April 24, 2009

Say it with me...

IT'S CLOBBERIN TIME!!! Here's the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing, the Fantastic Four's cantankerous, yet endearing tank:


My year has so far been filled with plenty of travel (not bad) and illness (not good)--I'm feeling fine now (with no further travel on the horizon), but I'm still playing catch-up. So, tonight's post is a quick exercise in the rare (for me) traditional media. I sketched it in red and brown color pencil, colored it in marker, then went over the lines again with color pencil, and finally added some highlights with a white color pencil. Scanned it, managed to adjust it to match the original pretty closely, and here we are.

Any real understanding I have of color theory has been picked up while working in Photoshop, so it's a refreshing change of pace to apply what I know to traditional media. I think this piece needed more contrast to bring out the larger forms of the Thing's features, like his brow, nose, and cheek bones (cheek rocks?). Recently, I feel like I've been struggling with contrast... having trouble getting it right the first time, and making a lot of adjustments. My sense of color is a bit off too, again, something that I've been getting wrong on early tries and making many adjustments to.

My artistic senses might be dulled as a result of doing a lot of cheap blogs that don't require artistic brainpower, and also banking a lot of blogs ahead of time rather than working continuously. When it comes to drawing, taking moderate breaks can actually help me out--when I come back to it, I feel energized. I suspect coloring is something that I'm still drilling into my brain, and I need constant exposure to the act of coloring, or I start to regress.

Just thinking aloud here, carry on...

2 comments:

Don Chente said...

Very Noice! Kinda relaxing huh, when you sit down and work with markers and pencils.

Mark W. Hale said...

So close to getting that tattooed on me somewhere...

So close...