Foot planting is hard. Just ask animation coders

So, erm... this turned out waaaay more creepy than intended. Maybe I need to go up in scale

Due to layering and curing times this is taking ages. But here's a small update, poor Squirt is starting to drown. Please admire the elaborate and highly professional setup to keep things oriented vertically while the resin sets :)

Chemical fumes ahoy! The idea is to sprinkle the pink spheres and heart around the Squirt floating in "air"

Playing with Fimo. Will see about casting it in resin in that tiny bottle. A few cracks unfortunately, have to work on how to do gradients well!

Painted the frame. Color scheme turned out a bit minecraftey.

Darkened and textured some more, I'm calling it done. It's not as great as I'd like it to be, but I'm out of ideas for how to make it work better. I also gesso'd the rest of the plate and will paint that with acrylics tomorrow to create a clean frame

Darkening...

Started again on an older WIP (first poc is from last June!) based on the game Fly'N. Need to finish it! It's a bunch of wood things glued on a plate, covered in an ungodly amount of watercolour ground, with some fabric trimming thingie to add texture. It took the watercolours surprisingly well!

Overall I need to darken it a LOT, which is proving tricky on this surface.

Today I:
- removed the piece from the stretcher
- trimmed it (a bit too much it turns out)
- scanned it (took three tries. It was bent and hence blurry, then there was too much dust on the glass)
- scaled it in GIMP
- used the clone tool to get back to the proper aspect ratio
- switched to the PC and Photoshop to switch to CYMK because Gimp doesn't support it.......
- and sent the whole thing to the Bomber's Notebook zine!

Attached is the final CYMK file. We'll see if I make it in, that would be really nice :)

Finally, it'a finished. Full process with number of sessions:

- rough, small sketch (1)

- clean sketch to full size (2)

- digitally cleaning the sketch (4)

- copy to watercolour paper using the light table, and drench and stretch the paper (1)

- painting with watercolours (4)

Took a long time but I'm super happy with it. Now I'll leave it to dry for a day or two, get it off the stretcher, trim and scan it :)

Phew, it's running long. But it's really coming together now :)

Frogs and ink, ink and frogs

Paint at last! The idea is for each frog's surroundings to reflect where you find it in the game :)

Transfer on the light table, and hammer-the-stretcher-rods-in-at-ungodly-hours: done! Tomorrow is paint, weeee :D

Note on the light table: make your own, it's much cheaper. I got that one from my dad who made it years ago but hasn't used it in ages

And DONE. I am not doing this the same way ever again. As you can see from the comparison, it was well worth it though. Tomorrow: print and transfer on watercolour paper!

Was hoping to finish today but it is, of course, taking even longer than expected. Cheers to coders' time estimates.

Still cleaning the sketch. Taking ages, but doubling as some very nice pen tablet practice. I'm getting much more comfortable tracing lines and being precise.

Scanned the sketch and started on the cleanup. This is taking FRIKKIN AGES, so lessons learned: try to learn to sketch digitally, or at least to have cleaner sketches before scanning. I also realized how much I rely on my lines being messy for my sketches to look okay: I need to address that and work more on line quality.

Added the frogs and the Don Gero mask in the middle., and cleaned up the lines a bit Next: scanning, cleaning, printing, transfering, painting. Phew!

Onto the clean sketch! This time I'm trying to do it to scale to transfer onto the watercolour paper instead of re-drawing it. We'll see how it goes

There's a Majora's mask zine taking shape out there (http://majorasmaskzine.tumblr.com/post/10495056919...) so I wanted to draw something from the game. Since I never got around to finishing it, finding what to draw took a while. I settled on the frog choir. We'll see how it turns out!

Any feedback on the composition super-welcome. I intend to make a watercolour out of this, again.

Polished up the beast and made the background. The salt in the bottom leftdidn't do what I expected it to do (expected circles), but it worked out!

Started painting! Needs more work and background still.

Preparatory sketch for a Squirt (Bastion) painting!