It’s been a short while since I last updated my blog, but I recently finished a newer piece and working on another one related, yup, Alice In Wonderland!
Taking a look at what’s going on in the world of stories orientated towards kids, Through The Looking Glass is a universally known story, so I thought I should give my own interpretation, and ended reading the original story by C.S. Lewis several times and watched at least six versions of the story. Quite possibly the most interesting interpretation by Jan Svankmajer, using surreal stop-motion techniques in “Alice”, capturing the chaos of the story to a tea, and a 90′s made for television movie that was interpreted by Hallmark. Though some of the effects seem a little dated, it’s ridiculous and has beautiful colors, and has a great mad hatter that inspired a lot towards my version of the hatter. As described in previous entries, I sometimes go through my process, so I might as well show you how I go through finishing a piece:
The first step is making the drawing fully in pencil, so I get to finishing that first, and get it scanned in and cleaned up a bit digitally. So it’s time to get ready to coloring the piece. Since I want to make this a lively and energetic color scheme, I choose not to use blacks or grays. So the next thing I do is choose what the dominant color that the drawing is going to be using, and that is an antique brown since this is in the Victorian era, and I do this by duo-toning the piece. This is also going to determine what kind of color scheme the piece will be.
Ping! Not too much changes but now it’s ready for coloring! So I block in the basic color into the piece and keep about three related colors consistent but still change their intensities. So I chose to use the scheme, Orange, Yellow, Green, Orange coming from the Antique brown. Makes sense because: warm color, warm color, cool color.
Looking good! But it still lacks pop, and my style works best when color pops. So since there is lighting in the piece I next go into using the inversion of my commonly used color (which is my antique brown) for shadows and lights, and add a little more subtle light effects.
Nice! Sometimes in the last step, I choose to add some subtle textures, but in this piece, there was already a lot of texture to my pencil work so I chose not to use anymore textures and let the pencil sing. But that sums up how my mental process goes through finishing a piece.
March 4, 2011 at 2:38 am |
It’s lovely,Lively and fun art. Great work for showing the steps how to create your art piece.
Have you drawn the cat in Alice in the wonder land? I really would like to see it if you have a chance some day, please. I saw the musical version of Alice and the cat impacted me most.
(Maybe because of Wasabi, my cat I found in the wood.)
I look forward to your next art piece soon.