Been a while...

Oh yes, it certainly has.  I've been playing with more cartoon and caricature methods of late, as well as doing some commisions, and I'm now in the process of updating my methods (again).

As described in previous posts, I usually colour my line work by underpainting in water colours, and then detailing with colour pencils.  I recently bought Jeff Miracola's acrylic painting DVD, and it made me rethink my current process.  Firstly, I've been using pigment markers or brushes to do my linework, but I've always been happier using my Zebra brush pen - but it's not waterproof.  After watching Jeff's videos on youtube, I thought I'd try using a fixing spray to seal the paper after I did my linework - and waddya know, it works!  I can use my Zebra brush pen, with all its abilities, and still colour the work with no ink bleeding - marvelous!

I then tried to do the underpainting using acrylic inks (FW Ink) which worked, and here's the result...

As you can see, it turned out...OK.  Not as good as I hoped actually, which I put down to the inks being far too strong, which meant I had to work much harder with them.  My next step was to try Acrylic paint - specifically Golden Fluid Acrylics - for the underpainting - here's a little "TinTin"esque character...

This is JUST the underpainting - no pencils involved.  You'll notice how rich it looks compared to the combined ink / pencil method above.  I reckon it will look even better once the pencil is applied.  Let's see...

Subtle - but it's there.  The pencils add a bit of textured shading (this is watercolor paper...).  Overall, the effect is quite nice.  There's a "depth" that's there that wasn't before, possibly because I "glazed" the underpainting, making the colours more striking.  The Pencil shading is good, although I wonder if I could do that with just paint (the before picture has had some shading performed with just the acrylic).  The next step is to try this on another caricature, and see how we go...

As an aside, my next piece will be on illustration / watercolour board.  I'm tempted to prime the board with Gesso (another little trick from Jeff) before I start, to make sure the board is properly sealed first, but as I have 3 boards, I might just have a go with just the fixing spray first.