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Prometheus Spawning Grounds - version 7, beta
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Acrylic Borg painting56 modemers might have to wait a while for all the images to load. The text is taken from my post at a forum and is thus a bit fragmetated and sporadic.Oct 9, 2003 I decided to paint something with acrylics for a change, but the paint jars have probably dried. I did a sloppy ink however. There's no point in wasting time on lines you gonna paint over more or less. I think my inking style has become 'marvel-ized' though, with thicker and more cutesy lines (and design). I used a 0.3 pen seen on the pic and a fat felt tip pen for the larger black areas. My earlier inks were made with a 0.1 pen, and since it's so thin you can't really vary the linewidth much with it. You can squeze in a lot of texture and stuff though. The relatively clean style I have now doesn't allow that. I feel I can't really control where my inking style is heading. I might document further progress. As for now, here's a digicam snapshot. Photo ...as you can see, it's the usual backgroundless pinup... sigh. I'm pretty happy with the arms though. He has a claw thing and a laser...uh, glove/fist. Pow pow. If I paint it I'm gonna make a dark base of thinned acrylics and then add darker and brighter spots from there. If I make the base too dark I can't see the lines, so I have to add the extra dark spots individually. Thinned down black acrylic works a bit like multiply so I only have to go over the same area twice with the base color brush. Rendering black is hard, the only lighter spots are usually (cold) speculars. I'd be making those with more opaque paint. Some green fill light might work with the borg theme. Luckily my colors were not all dry yet so I decided to have a go at it. Here's the setup. I also used a W&N Titanium white jar. The brushes are:
Photo Base colors. Fingers and brush + watered down black. I don't worry about the edges or paper wobbling. As you can see the line art quality is already irelevant. People often think I'm ruining the piece when I do the base color, but it's necessary to add it cuz painting on white detail by detail is not a good approach. The ink is just there to so I know where the details should go. Photo Added splatter and started some rendering with various hues. The brush has a much lower resolution than the ink pen, so when using this technique it's pointless to spend time on the line art quality. I try to work with a big brush (seen on the pic) so I don't get caught up with lesser details. The major shapes should be correct first. I don't know how well I did with this piece though. It's hard to be brave with acrylics and there's no undo! Photo Photo Rendering. I used some pencils but not much since I they don't work well with acrylics. I need those PrismaColor ones. Photo Finished. Head is wonky. BG and pose is dull. Lighting type the usual. It's hard to paint with acrylics cuz their value change when they dry (10% or so). They also go grey as the brush and palette gets polluted, plus, the amount of colors you have is limited. That's due to lazyness though, I could probably spend time cleaning the brush properly and put more colors on the palette, but then it would take ages to paint and I'm a lazy git. I try to use saturated colors to compensate for the 'greying'. Woot woot? A grey BG??? Yeah, it's not the usual white BG cuz I supected that the white would kill the darker values of the figure. Photo I used the colors on the palette to make the different hues, like the rust and blue/cyan. My blue color had dried so I had to use an old Humbrol darker cyan I had (5039). For the rust part I used 'Blazing orange' (citadel) and for the greens is Bilious green (also Citadel). The white is Winsor Newton Titanium white, a squeezy jar tube thing, 250ml. It costed me around $18. The citadel and humbrol colors are 12ml and close to $2 each. My fav color is probably Bestial Brown (Citadel), but I didn't use it much for this piece. Snot green (Citadel) is pretty useful too. Humbrol 5060 is a good red. I can't keep all the colors on the palette because they dry up, so mostly I only have access to 70% of the colors. I decided to make some parts dominant blue and some dominant rust so the different parts of the borg looked ...different. Other than that it's pretty random where I added the hues. I tried to make the blues looks like speculars though. By keeping black and white blobs on the palette I could control the saturation and value of the colors somewhat. Photo Sometimes I clean up and edit digitally, but this one is pure natural media so far, except for the curve and slight sharpen in Photoshop. The original is a tad more grey. Some varnish might amp up the contrast though. As the 'painting blindness' is going away I start seeing stuff to fix. I'm not sure I will touch it more though, as it's a rather pointless pinup anyways. I just wanted to play with the acrylics for the first time in a while. The acrylic paint is Humbrol Fantasy or Citadel colors. They are probably not the best colors out there, but it's better than nothing. Oils are the best for getting good colors I think. I hate oils tho as they are a mess to work with and don't dry. I have a couple of tube colors too but they are too slimy and transparent. I think they are meant to be used thick. I paint really thin and the figure paints are meant to be used like that. I know I took the easy way out with the flat background, AGAIN. Sigh, some day I will need to start doing proper ones. You can see the value change of the BG behind the cables of the rightmost arm. The grey inside was painted with the same value as the dry outside. When it dried it made the inside look darker so the silhuette holes doesn't really work. Do more? I get a terrible neck-ache from doing this piece, because how I lean over the 'canvas'. The painting process took me about... four hours according to the digicam date but it felt like longer.
Copyright notice: Niklas Jansson, 2007. Bla bla bla. Yadda yadda yadda.
Contact: email rebus (Hint: only one is correct, and it's Diglett, cuz Diglett is like... awesome!) |
