Dog Family in Gouache

 

This is a painting I did over the summer for the husband of a friend of mine.  My friend sent me a range of pictures of the dogs, but not one picture with all three of them.  So I used the furniture in their house to get the dog’s relative sizes and then pulled 3 reference images into photoshop to make up the trio.

Then I was able to make a sketch and start the process.

 

After that I made a quick study to get a feeling for the picture…

 

Then I laid down my background and got to work…

I used purple for the shadow areas under the dogs to give the painting the feel that they are warm.

Here’s my final painting…

 

Designing a Motif to Represent Mother Nature 2 of 2

Last week’s art was a watercolour I made from a digital design I came up with based around the motif of the tree of life. Link to last week’s art. The idea was to celebrate my love of nature in art. This week I’m going to go over how I made a detailed digital design of the same subject based on my outline design from last week.

At first I just played around with the design, trying out different effects and seeing what I could do with my basic outline and how I might want to develop it digitally.

Here are a few of the ideas I came up with while I was still exploring what I might do…

1. Seemed to make a nice sillouette which could be used as a tattoo design but wasn’t what I wanted for my final drawing.

2. and 3. were OK but still far too simplistic. It was OK to keep this design simple when I was using watercolour because the whole point was to let the simple colours and shapes speak for themselves. With this drawing though I wanted detail.

With 4. I started to see more of the form of the tree which I liked but it was still too simple. So I decided to change the form of the trunk to make it more interesting. Like this…

And then I began to play around with some texture…

The combination of textural and contour lines inside one textural pattern worked really well. So I went on to use this over the whole tree…

Next I used shading to give more form to the tree. The shading alone looked like this…

When added to my line drawing I completed my project…

At this point my greyscale design was complete but I did spend a little while having some fun with colour after that. Here’s how it went…

I worked in photoshop 6.0 for this. I used a circular gradient across a mask to make the main colour…

…which looked like this (above) once I had balanced the greyscale and the colour approriately. (This was actually quite tricky and took a while to do.) After that I added a background and then a partially opaque white circle over the main design and it was done!

Designing A Celtic Tree Motif 1 of 2

Nature has always been really important to me. It’s why I read a mixture preclinical medicine and biology during my degree, why I paint and draw animals, plants and natural places so often, and where I go when I am in need of restoration. I wanted to design a piece of art which captured this feeling and could be used repeatedly in many places as an icon or symbol for these experiences.

I thought a tree would be the perfect subject for this particular project and I was drawn to the motif from many cultures of the “Tree of Life”. I love the way that a tree in this style is shown as part of a circle which links very much with the way nature comes and goes in cycles. I also love tree of life symbols which incorporate celtic knotwork into them. I have found it hard to discover the real history of this kind of knotwork as much of it has been repurposed as marketing for various modern jewllery and tattoo designs. Personally I see, in this pattern, ideas about interweaving the varied threads of life and mutual dependance among living organisms.

At first I began playing with this idea in my sketchbook…

…but soon moved across to a digital drawing board since I wanted a largely symmetrical design and could use the symmetry tool to design this really effectively. (This is a digital tool which will reproduce the mirror image of what you draw on the other side of a line of symmetry.)

I began, as always, thinking about the large shapes in my design…

Next I moved onto my own knotwork design. I alluded to this style rather than implented it more fully so that my tree still looked very tree-like but with strong overtones of knotwork in it. So each branch weaves through others but is only joined to them at the trunk. I planned the knotwork first using single lines so I could get a feel for the pattern that I wanted. I went through several iterations of this and finally found something I liked…

I really liked the way the top of the tree has a hint of a large lotus flower in the way the branches are placed.

Like this (in orange)…

Once I had a pattern that I liked I moved on to roughing in some branches and roots…

Once I removed my blue guidelines this looked like this…

My next stage was to redraw my line art neatly and put in a balanced set of crossovers in the knotwork effect. This is taken part way through when I had done a lot of the roots and was working on the branches…

Then I added some leaves, but this decentred the picture…

…so I got rid of my original outer circle and put in two new ones. My basic outline design was now finished…

From here I wanted to make two different pieces of art. The first was a gradient wash of watercolour in some iconically natural colours. The other was a detailed digital design possibly one in greyscale and one in colour. This week I’ll go over the watercolour work.

Watercolour

The first part of this painting was getting my digital design onto some watercolour paper.

I printed out the design on two sheets of A4, with just over half of the tree on each side. The using scissors and sellotape I made an A3 copy. Then I used an 8B pencil to rub all over the back of every line in my design. That done, I fixed it with masking tape to some A3 Watercolour paper and I was ready to transfer my image…

I went over the lines of my design with a hard pencil until I had redrawn the whole thing. Once I lifted up my copy paper I had a light imprint of my design to work with…

It had some darker bits where the pencil had bumped against the sellotape but it worked. I then went over this with a pencil and used a putty eraser to get rid of any rough work like this.

Finally I had my design on A3 watercolour paper!

My next job was to hash out how I wanted to do the colour. Here’s one of a few trials I made on copy paper to see what worked…

Eventually I decided on going from dark paynes grey with ultramarine, through a range of greens to a cadmium yellow deep at the tips of the leaves.

So I began to paint…

The painting was simple but demanding in the sense that mistakes couldn’t be rectified. It gave me a lovely period of intense concentration and then it was finished…

I am fairly pleased with how it turned out. I like the colour changes and the patterns and lines. If I had to pick something to work on I would paint the wash differently. Normally I paint a wash wet in wet and the watercolour almost takes care of itself. With this, because the lines were so thin and I wanted some really intense colour, I painted it wet on dry and just tried to move fast enough to mix the colours on the paper. I think taking my time and doing a few layers to build up the colour wet in wet might have given me a better result (although the final painting looks much smoother and more consistent than the photograph above).

Next week I’m going to take the outline I designed and use it to make a textured digital symbol in grey scale and in colour.

How to draw a Comic Hero in 8 Simple Steps (with a free worksheet!)

This week is going to be a little different. It’s going to be dedicated to all of the children, young people and “young at heart” people who love to draw superheroes! Here’s how to do it in 8 simple steps…

You will need…

• pencil,
• eraser,
• sheet of paper,
• picture of a superhero or heroine,
• black pen
• colouring pencils or pens

(I have drawn my hero digitally on my Android tablet so that my sketches can be seen clearly but it’s simpler to do on paper with a pencil and pen.)

Step 1 – Draw a stickman

Using pencil make a stick figure in a heroic pose. Draw very lightly so that you can erase your lines later. Make his or her body roughly 8 head sizes tall from the heels to the top of the head, like this…

Step 2 – Make a rough sketch

Next, think of each body part as a simple shape. So, for instance, the upper arm might just be a cylinder. My hero’s cloak is just a wavy line and his feet are just quadrilaterals (four sided shapes). Then use these simple shapes to make a rough sketch of your figure over the top of your stick man. Again draw lightly. Don’t worry if it doesn’t look quite right yet – we’re just getting started.

Step 3 – Erase the stickman

Next rub out the stickman part of your drawing so you can see your rough sketch clearly.

This is my rough sketch (below). On the head I’ve just drawn 2 curved lines across his face and one down the middle. This helps me see roughly where to put my eyes and nose. Then I drew another small line across below that to show where his mouth will be. I had a go at drawing his hands at this stage but the fingers look a bit like banana fingers! That’s OK we’ll fix it later…

Step 4 – Carefully draw the outline a bit better while looking at your picture of a hero or heroine.

Now it’s time to make a more careful drawing. It’s a good idea to look at some pictures of superheroes so that you can see more details of their shape. Try to find one in a standing pose. Again draw quite lightly at first.

If you can’t find any, here are four I found on the internet – Spiderman and Thor from Marvel and Superman and Batman from DC…

(Image credit Marvel and DC respectively)

I looked at several reference pictures to draw my hero. I tried to draw the lines cleanly and to show the general shape of his muscles. I also began to make up an outfit for him and drew in his face and hair.

Step 5 – Ink the outline and then erase the rough sketch

The next job is to ink the careful drawing you just made using a black ink pen. Then leave it alone for a good ten minutes to make sure the ink is dry. Once it’s ready then you can erase your rough sketch. Here is my more careful drawing with the rough sketch removed…

Step 6 – Contour and Shadow Lines

Your next job is to add some contour and shadow lines to give your picture the feeling of being 3D. Contour lines are little light lines which show the viewer the shape of a 3D object in a normal flat drawing. Shadow lines are little lines added to show the areas of a picture which are a bit darker.

This stage takes a long time because you have to draw so many little lines so I usually listen to some TV or an audiobook while I do this bit.

Here’s the next stage drawn…

You can see the lines I drew more clearly in this close up. I imagined that the light was coming from in front of him and slightly above him. So the sides and underneath of each part of his body shape have shadow lines and contour lines…

I tried to use each line to show my viewer the shape of my hero.

Step 7 – Colour

After the contour and shadow lines are done the next stage is to colour your hero. I chose blue and yellow because they are my favourite colours…

For each shadow area I chose a darker version of the same colour I used for the rest of the shape. So the main colour of his suit is a bright blue, so I used a darker blue to colour in the shadows on his suit. His boots are yellow so I used a light brown colour for the shadow areas. This also helps the viewer to see the shape of your hero or heroine.

Step 8 – Shadow and Background

Your last job is to give your hero or heroine a shadow so they don’t look like they’re floating in the air! (Of course if your hero or heroine flies then you might not need to do this bit!). Then you might want to draw in background. I started out just giving my hero a shadow to ground him because I didn’t have time to draw a full background, but then I found an old digital sketch I’d done previously of a futuristic city skyline, so I put him into that picture. Here’s the finished hero with just a shadow…

And here he is in a futuristic city. I made him face the other way to fit into the background better and gave him a name “Captain Quark“. (Quarks are the most elemetary particles we know of in the universe. His superpower is to be able to manipulate matter to make and repair things.)

If you know anyone who would like to have a go at drawing this picture, I’ve made a free print out of the main stages I went though.

Click to go to the free download.

It should print out correctly onto A4 paper in portrait mode. It is licensed for Non Commercial Use under a Creative Commons License so you can use it, share it, make a paper aeroplane out of it! (It’s also free to use in schools.)

I hope you enjoy it! I would love to see any hero’s any of you have drawn using this basic plan!