Oh, well

Where Señor Salme draws a rooster, and reveals his extraordinary process

It turns out that all I needed to wind down a little and recover (at least for a while) from a long period which has been all work and no play was to spend a good couple of hours drawing rooster feathers. Suddenly the universe made sense again. For a while. Highly terapeutic.

And just to celebrate that it seems that this blog has actually some readers, this is going to be a how-to post.  No big deal because my process may be quite similar to what you, dear worthy reader, have seen elsewhere. But anyway.

At first I just wanted to draw a rooster. Roosters are cool. At some point later I had this idea of having it surrounded by hands. Hands are making this sort of shadow play in which they try to look like a rooster. It is suppoused to be slightly disturbing, and to suggest the notion of —ahem— estrangement, the impossibility of communication and things like that. I am a cultivated guy, you know. Trust me. Or then it’s just a rooster and a bunch of hands.

The original drawing is A4-sized, which is smaller that what I usually do. I used a Escoda Reserva No.1 brush and Lefranc & Bourgeois indian ink on plain paper (more talk about brushes and ink another day). I scanned it at 600 dpi and did the usual level adjustments. I didn’t apply a strict threshold to the image; this means that black won’t be flat black and the watery texture of ink is preserved at some extent. The scanned drawing looked like this:

Next, I took the drawing to the light table* and laid a couple of sheets of paper over it. There I did some loose coloring using markers. I got this:

The obvious reason for using two sheets of paper is that marker ink permeates too easily through regular paper, and I did not want to spoil the original drawing. Lately I have tried two different marker models: Letraset Promarker and Copic Ciao. Both are similar, but Promarkers have a unique capacity to blend strokes seamlessly (no more ugly streaking). On the other side, Copic markers have a nice brush nib instead of Promarkers’ not-so-cool chisel nib. I’ve found that using markers to establish the main color layer is better (and actually takes no longer) than doing the same color setup directly in Photoshop: you get a more natural, rough feel and restrain yourself from overdoing things. Plus, you don’t end up scanning separate textures just to add a bit of “analog” look, which always feels a bit like cheating.

So I scanned the colors and added the resulting image as a new multiply layer in photoshop. At this point colors looked too muted in the screen, so I adjusted levels until I got something vaguely close to what was in the paper. I also used the clone tool to fill some small areas that shouldn’t be blank (note the bottom left corner, for example).

As you can see, I tried to keep things loose and left almost everything as it were, so all this inaccuracies and small happy accidents were showing:

      
That darker area in one of the hands, for example, was not intentional. But it adds nicely to the shape, so I let it there.

From now on, almost everything is straightforward Photoshop work. In order to create some depth I added a new layer with different color tones for every hand. The idea was to use blueish tones for those hands behind the main figure (the farther, the bluer), and redish for those in front of it. Does it makes any sense to you? Oh, well, I think it works in the end.

As this is intended just to be a subtle effect, I set the layer to multiply and transparency to 10%.

Next… shadows. I usually do a single layer of shadows with a single gray tone, and that’s what you can see here. Sometimes I’d ink shadows on paper and then scan that, but for this one I painted then directly using the wacom.

Almost finished. I did a few brush scribbles and splashes and used them as background; I added a few (really few) highlights and laid a uniform pale yellow layer, which I think adds character to the final image, whatever that means. And this is the final result:

So that’s it. Most likely I will hate it a few minutes from now, but I still think it’s nice. Bear with me and enjoy your day (just a suggestion).

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*Light table I said? Well, I do not have a real light table (that’s way beyond my budget), just a custom setup with a traslucent IKEA table top, adjustable trestle and clamp lamp. It does the trick and I’m using it all the time. Yes I know, IKEA warns you that glass table top plus trestle is a no-no, but it’s quite stable and nobody’s been hurt at home so far.