acrylic experiments over again in oil when I get the canvases back. X.x',,
I shall have to try the sepia thing, though i think when i re-do my basilisk piece over in oil, i will probably try greenish-sepia seeing as there will be much green through out. I know using one color as a base or in airbrushing even spraying a color over can tie it all in, i've just never done it before.
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I have noticed that fantasy and science fiction art ARE becoming more fine-art respectable and do come up in galleries, even if quilting and traditional subjects predominate in your area. The markets for fantasy art and imaginative art seem to be less place-dependent and more event-related. Large conventions can get very good prices for fantasy art. Magazines also purchase publication rights to it sometimes, often because the editors and art editors attend the conventions.
These are science fiction and fantasy conventions, many are located in the Midwest or other regions in North America including Canada. Anthro art sells at those conventions very well and there are also "Furry" conventions where it gets great auction prices.
The marketing's different, that's all. I never tried to sell it as gallery fine art, New Orleans tended toward nature art and traditional subjects too.
I'm going to review my Derwents more thoroughly in another journal, haven't tested smudging yet but they shade nice like graphite and have a graphite-like feel so I think they will. I still need to finish my color chart and scan it and then do a major, serious piece just using that set to really know it, maybe several. Graphitints demanded seven before I even started understanding them. Tortillons work great on Graphitints though and saved the look of my dry Graphitints pieces.
I bought a ton of tortillons on sale and a couple dozen stumps, so I'm covered in both directions and expect to use them up, so I don't worry about it. They're cheap. Stumps a little more pricy but also more lasting and durable, I use the one that works at the moment, new or old and rounded. The flattened used-up dirty tortillon still works for shading as a mushy broad smudger so it's fine for what it is.
You're so right. Art is all about tinkering. That is so much of its joy for me. Every month I get new materials. I may not use them right away but I always start the tinkering process. Usually I at least do the color chart right away, sometimes I just study them for a few days or weeks first, drinking in their differences and newness and color range and coming up with new ideas. It depends too on how sick or healthy I am and on whether that month I got more than one new thing.
Sometimes delaying the tinkering process happens because the materials inspire a great new idea for which I need to learn a new skill. Just the sight of them and intuitively I know what I need to do with them and I can't quite do that yet, so I fall back and start doing the pieces I need to do to learn the skills I need to do the thing I want to with the new set. Just like the way I mix colors more when I have a larger color range, I experiment and ruminate and try new things most in my most familiar medium, colored pencils. It took a freakin' year to realize I do have a favorite medium and that I'm better in it than any of the others, not that those aren't fun either.
The best way to avoid the "plastic" look in acrylics is to pay attention to color harmony and color richness, really use them like oils in terms of colors. Choose a palette as if you were doing something like a Bob Ross oil painting but instead of squeezing out all the colors onto the palette at once, add them one at a time as you use them and create mixtures working into the mix that is already there. A little of the previous mixtures goes a long way to establishing color unity and eliminating the Paint By Number Plastic Toys look. It isn't always visible as such that a muted orange has bits of a muted blue in it as what muted it, but it unifies it. Also using lots of acrylic gloss medium to make the paint both thick and transparent, then glazing layer on layer to change the colors and tone them as if layering in colored pencil gives richness and an oil-painting like look.
I do realism in acrylics and they're clean, easy to use and fast-drying. They have convenience features, but a lot of people use them right from the tube in monochromes and pop-art influenced ways because the brights are so obvious and dramatic for a pop-art look. Realism rests on color mixing and the colors available in acrylics are the same as those in oils, so you can use the same mixtures and get the same effects. Try using gloss medium to do the Sepia Underpainting and establish values in the painting, then use varying amounts of gloss medium in all successive layers so that the underpainting continues to shine through at least through translucence. Using them at full opaqueness tends to give the "plastic" look too, vs. multilayered glazes.
It sounds like RoseArt handles like Verithins but more so, they are extreme hard pencils and a light hand with many soft layers gives the best results, also the sharp pointed black works great for fine black details, eye pupils and dark fur-tips and so on. Lighter layers could also reduce hand cramping when trying to create saturated areas. Do me a favor since you have them, would you? Do a test patch on a scrap with RoseArt and smudge it with the PRismacolor Colorless Blender? It worked fine on other colored pencils I have, but I'm curious to know if it helps RoseArt any. I'm thinking of recommending it in the book to anyone who gets any colored pencils whether they have Prismacolors or not, because it's so much of a timesaver. Also its softness may be a way to handle the hardness of less expensive pencils and get dramatic results with fewer layers and less work.
Doing a soft even tonal layer with a hard pencil and then smudging with a soft colorless blender should produce a textureless smooth tonal layer that's got more or less the same value, maybe one step darker, and no white specks at all. That'd be one technique I'd recommend for RoseArt... so since you have them on hand, give it a try!
Wait and watch on the oils. Also look at Blick's Clearance section. Keep watching that and eventually a nice oils gift set will turn up with humongous bargains on a good palette and usually a bunch of other expensive needed supplies included. Waiting for the sale catalog at ASW will usually also get you good oils gift sets on superdeep discount.
I wanted a $30 wooden table easel with built in sketchbox on sale from Blick in the fall of 2004. I was putting together my first largish Blick order, and got disappointed that they were out of stock on the sale item. I decided I wanted that table easel anyway and I'd at least LOOK at the others to see if there was a similar one at a good price because I was tired of keeping my acrylics in a shoebox and wanted to do paintings.
So I skimmed Clearance first on the off chance of other sale items and found a $45 Winsor-Newton oils gift set that came inside a wooden table easel a bit nicer than the sale item they were out of stock on! I bought it, I thought "cool I'll at least get small tubes of sample oils, maybe enough to do a painting or two." I didn't know what the size descriptions on tubes meant at the time.
The set arrived and wow, instead of ten tiny tubes like student sets or little cheap gift sets, these were huge honking giant .37ml tubes, adult size, enough for a good long stock and twice the size of the tubes I'd had a decade before! They rock. I'm set up for oils completely with nice bristle brushes, mediums, paint, everything, and bought canvases at the same time so all I need now is the space to use it. The set retailed for $167 but it was an obsolete gift set. That is what to watch for at either site, discontinued gift sets put a lot of quality materials into a very low price. New ones are usually cost effective too but that effect gets doubled or tripled when the older gift set goes on sale or Clearance.
Go ahead and use unmixed sepia under the greens. I am NOT kidding, if you try this with a predominantly green piece the greens will just be richer when you're done. It won't look not-green. It will vibrate and resonate with the redness in the sepia making a neutral color livelier without changing its hue, when it's layered like that. I've done it with greens, blues, pinks, anything and it does always work. It establishes values and gives the unity without being obvious because it's an underpainting.
Do a little test piece with using a dark sepia-green underpainting and actual sepia and see how much richer the sepia one is. Part of the trick is that using turpentine and letting the underpainting dry, the light bounces off that entirely separate layer and gives a different effect than mixing the color to the same hue as the layered combination. It's like the difference between Prismacolor Black and Prismacolor Indigo mixed with Sepia to get black, the mixed black is much livelier. But it won't work on kelly green because the blue will predominate on a green paper, that works on white or grays.
Art Stix rock and are worth the investment. They last a surprisingly long time and they spare your Prismacolors in all the colors you cover big areas with! They are extremely handy and can also be a sketching medium in their own right if you use them like Conte crayons for that loose visible lines style, that can be very dramatic. Also, if you keep them in a small wooden or plastic box instead of their original box or get a Global Classic leather case, they are a huge range in a very small container.
I have my 48 Art Stix packed into a 120 color Global Classic leather pencil case that also has my Verithins, my Col-Erase pencils and an assortment of graphite, sketching pencils and charcoal pencils, all my Miscellaneous Pencils are in the Adjunct Set. All 48 Art Stix fit in the same spaces as 24 colored pencils would because they're shorter, so I have two rows of three in each loop instead of three pencils per loop. If you wanted it just for the Art Stix, the 24 color size (rather small and handy like a wallet!) would be exactly the right size for a full set of Art Stix. I've been tempted to get that if my miscellaneousness expands any farther, so that they're that portable.
Yeah, you need to get a job or find good venues to sell art and take commissions. RPG groups, online sites, science fiction and fantasy conventions, and school settings are all really great for selling anthro and fantasy art. *Peachfuzz earned her Derwent Artist Set entirely with commissions she got word of mouth at her high school, and finding the anthro-and-fantasy groups in college is possible too. Or in various social clubs that relate to fantasy, gaming and anthro fandom. Furries conventions the anthro art would fetch a great price. It's more in fannish subcultures than the type of fine art galleries carry, but it does occasionally get into them. At least fantasy does, anthros don't seem to. Comics people may really, really like them though, so comics stores are another place to hang a flyer with a good line art drawing on it "Character Portraits $##" to get the word out to strangers who really need a white unicorn anthro with purple zebra stripes and a big sword with a turquoise hilt.
Yours are good and should sell for a decent price. It's mainly marketing directly to people who like anthro or have anthro characters, fursonas. Furries websites should be good too if you can link to some Deviations in your posts or link your Gallery in your sig line and just post a lot in the forums.
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Yes, the furry conventions that I can never seemingly get to. x.x Being a furry(it's a community with a lot of drama ^-^',,) and having checked into a few places, it seems like the recent events(the war, the hurricanes, the fires, so on and so forth), have limited a good amount of spending and restricted it more popular or better artists. Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Furbid has been rough these past few years. Heck, i had a stack of 62 pieces started at $30 and nothing. X3 I remember the days when it seemed like half of the auctions were selling. I will try to surf around and find more furry forums though, the last commission i got was back in sept.
I guess I'll also have to look around for fantasy conventions as well then. I'm in a portfolio this year, and hopefully that will help to get my name out there with it being my first one.
No problem on the RoseArt blender test, I'll make a note to myself about it. Yeah, I saw some of the gift sets Blick had, lovely things. The Lukas set I'm looking at is normally 350+ but ASW dropped it down to 300 basically...and they're sold out and me without money, just my luck.
In the end, I'm considering a job over trying to scrounge for commissions for the lack of luck. I don't really go anywhere, only know a few of people here(pretty much just my fiance's sister, her b/f, and a couple of people we met on myspace). If I could get the job I want, I would be set easily...if I end up with the Petco job, not so much but still would be able to get supplies often enough.
Well, I'm going to go add the Art Stix to my ever growing wishlist. I'm going to take my time and play with acrylics off hand before doing anything further with them. Derwents sound a lot like what I'm looking for though, but with me, I'm always looking for all sorts of things, the never ending tinkering. ^-^
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Subculture markets like the furry conventions or fan art or fantasy art rise and fall through reactions to the economy at large and also on some cycle of their own that has to do with clubs and the activities of new fans. When there's an influx of new people into the fandom they go wild catching up and throwing themselves into it and collecting -- art, fanzines, costumes, the stuff -- and the market will boom for a while. Sometimes a new artist reaching the "OMG" skill level will create a boom and stir up the market for all the regulars who were already selling well even in the lulls.
But that's cyclic over a few years and the lull markets are hard on beginners. I know a lull like that was what made me shift from selling fan portraits at auction at media conventions to doing street art in New Orleans, when I had a convention that barely broke even on its costs rather than paying my rent, I had to do something. I'd sold a lot of art at it but gotten a lot of minimum bids instead of auction battles. At that point I couldn't take the risk of relying on it to support myself, and it was a lull that probably lasted two or three years before picking up.
The lulls are cyclic though. I don't see any established fandoms like Furries vanishing or dropping so low they don't support the serious artists. It's just harder to get established during a lull. The best way to fight it is to draw a lot and keep growing as an artist, because a couple of things happen. It gets easier and faster with more skill, it gets better cumulatively lifelong and you reach a point where lulls don't really bite that hard.
The other thing is that if you start getting into it, your energy and new work and involvement may actually start tipping the balance. One active artist can revitalize the market sometimes. There was a market boom when I started drawing well and doing cons regularly at about the point when my own art was booming and getting more successful at each convention, it was toward the end of a market lull and I got a name. At that point all the established collectors had to start getting something of mine too along with the big name artists and I made friends with the big name artists because they rocked, they were cool people.
I started really enjoying the conventions because I'd get in the door and the same friends I hung out with at the last convention would all be in the checkout line. We'd get registered and hang out in clumps and sit around in the hallways showing off new art materials and projects in progress, and a lot of the tutorials that I see on DeviantART would happen in the hallways spontaneously. Someone who did good knotwork would be around and I or someone would go "How'd you DO that?" and she'd settle down and we'd all clump around for a knotwork tutorial. Next it'd be someone else explaining noses or pencil shading.
I'd share expenses at the conventions by finding friends to split rooms with, never go to dinner alone, have a lot of fun. I'd hang my stuff in the art show and then run around helping and kibitzing as my friends hung theirs. The first convention or two were a little harder to get to know people at, but the convention regulars go to most of them and so even by the second time, I was meeting people I knew and having fun.
When I think of how I met those great-artist friends, it happened the first time I got in line at Art Show Setup. I'd budgeted the fee and I got in early enough that I did get in, and so I ran into the Early Setup Crowd, most of whom had prepaid because they were at least breaking even and paying for the con on what their art sold for and more often looking at a big art store trip the week after the con.
I walked around before it was open and met artists whose drawings I liked. They were friendly the way they are on DeviantART. So when you do get to the furry convention, look around at the other artists' works and say hi to them and comment on their art in person. That in itself just opens things up. I meet Deviants all the time just based on seeing something I liked on the home page and drop a comment and start a comments thread convo. Same thing in life except that you can look at the actual art and you can see their smile.
Online markets may have the same fluctuations. When either a new big collector or a new artist comes along, a community will get revitalized and the market boom for a while, but sometimes it gets saturated until enough new collectors come through that all need their favorites from most of the established artists, which is just a social pulse.
Fantasy conventions are their own social community and subculture, and bringing good new art to one stands some chance of a lot of sudden interest. Depends on what's going on for the regulars in their lives and that does get affected by the economy and everything. For the first con in any group, going in without any expectations because you don't have a name yet is a good idea.
OOOOOOOOH! That's the Lukas set you are looking at! Wow! Way cool! They'll get them in again and run the sale again. Almost everything in the ASW sale catalogs is perennial, they'll run the same sale again later and restock it if it's out. One time I saw the Derwent Artist Pencils set I just got run out of stock, but was getting something else big anyway so it didn't matter. Though I am so glad I've got it now!
You're going for something spectacular on that oils set, and I know you'll get it sometime.
Hmm. Yeah, I know what you mean about whether to get a job or not and how to get introduced to enough potential commissions to do as well as if you had a job. It's really up to you what works or not. Petco is very cool, Petco would be a fun job and also give you plenty of chance to see animals and draw animals on your breaks and get into art more. Petco is this incredibly fun company. I want to take Ari out to the local Petco sometime and let him try all the cat toys in the play area. He really needs one of those stick-and-string-and-dangle toys, he likes chasing stuff and I sit still too much for him to get as much running around as he needs. With that I could flick it around and get him running.
Oh yeah! I got some ideas for more acrylics just from these comments, but I'm enjoying my Derwents and probably will play with those a while before doing paintings again! I love the never ending tinkering. It's hilarious. I looked at the Blick sale catalog and didn't see anything large I wanted anytime soon in it, if I order anything it'll be a couple of watercolor blocks or pads later on -- and later on cause I don't feel like painting for a while. Neat feeling. I've got more Graphitints and Derwent stuff to do!
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WonderfulΒͺΒͺΒͺ
It reminds me of "Jaqcues CousteauΓ·s world" he was my childhood hero ...
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Mine too! That is so much what this is about!
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yeah ... itΓ·s impossible not to think on him after seing this if youΓ·re older than 20 ...
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Yeah. He touched so many lives with his lifework. I thought it was so wonderful that he did that, year after year after year and always with new discoveries. That he didn't just do a couple and vanish but was still out there no matter how old he got. I think he raised his kids on the Calypso.
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yeah ... now you have made me notice that i haven`t drawn any portrait of him yet ... How can i be so forgetful?
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That would be so great!
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You've gotten the kudos on this most excellent piece of art by now I'm sure you've heard all the good things I can think of. Therefore I extend my immediate apologies for what I'm about to do. It is not that I don't like this one, or think it is not a worthy piece.
Firstly, it looks good both in thumbnail preview and full size. Good but not perfection, and I'm sure some of it is my monitor and some of it is just me. But from the preview, you miss not only some of the hard working detail of the piece, you miss the paper texture that makes the water seem to come alive. It especially gives the fading middle ground a proper look to it in the full view.
Unfortunately, that same paper texture shows through some of the foreground details and those white "show throughs" just look out of place there. So, perhaps this is a piece I'd like better in between, as viewed from behind a gallery rope hanging on a wall. I don't know. Going back out to thumbnail things look really good, except for one further quibble. The first inclination of the eye is to follow that slash of green from the elkhorn coral to the vase sponge and off the edge of the paper. I'm sure there are places like that out there, but for this piece, that slash is just proving too distracting to my eye. Oddly enough that doesn't show up so in full view... however, since I have to scroll the screen to see the whole picture in full, it might again be my monitor.
So, that's my quibble. It's a really nice well done work, full of vibrant color and superb believability in set up, color and composition. The frame, the light, the fish, the amount of details from creature to creature, all rock. I won't call it improvement over other things I've seen from you, because it's a different style done with different materials. You keep exploring and throwing out "yet another example of something fun and exciting that Robert can do" and that's one of the main reasons I find it so fun to watch you. I just hope I didn't offend by letting the critic come out.
k
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Not at all, don't feel bad, this is good critique! I've wanted to do this one for years and years. I did an underpainting, but some foreground details I had white areas under some sections. That the textured look does come through on some of it in what is actually a textureless piece is interesting, because it's heavily burnished -- and even the white areas there on the little pale sponges have been covered with white, clear and very pale pencilwork.
It's gotten fixative, so I'm not going to rework it. Also, you're so right about Full View. Full View will actually show things much larger than life and show the strokes and it's blown up twice the real size of 8" diameter. On my wall what you're talking about isn't visible except the composition suggestions, which will help me on future ones. I don't often rework things anyway, I tend to take ideas and go forward into later pieces. But that is a good point about composition, and I do composition more intuitive than anything else.
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Sorry, I don't speak any Spanish. Could someone translate this please?
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Absolutly stunning work of art! This must have taken you a very long time, but it was obviously very worth the effort, because it is absolutly gorgeous! You did a wonderful job with the colours and blending and you are obviously very knowledgable about sea life! Your portrayal of the different aquatic life is very accurate, as far as I can tell and it looks spectacular! Great job!
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Thank you! Yes, I just got a new reference book and so I had all sorts of details right at my fingertips. I'm going to do many more reef pieces and undersea creatures drawings. And more forests too of course.
And yes, it did take a long time and many layers to finish, but I loved doing it. Sometimes what I really want to do is a long detailed Prismacolor drawing and nothing else really satisfies.
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Another winner! The colors are so fresh and just plain beautiful. Also, l am impressed with the knowledge you have imparted about sea life. You must have done considerable research.Kudos to you!
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Purrr thank you! Yes, I did carefully research each one of these animals. I've wanted to do reef scenes like this all my life, realistic and brilliantly colored. There are lots more I plan to do too, rather than jam 50 species into one drawing I think I'd rather do lots of separate drawings.
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The colours are so vibrant. The presentation excellent as it really is beneath the sea in my eyes. Very well done Robert 
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Oooh thank you! I am so glad you like it. This piece was a long-held dream for me, being able to do it.
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I do love this! Great stuff, and I especially lose those little pink worm tentacle thingies...( I have no idea what they are, but hey I like em!) The only thing that I would sugguest would be the blue on the reef that is tube like stands out a bit to me and the brain coral does have a lot of texture, but doesn't seem round at all...maybe a few more shadows?
Skye
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Hmm. I rounded it a little but the photo reference showed it a little flatter. I've put fixative on it though, so I should've put 'no critique it's finished' on the final version. I can't draw over the gloss varnish layer. I did consider making the brain coral rounder but I'll probably do that in a different drawing and try to make the coral an actually rounder shape -- this one looked to me like a somewhat flattened example even in the photo. You're right that it doesn't come forward that much.
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