fanart process: Methos with a mutant baby

[ratcreature]

I'm not sure whether anyone is interested, seeing how the art itself got very little reaction (only two comments and one kudo so far *sulk*), but since I took the pictures of the in-between stages, I might as well post them.


I started with googling for references of people carrying babies in slings, like this one


also pictures of Methos, though seriously, considering how popular the character is there is a real lack of high resolution images of him.

I also took a bunch of photos of myself holding my hands and arms in particular positions, which included wearing a sticker onto which I had drawn the Watcher tattoo, trying to figure out how a sweater looks scrunched up and such. Because all the different references I used for this, that were different sizes, resolutions and such, I used a grid method to combine them and still have the relative sizes and proportions right. Eventually that resulted in this preliminary pencil sketch:



I then tried to do a digital color study with that to figure out the color mood, but I sucked at it, and it came out a mess, so I just decided to try for some color harmony by picking a palette heavy on earth tones, i.e. yellow ocre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and then ultramarine, titanium white and just a little cadmium red.

Then I transfered the initial sketch to the expensive paper with my homemade lightbox, and started with a wash of yellow ocre so the paper won't be so white.



I then started with the clothes leaving skin for later because I have always such a hard time figuring out what color skin needs to appear to look okay, so usually I want all the other color first. I took pictures somewhat irregularly while painting.

























You can see that I moved the mouth a little bit upwards as a late correction because it just looked odd once I had begun painting it.

Comments

[giglet]

Eee! I have been (off and on) reading Unalienable, but I didn't know that a picture existed! Her little gills! This is delightful! Thank you!

Also, I'm seriously impressed with your process!

[ratcreature]

I'm glad you like it!

I never quite know what my process will be like, sometimes I build the color up in washes and sometimes I start more opaque right away like here. I'm still feeling my way with acrylics, probably because I don't paint that often. So it's good to document for myself as well, so I'll remember what I did with which image.

[goss]

I love seeing how a work comes together (it's like *magic*. heh), so thanks for posting these. :D

[ratcreature]

I'm happy to hear it's interesting to you. :)

I like seeing the steps also, though I think the magic feeling only appears because you don't really see how long everything takes and how tedious it is with just the snapshots, so it's the time compression aspect that is the magical thing about process posts. (It's even more obvious when people post time compressed videos or screencasts showing everything in fast forward, that never fails to impress me, whereas often with for example real time livecasts I'm interested a little while and then bored unless the artist explicitly makes it a lecture.)

[marycontrary]

Nice picture. The posing reminds me of a madonna and child, though I suppose there's a bit of that in any picture with a baby. They look very good, very loving.

[ratcreature]

Thank you.

[talitha78.livejournal.com]

This is fabulous!! I love her little face. Thanks for showing the behind-the-scenes stuff. All those different layers...

[ratcreature]

Thank you, I'm glad you like it! I was worried the baby wasn't looking quite ugly enough (it is surprisingly difficult to draw an ugly baby).

And yeah, painting always takes me a long time with building up the colors slowly.

[droolfangrrl.livejournal.com]

baby monkfish aren't that pretty, http://conservationreport.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/monkfish.jpg

[ratcreature]

I meant vaguely human looking babies. She still needed to have the large human baby head.