Gallery

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

New stuff and Microvisions!

Between drawings I've been trying to play with different papers, rather than the cheap stuff I'm used to. Here is the result of one experiment with Fabriano 300lb Hotpress watercolor paper. Extremely nice to use, but tends to suck in the paint, demanding more layers to hit darker values. On the flip of that same quality, the variations in value are very easy to manipulate. 

But I digress. I drew the devil, a giant ape, my dog, a lion and other nonsense. Let's not get too heady. 
In other awesome news, I've been asked to contribute to this year's Microvisions auction. I'm honored while trying not to panic. It's not enough that top talent in the fantasy/scifi art field are asked to do these small paintings, but they usually kick major ass. Just a quick google search will show the quality of years past.

Now I just gotta figure out what I'm gonna paint, then not screw it up.  (Suggestions welcome.) 

6 comments:

OWEN FREEMAN said...

This is great. Especially digging the atmospheric octoperspective.

Steven Belledin said...

I dig it! Out of curiosity, though, how much of the vibrancy is due to the piece and how much is due to the scan? It feels more vibrant than other work of yours, which I think is a good thing. It also feels insanely rich overall.

Unknown said...

I think some of it may be because the paper is ever-so-slightly off white. So when i scanned and adjusted it, a lot of the color got even more saturated. There was still a fair amount of desaturation before putting up on the blog. Even then, the translation into jpeg always seems to add electricity to it.

The painting itself was intentionally keyed to be overall hot. So the colors are pretty rich in the painting, but the scan probalby amped it up.

Ariel Diaz said...

muy buenos trabajos!

Jardley said...

By suck in the paint do you mean it can't really handle water/watercolor like it buckles?
I'm looking for a paper that's water resistant...

Unknown said...

Hey Jardley! Actually, no, no buckling at all. Since it's 300lb, theres no real need to worry about buckling unless you pour a gallon on it. Even then, it would probably only bend a little.

What I mean is that, compared to a lighter weight paper (90lb or 140lb), the pigment gets rich very fast. This heavier paper sucks in a lot of the color on the first couple washes. I'm not sure if one is better than another, but changing gears was very helpful for this particular painting.

And for paper that is water resistant, try Yupo paper. Its like painting on barely-absorbant plastic. Gets really interesting textures, but not very easy to control.