I’ve had many people ask me: Are those covers really painted? Yes! All my covers for ORCS! have been lovingly rendered in Liquitex liquid acrylic. As acrylic brands go: this is not the fanciest paint on the market, but for my own needs it works perfectly, as I am building up areas of thin washes and thicker opacity.
But that’s a little down the line. First, let’s talk sketches!
I always start with a rough sketch or layout. Whether I do that layout digitally (as I did here) or traditionally (as I often do for my comic pages), I make sure that all of my art and text is roughly to scale. This takes a lot of pressure off of me at the drafting stage, because the composition is pretty much right where I want it and I can focus on making a good line drawing.
The digital version is analog inks with photoshop colors, like the pages in the comic.
One thing I do with my paintings that I don’t do as much with comic pages is define my tones in the sketch stage of the painting. Unless I am painting a comic page (a rarity), I am digitally coloring, which leaves a lot of room for messing up. Paint is slightly less forgiving and mistakes take longer to correct, so I am trying to go into a painting with as much worked out as I can.
For this painting I had the benefit of a digital version, which I created well before I started on the final art for the pages and paintings for the individual issues. This was used in all of the original promotion of the book and laid good groundwork for the painting as a color study I could reference.
It also allowed me to double- check the sizing of my characters against the layout of the type. This is something I do often with the pencils, but it was nice to have a color back-up.
For most paintings, my color study stage would be done traditionally in gouache, which allows me to mark the various color mixes I will be using for the painting (gouache and liquid acrylic have standard, corresponding hues, so a mix in gouache is almost identical to a mix in l. acrylic), but as this was the last painting I had done for the series, I was comfortable enough with painting the characters and the color scheme to mix by sight.
Now that all of that preliminary work is done, I can start to paint!
I paint on Arches natural white hot press watercolor paper (156lb) and use a very cheap 11 x 17 light table to transfer the drawing in colored pencil. I like to use colored pencil for the transfer because sometimes the pencil will mix a little with the first paint layers and black CP can make the paints look muddy. I try to choose a color that is just dark enough to see through a thin layer of paint, but not so dark I can’t paint over it with a thicker, opaque layer.
Don’t mind those wrinkles! Once the watercolor dries, they flatten out nicely.
I then go in with a thin, overall wash to tone the background and lay in rough shadows for reference. I do this stage in watercolor, and it’s almost always completely covered over. I was talking to a friend about under paintings: their usefulness versus the time they eat; and by the end we agreed that anything you need to get through a painting, even if it feels arbitrary, is probably a good step. I’m not sure that I need this step, but I need this step.
I’ve also been making a point to mount my paper on board (cardboard in this case, but more recently, I found a large, scrap piece of plastic board). Normally, I would tape down the paper on all sides straight to my drawing table, but because I had to bounce between projects while I was painting this, I mounted it instead, and found I liked working this way a little better. The industrial magnets hold it to my table (there is sheet metal under the cutting mat) and it allows me to turn a painting like I would turn a drawing as I ink it.
The background of this paining was mercifully graphic, which allowed me to play a bit with washy, pure color. I also put in a layer of turquoise shading on the characters. Again, much of this would be covered once I started to paint the characters proper, but It is necessary for me to get down so I could conceive the lighting.
What a mess! However, here I am starting to lay in the dark black areas and define those globular shapes of the astral plane. After painstakingly paining the negative space I went back in and cleaned up the edges, adding overlapping globs in more opaque color.
This is where the liquid acrylic outcompetes gouache. By the end of this painting, I will have put down so many thin layers that gouache would have become grainy and unwieldy, but the acrylic maintains a smooth texture throughout the painting. Yes, you have to paint fast, but years of watercolor and gouache sketching has made me a fairly quick painter.
This was a complete session for me (a few hours) and where I called it for the day. At this point, I only had to worry about the eleven characters. Which, believe me, is enough!
The background characters were the first I tackled. I wanted them to appear far off in the distance – almost like an apparition – so I didn’t want to over-render them or get too noodley with their details. This is something I find hard to do on the computer. Zooming in tends to warps my sense of space.
I rendered them in several layers of light and dark. You’ll notice not much of the background gradient serves as a mid-tone. I was concerned, after that first pass of lights, that they might become a little too transparent looking if I didn’t add in a mid-tone layer of greens that defined their forms better. (The photos make it appear like there is a warm, yellow wash in some images. There is not. Cameras are not always very accurate with paintings).
Mid painting: The details with a photo of my thumb for scale.
I painted all of my foreground characters with the same process that I painted Old Granny for the back. I put down an initial pass of flat color. There is a little rendering in this stage, but it is very subtle dimensionality. I will then put in a layer that pushes the highlights a bit more. But the layer that always pulls things together is the shadow layer. Once that layer is in, it is only a matter of cleaning edges and adding in small lighting details, like reflected light and subtle highlights or textures.
I am using extremely small brushes by that final stage (round 1 and 0), to the point that it often feels more like drawing than painting (which is probably why I like painting and rendering in this fashion. It’s familiar and not unlike brush inking by the last stages.)
I repeated this same process for the foreground characters (displayed below). After the first stage of flats, I will go in, character by character to paint each individual (though you will notice I tend to render around the group while I do that).
I wish I could tell you that there is some trick to this stage, but there really isn’t! It’s a gradual rendering – pulling out and pushing back – details until I have everything where I want it. The more preliminary work I do, the less time I spend on the rendering process, trying to find my colors and blends. (Though not practical for time sensitive work, sometimes it is fun to “find” a painting as you go.)
The very last pass is extremely subtle, and I’m not sure most people would even notice the thin layers of color I went in and added to the shadows, or the areas I warmed with pinks and reds in the background to help the painting look more homogenous. But I know they’re there, and I do think they make the difference.
Painting is a kind of return to my roots for me, as much of my college was spent wading through oils. Though I’ve always kept painting sketchbooks, it is only in the last few years that I’ve been able to find an applicable working method for my professional projects. But no painting is finished until it is scanned. Below is the color corrected scan, along with photographed details of the image.
Whatever your process for creating an image, I hope you found something useful in my painting process. As always, comments are appreciated.
