Oh, well

Where Señor Salme gets his hands dirty, and a drawing is produced

Time for another process post, this time regarding one of the pieces I’ve done for Nucleus Gallery. This one:

The idea for this drawing was pretty straightforward, as you can see, and involved a skull and something in between a comic-book ballon and an eye —the sort of eye that you can see in greek pottery, at least. Kind of my usual blending of references.

As this was a piece for the Power In Number project, it had to be 5” x 7”, and it had to be “original art”, that is, Photoshop postprocessing was not an option. That said, I didn’t had the intention of trying a more “paintery” style —I still wanted the drawing to look as close as possible to my usual, comic-book style stuff. It’s not that I had the strong commitment to remain true to myself, it’s just that I would have no idea of how to do things differently.

So. In the end, it turned out to be kind of the same process that I use to follow when working with Photoshop… just backwards (and messy). Let’s see.

Before I forget to mention: this illustration was done on Windsor & Newton, 250 gr. bristol board. 

A. Sketch

The original sketch got completely spoiled during the process and I wasn’t smart enough to take a picture of it before covering it with different amounts of ink and, well, stuff; so you’ll forgive me if I do not show it here. But an initial ink sketch existed, trust me, and I traced over it all the time.

B. Color layers

I had planned to use just two colors for this drawing: a sort of creamy yellow and greyish green, both of which you can see below. Colors look way more saturated when seen in the bottle; but I was going to apply them quite lightly. I had seen these colors used in an old polish poster and I wanted to use a similar combination.   

I mixed the colors using acrylic liquid inks. Some of these inks are opaque, and the result was opaque indeed, so it was not possible to apply the ink after doing the linework, or else the linework would have been completely vanished. Now, the best way I’ve found to get a uniform layer of color is to use the airbrush. Yes, an airbrush: they do still exist. Remember that lavishly rendered illustrations from the eighties? Well, we’re not going so far this time. I applied a uniform layer of yellow (see? I’m talking of layers all the time, as if I were using photoshop) all along the paper. I only saved a small white section for the eye spot, using masking liquid.

Then goes green. I took the drawing to the light table and traced over the original (now lost, remember) sketch, using a mechanical pencil to outline the main areas, as you can see in the previous image. Then I used adhesive mask film to cover those sections which needed to remain yellow. I also splattered some masking fluid here and there using an old, worn-out brush, in order to get the effect you’ve seen in the finished drawing.

Needless to say, be careful with your brushes when doing this, as masking fluid solidifies pretty quickly. And of course never ever use your luxury, kolinsky sable brush for this purpose. You’re warned.

So I applied the green ink using the airbrush. Note that I said before that inks were opaque, and that’s why I was able apply green over yellow without getting too much blending.

And this was the result, after taking away all the masking stuff:

C. Inking

Back to the light table, I did the inking with my trusty Escoda brush (yes, now it’s allowed to used that sable brush we were talking about) and indian ink. Here you can see how it ended. Sorry for the inconvenient light focus.

D. Shadow layer

To finish the drawing, I added some shadows using another old-school tool: screentone. I would be inmediatly transported to heaven if I could find a place near here where I could buy nice, affordable screentone sheets. But I’m afraid that won’t happen. I only have a few sheets left, which I bought online from Letraset’s site some time ago; but shipping costs are way too expensive and I can’t do that on a regular basis without feeling guilty. So if you know of an online site where these things are sold with decent shipping costs, please email me at once. You can be sure that I would burst into tears with gratefulness.

Like inking, applying screentone is a zen activity. Don’t look at me like that, it is. You must switch yourself to yoga mode, breath rhythmically and such, and take your time. Oh, and when you’re done, remember to cover your x-acto blade with a stylish wine cork to prevent nasty accidents.

You may understand why I said at the beginning that this process was similar to what I do in Photoshop, just backwards. Usually inking would be the first step, then colors and last shadows. But here we go in reverse order. In this particular drawing, shadows went actually in the last place, sure, but that’s only because they were done with screentone. For this other drawing, I did a first layer of shadows with gray marker, then added color, and finally I did the inking.

Which was interesting for some particular reason I have now completely forgotten.