Unicorn Drawing

The next step after bringing my Unicorn thumbnail where I wanted it to be was to turn it into a finished drawing. I planned to make the painting 18 inches by 24 but a smaller drawing often works for me so it would be proportional at 9 inches by 12. Working full size or even larger can work well too especially for drawing action, motion or just anything that needs to be loose and flowing. The large space lets you move and use your whole arm to sketch broad strokes. But I planned to get in and really plan the details of my piece working with pencil. First step, stick that thumbnail in my old school Art-O-Graph. 

Any photo, drawing or tracing is just mounted inside the hinged door with tape. Close the door, turn down the lights and turn it on. The drawing is projected onto the drawing table where I can lay down any paper I want and trace my own image at any new size. I can also unmount the Art-O-Graph and shine the image on the wall which can create a bigger blow-up than any photocopier will ever do. It's finicky, awkward and sometimes very frustrating if I bump the machine and throw off your drawing when it's half traced but for my purposes here it's a very quick and easy way to turn my little thumbnail into a full size drawing. When tracing it off it's best to forsake detail and just sketch in the major outlines. I'm not drawing right now, just laying down the framework. I take the paper I'm working on, rule out the border at the correct size the put it under the projection and adjust until it fits (I plan ahead and make the thumbnail roughly the right proportions.) This stage gives me an opportunity to tilt the paper and change the angle of the drawing. I can also crop in tightly or leave room around the edge for more background.

Can this all be done with a scanner, bringing your drawing into Photoshop? Of course and once it's there you have a lot of tools at your disposal that aren't possible here. But this is an example of doing everything the old school method and in a lot of ways it's not harder or less efficient just different.

Now I have a framework drawing that hopefully captures all the proportions I planned so carefully in the thumbnail stage. But there is still room to move elements around in relation to each other and adjust the layout. I work on tracing paper so I can trace off portions of the drawing then put them underneath.

They show through the existing drawing and I can tilt and move them around trying out different positions for the major elements. There is nothing worse than carefully rendering your subject then stepping back to see it's an inch away from where it should be. No problem, I trace it and move it and, at the same time, tilt it to the left or right or flip it backwards and see if there's a better angle for it in relation to the rest of the picture. This is all more stuff that is very easy in Photoshop and digital artists are taking advantage of the ease with which they can make these changes.Working on tracing paper I make sure I don't stick with a bad drawing just because it's "there".

It does take a lot of drawing, erasing and shifting but it's all time well spent building the right layout. Then it's time to get out my reference materials and tighten up details and lay in shading secure in the knowledge that it's the best drawing I can make it this time.

Unicorn Ideas

I have joined my friends at Running With Paintbrushes and the first assignment I joined in on was Unicorns. We love children's illustration, mythology, fable and fantasy and wanted to tackle something that could be cheesy but could be a lot more. These are sketchbook pages of the earliest stages, that point right after you say "yeah unicorns could be really cool" and then try to prove it - on paper. 

Everything is rough at this point and nothing is finished off. The goal is to blast though a lot of ideas and avoid getting hung up on a bad one (half motorcycle/half unicorn, maybe not). Some early ideas might be a good beginning but you just want to go another way. This is also a great time to go ahead and sketch those things that you know are a ripoff of someone else's idea - put them on paper and get them out of your system.

Some ideas start to feel right or at least worth elaborating on. Sometimes it's as simple as giving yourself a whole page to spread out and fiddle with a little more detail. I can get nervous at this point and wonder if I'm wasting time on a dead end. It helps to clear your mind and just keep sketching and letting things take form. This sketch above felt like it had possibilities but something made me move on.

I was sure I wanted a female figure in the piece and an idea was forming about contrast between a large unicorn and slender girl. How could they interact without one figure overpowering the other?

It can be helpful to square things up and actually look at how things are laid out on your canvas. I wanted to make this piece vertical and needed to see how the subjects fit in that space. Maybe I could use the bare back rider. A completely new idea popped up from trying to fill that vertical space. It wasn't quite right but I liked the unicorn viewed from the front.

 

Which led to this front view. It felt right that the unicorn was large but also delicate somehow in position. I went back to the idea of the girl in front and made it work with her head tucked under his cheek and her foot resting on his hoof (drawing on tracing paper over the unicorn sketch helped me move the girl around and find the best position for her). The vantage is looking down on them slightly and that helped me place the horizon line and rough in a background. When you start to like an idea you want to elaborate on it. Now it was easy to give her a sword, lay in trees and branches and grass and to find a little temple in the water behind.

I now felt like I had a sketch. The drawing isn't even started at his point but I have a framework that I can elaborate on and elements that I can start finding reference for. There is always room for more sketching, ten pages may have brought me farther. Sketching very large on big sheets of newsprint can open up layout ideas. They say a painting is never finished just abandoned. In fact it's a whole process of building up and abandoning, a garden of forking paths.

Running with paintbrushes.

I am now part of the "Running with Paintbrushes" blog where five illustrators give themselves challenging assignments and useful critiques. Thanks Becca, Scott, Lis and Owen for inspiration and input!

http://runningwithpaintbrushes.blogspot.com/

Wizards of the Coast

Here is my piece for the Wizards of the Coast "Agents of Artifice" contest. It's my first digital piece. It earned an Honorable Mention. See the details on the Wizards page here ...

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/other/030209b

Color Wheel Masks

I was excited to find James Gurney's blog which is an amazing resource for him to share with the world. I was surprised to see his entry on color wheel masking. I made my masks a few years ago and find them really useful. Gurney's masks and initial color wheels go way beyond mine and I plan to emulate and learn from his.

First my color wheels which include an elementary school Grumbacher Color Compass, my own painted wheel (I'll be making a Gurney style one with a middle value neutral instead of dark/black at the center now), A Quiller Wheel (copyright S. Quiller) which shows actual tube colors at their "correct" position on the wheel, and my own copy of that using my own actual tube colors.

The masks are just expressions of standard color schemes and help me see the range of colors involved. Seen here are the masks for ... a complimentary color scheme, a sort of split complimentary, a slice that reveals analogous schemes, and a triadic scheme. All of them can rotate and show infinite variations.


Here is the piece left over from making the analogous scheme mask. It's useful for showing an "everything but" scheme. In this example yellow is mostly eliminated leaving a selection of colors that contains a complete complimentary and a wide slice of the wheel but are still broadly unified.



Here are the same masks on top of my copy of the Quiller Wheel. Never hesitate to mix colors your own way but for time's sake this method helps identify specific sets of tube colors you might use in a scheme.







At the same time I made the masks I made these small examples of the main analogous schemes, the split complimentaries (with the little "rabbit ear" shapes), the main triadic schemes, and even the four way schemes. It's great to have examples of these things right in front of you in actual paint from your own tubes.

Wingmen

Here's my latest portfolio piece. 18"x24" in oils.

My New Blog

I'll be using this space to show you new things from the old drawing table.