fanart, Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper

[ratcreature]

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper
Media used: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint
Rating/warnings: G
Notes/comments: I did this for the prompt "Victorian steampunk AU" for the SGA fanart fest paintedspires. Admittedly mechanical pterodactyls aren't the most efficient way for a flying machine, Steampunk or otherwise, and not a very likely or even possible path technology would take from an SF standpoint, but this way was much cooler visually than merely changing the puddlejumpers with pipes or gauges or whatever. I mean, they more or less look like flying lunch boxes. Not really realistic technology, but this is Stargate after all, and I'm pretty sure John would think that mechanical, flying dinosaurs were cool.

The original is 30x40cm, so unfortunately I had to scan it in two parts, and you can see a slight line where I merged, because I fail at digital manipulation and didn't know how to make the two parts fit completely seamless.

Preview:



And because you can't see Sheppard that well in that size, here's a larger detail view:



If for some reason you want the whole image in a print resolution in its original size, I uploaded that as well, however at 300dpi and 30x40cm the file is over 4652x3500 pixel / 4mb: look at it in a really huge size in high resolution

Comments

[belovedsnail.livejournal.com]

oh wow, i wish i thought i would ever be this good with acrylics.

this is amazing. i love the gears and propellers and the hinged tail-rudder and John's very cool coat. (also, you are completely correct that mechanical dinosaur trumps 'flying lunchbox' every time. also, it must be ever more fun to talk to your aircraft when it actually has a face. i imagine that John probably pats lovingly at the pterosaur's metallic snout from time to time.)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, John would totally get attached to his aircraft. And I'm glad you like it, and that's a very kind comment about my acrylic technique, especially since this is only the fifth drawing I colored with them (my pet rats chewed through my tablet cable, and I'm too broke to get a new one...).

To me acrylic paint (used as glazes not as impasto or like whatever you do on actual true paintings on canvas) seems much more forgiving than watercolors and easier, because you can just paint color layers over each other, and they won't dissolve again, and you have a white for highlights and can easily be more or less opaque and also paint over things if it just went wrong (really I tend to think of acrylic glazes as "watercolors for dummies" *g*). Because I don't have any real clue about painting, I actually started out to use acrylic paint more or less like I'd use color layers in a computer program, and have only slightly modified that approach sometimes as I gain experience, but I still mostly just color like this: I have an inked drawing I want to color, then I pick a base color for something, then make that a thin glaze so I can paint it like water color and get shadings of the color by doing layers (for which the water works like the opaqueness setting in the computer) and paint with that several layers on the thing so that some areas are lighter, some darker, and for some stuff I use slight variations in color to make it livelier and less uniform, like skin, then I do shadows with a glaze, like a complimentary color, or sometimes a different darker color or even brown or black (there's some trial and error how they overlay I do on an extra sheet), and at the end I do some things with white, like metal highlights, and as a final step I redraw some of the ink lineart where it has become too covered.

[belovedsnail.livejournal.com]

your acrylics-painting-system is working beautifully, i think! and there's something that just works about a steampunk flying machine being coloured with real paints. (although i'm sorry about your tablet cord.)

i am so excited about this comment, because i'm just getting back into art-type-things, and this gives me a whole new way to think about using acrylics. (and i really have no clue about painting, the only acrylic paint i'd used until recently was tempera paint that came from giant plastic bottles that we used in my school art classes years ago.) so thanks for telling me about your colouring process. :)

also, i love your icon! enthusiasm is awesome.