Honestly, any one of these could be a self portrait.
Tag: Colouring
Not much time for drawing but I’ve been adding to these larger pages of bedtime doodles, sketching some favourites and other stuff.
The comics machine Matt Garvey kindly asked me to provide a variant cover (my first cover) for the latest issue of Gangsters v Monsters. Look at that preview art by the awesome Andrea Schiavone! So good!
After sketching a few of the characters and initial ideas on paper I worked up a quick cover layout guide in affinity designer and imported the logo files. I then exported the guides to clip studio paint as a draft layer and scanned in some of my loose sketches.
I switched between procreate and clip studio to create the thumbnails, for some reason thumbnailing was just easier in procreate.
I liked all four of these and couldn’t really decide on a favourite, they all would have been fun to draw, honestly.
After receiving confirmation from Matt on the second thumbnail I started inking the mummy head first, followed by the werewolf before tackling the rest. I decided very quickly to limit the brush size to 0.4, 0.8 and 1.0 for consistency. In hindsight I prob went a little overboard with the texture on the mummy in contrast to the other characters.
I haven’t really been colouring much this last year so took a few hours to refamiliarise myself with some basic techniques before flatting the file, practicing on this art from the previous post.
I had a lot of difficulty nailing down my colour palette and worked up some rough options after finishing the flats.
I coloured this over a few days so decided to create a reference page in clip studio to remind myself of the brushes and combinations used. It was very quick to put together and saved me a good bit of time in the end thankfully.
I had a blast on this and now that the project has surpassed its goal I’m really looking forward to seeing this in print come December.
Shout off in the comments if you’re getting a copy, I’d love to hear from ya!
Nope, not doing it, you can’t make me, what’s that?… you’ve made a list of prompts with vague references and obscure characters appealing to my unquenchable nostalgia… ahhhhh, hmmmm… maybe I could… just one a week… or maybe seven at the weekends and post them together in a batch… collect em in a zine… release it on gumroad… that could be fun… I could make it woargghhhhhhhhhhh!!! Damn yooouuuu October!!!! You vile cursed month! Every fraggin year!
Anyway, now that I’ve cleared that up, please enjoy these random drawings.
My old Belfast comics meet-up pal Stephen Downey turned 40 recently and I quickly sketched up some fan art of his latest @outsidergames project Tax-Force. It’s heavily influenced by the X-Men animated series which is basically all you need to know, go wish-list it on your computer.
Wee goblin inspired by @boe_ink latest posts on instagram, goblins are good craic.
Had a go at the new bats and that axe, lotta fun and it got me excited to pick up the first issue this week. Since reading it though I think these henchmen dudes are supposed to be wearing ape skulls, oh well.
Look… it’s been a long week and an even longer weekend, it’s times like these that the Jarbats will emerge in the sketchbook… meesa not sorry.
Is it good? Is it fun? I’ve been asking myself this lately when I’m drawing in my wee Royal & Langnickel sketchbook. Seems obvious but sometimes you forget y’know, drawing should be fun …otherwise, why bother? Anyway these were fun, not necessarily good but I’m enjoying sketching again… and colouring with Frenden brushes in CSP is always a blast.
I’ve been itchin’ to ink over some more blue line work since writing my Blue no more post back in April. I sketched up a quick marsh man in Clip Studio Paint and converted the line art to Cyan.
I printed it onto an A5 sheet of cold pressed watercolour paper (200gsm) and inked with a Pentel brush pen, Uni Pin fineliners and a Posca paint marker for highlights.
I got to work on this around 2pm and completed it in chunks throughout the day, approx. 2 hours altogether including quick colours in Procreate.
Overall, I really enjoyed inking over this blue line piece, there’s a freedom to it, knowing that you could just print off another page if you messed up the inks and start again without losing your original drawing.
I’m disappointed with the brayer texture and will probably need to look at using another ink next time or practice with the roller on different paper. The masking tape also damaged the page in places so I might use masking fluid or cut out a stencil overlay on any future attempts.
The Posca marker worked really well on solid black ink but tended to mix with the brayer texture and grey wash. It’s really difficult to get a good all-round consistent line with whiteout pens like this but it’s also entirely possible that I just didn’t allow enough time for the inks and wash to dry.
I pretty much gave up on the clip studio workflow to remove the blue lines after scanning, the results looked a little faded/grey and the background wash was lost entirely after edits. The technique seems to work best on clean line art only. It’ll probably need tweaked or approached from a different angle for washes/texture. One solution would be to scan the line art and then add washes/texture using digital brushes. Alternatively, washes and textures could be scanned from separate lightboxed pages and added as multiply layers.
I snapped some quick photos of my sketchbook to try out some Frenden brushes in CSP. I’ve been getting increasingly bored with digital drawing lately (just feels like a slog) but colouring on the iPad is still fun.
The search continues for my go-to textured colouring brush, y’know… the magic brush. I feel like I’ve come close to it on a few things over the years but I colour so infrequently that I can never quite remember the ones I’ve used or the combinations that have worked… I’m old.