Sunday, February 26, 2012

Update

Another WIP shot from Glen and Laurel's gouache class. Slowly starting to look like actual humans. I still need to finish blocking in the background character. The fun part will be painstakingly getting the spotlight to blur with actual tiles of paint.

4 comments:

bjwno said...

that's really cool, man! love the contrast between the foreground and background color.

Arthur Loftis said...

hey thanks man! i hope you've been doing well since class ended

Brenno said...

Hey Arthur,

These gouache studies (this one and the one a few posts below) look great. You've got a follower!

Could you say a bit more about this "tiling" process? Does that mean you are not allowed to soften the edge by blending? Do you pre-mix the values that will turn the form on your pallette and apply them, tile by tile, side by side? And to do so does the paint have to be thoroughly dry? (I find it hard coordinating the kind of edge I want with the degree of wetness the paint must be on....)

Arthur Loftis said...

Oh hey! Yeah, that's exactly what tiling is. You're basically trying to do as little blending on the actual painting surface as possible until the end. The great thing about gouache is that you can always add a little water to your brush and reactivate dried areas, letting you blend two adjacent colors even after they've dried. In class, I started off by using a spare piece of illustration board to match the values of my paint to the values in my reference photo. You can block in the whole painting that way with individual tiles of color, and then work back into it by eyeballing values and fixing shapes with smaller tiles. At the very end I started softening edges with a wet brush. Ideally, you're designing all those brushstrokes along the way. Anyway, sorry for the late reply. I forgot to set up my blog to email me when I get comments.