Author: Chad Frye

Welcome back to another fun-filled moment in the birthing process of Frankie. For those of you who have been following along through the past five and a half reports, you will be glad to know that this post will wrap up the painting portion of our program. Lucy, there’s a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, so let’s get started!

Back in Part 5, we left Frankie with his hands done, and a purple underpainting for the skin of his torso. As you can see in the first image below, all I did was paint a flat (as flat as watercolor will go) layer of green paint on his skin. It looks a bit dimensional, but that is only because the purple underpainting is doing all the hard work of creating the shadows. I also decided to paint a reddish-brown tone over the shirt with the idea that it’ll be easier to bring it back with highlights later than to do so with shadows later. Kind of the same principle as with the skin. The reddish-brown is more in line with the actual Mona Lisa’s coloring, too.

Next, skin highlight time! Using just two shades of yellow, I laid down the darker of the two tones in areas first. Sometimes, while it was still a little damp, I added in the lighter of the yellows on top so they could blend a little on the page. You kind of have to work fast at this, and paint with a dabbing motion. Otherwise, the green you already put down can mix into the yellows too much creating a muddy mess. Paint a little too hard and a little too wet, and you’ll lift the green off the painting altogether. I did paint some light tones along various edges, too (under the chin, the under rim of the nose, etc.) to create some depth and separation.

At the time of doing the face, I decided to take those same yellow colors and do the highlights of the right shirt sleeve. You can see  in some areas where I painted too wet and lifted the brown from underneath. That’s ok because I’ll be adding lighter highlights on top, and the colored pencil phase will be applied in here later, too.

That last phase worked rather nicely, so the yellow was added to the rest of Frankie’s shirt. Not only does it help define the shirt, but colorwise it compliments his skin. We must have our monster looking his best! A couple of other big additions now are the purple tone laid flat across his hair, and a really dark brown (almost black, but not quite) painted over the purple of his coat. It’s tough to tell in the scan, but I painted this tone a little lighter by the edges of his arms so that the underpainting of the purple shows through a bit, and it lets his arms have some subtle definition against the dark background.

It’s a little tough to see, but in the top right corner of the sky, I lightly penciled in with a white Prismacolor pencil the lightning streaking down towards the castle. This is just for placement at the moment, and will be fully realized shortly. Knowing that this backlight will exist, I wanted the right side (our right, not his) of Frankie to be aware of the presence of that light. So you can see there is some white that is being put on Frankie as a bit of a rim highlight. His head has it, as does his shoulder. On the other side of him are the beginnings of a similar highlight, but in yellow. Why? Because of the torches the angry mob below will have. This will be a much softer highlight, though. Torches don’t ignite the air quite like lightning.

The last major things here, too, are his dreamy eyes. I’ll mention more about them later in a close-up.

After the above was finished, little details like the lightning and the angry mob were finessed a bit. For the mob, I went in with a small brush and brown paint to punch up heads and shapes a bit. These folks will be left a little vague and out of focus to go with the rest of the background. I do want the torches to look bright, but really the background should be darker for that effect to look cooler. So we’ll make do. I hit the torch areas with a light airbrush spray of white for the glow. Then on top of that went the orange, and then yellow, then a harder white in the flames.

Also with the lightning, I hit the white pencil line with white paint from my airbrush for a glow. Then went in with a small brush and white gouache (an opaque water based paint that covers well) to paint the streak. Some areas I went over a few times to make really white which gave the lightning “hotter” spots. Hopefully it looks natural.

Jeepers, creepers! Where’d he get those peepers?! I wanted Frankie’s eyes to have a slightly bloodshot look to them. You know that’s always creepy. First a yellow ochre was painted in them. A red rim was added to the bottom, after which a light white was added on top, and as a rim under the red. Later, in the final stage, some white highlights will be added.

Also in this stage, you can see that there are paint flicks on Frankie’s skin. Using a toothbrush (NOT one I use in my mouth anymore, mind you), I spritzed his skin with yellow, dark green, and purple. This can be fun, but you have to be careful to not get carried away. And if you don’t want the flicks going everywhere else, you have to mask off the rest of your painting!

Below is a photo of my paint flick mask. Using a big sheet of tracing paper, I traced out the areas I wanted to expose. Then I put the tracing paper on a piece of cardboard and cut out the holes with my X-acto knife. I also used airbrush frisket to mask off the eyeballs and teeth. Taping the paper back down onto the painting, I can now spritz away without fear of ruining the rest of the piece. The extra texture of the spritz was only necessary for Frankie’s skin – not the rest of the scene.

Lastly, you can see below the addition of the hair (see how that purple was used for a highlight?), and some lighter highlights on portions of the shirt. Yessir, Frankie is starting to come together.

Next in Part 7, I’ll be showing you some of the finishing touches utilizing colored pencils!

So, now that the background is somewhat done, the moment I’ve been waiting for is here, and ding dong – the whole thing has become pretty intimidating! It’s time to tackle the figure. So much has gone into the whole piece that I don’t wanna screw it up!

Once again, I don’t wish to start with the white of the paper. So, some base coats are laid down: warm light brown for the skin, purple for the coat, and a yellow ochre for the shirt. Now, none of these colors will be the final, but they will help us get there. This step doesn’t take too long. I just laid them in there fast and loose.

For the next step, I want to employ a technique I learned from looking at the paintings of the great Jack Davis. Jack was one of the founding artists of MAD Magazine many years ago, but also did many terrific illustrations for many other clients. His paintings for the movie posters of It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World are among my favorites for their sheer hilarity and manic energy! He is even known for being the king of cartoony monsters himself. Ok, enough fawning – on to the technique! Jack will do a tonal underpainting for his figures, and then lay the colors over that. His underpainting is often just with the sepia color which gives his work a certain warmth. When he lays his final color on top, the shadows just look like a darker version of whatever color he painted over it. I’ll be doing this, too.

Now I’m kind of anxious to get moving on the skin, but at the same time a little cautious. Where could I try some ideas but not have them be in the spotlight? If I experimented on his face and messed it up a little, it could be noticeable. So, I chose to begin with that hand down in the shadows by laying in an underpainting color. First to go in was a darker brownish/ochre-ish tone which just looked too sickly and bland, so I threw in some purple. I tend to like purple tossed here and there in my paintings anyway.

The hand still looks a little sickly, but I know that I’m going to give him green skin as we all think of him anyway. And once highlights are added, he’ll come to life. For this I can’t wait, so the operation on this hand continued. I mixed up a nice green tone, and then two shades of yellow. The green is painted down flat, and then the yellows were used to bring back some highlights. Not quite done with the experiment, out came the colored pencils to assist with defining knuckles, light and shadow. It seemed to work. The hand is sufficiently creepy. However, I think for the rest of him, the underpainting will just be done with purple without the dark ochre shade.

Now that I know where I’m going with the monster, it’s time for an all out purple underpainting. I work it in all over his face, his other hand, and his shirt. The idea is to go a little dramatic with the tone because it has to show through the next layer of paint. It might not be quite dark enough, but if that’s the case, I’ll just accentuate areas with colored pencil on top of all the paint later on.

Normally when I do a piece like this, I’ll lay in all of one color at a time, but once the green went down on the other hand, it was just too exciting, so I painted  in the yellows, too. The colored pencil WILL wait until all the painting is done. It’s beginning to really come together at this point!

So, for now, here’s the whole painting at this stage of the game. The purple tones are in for the shirt and face. There will be no tones painted for the coat as that will be kept pretty dark with highlights here and there just like good ol’ Mona’s frock.

Next, Part 6 should finish up explaining the paint job on our dear friend Frankie.

In the last Frankenstein post, you read about the final drawing being applied to the paper. Naturally, the next step is the painting. In this case, it is to be a watercolor painting.

Watercolor is not necessarily a medium to use if you want to have absolute control over where the paint goes and how it dries. It tends to pool in areas on your paper, if you are working on a slight tilt it’ll run, and if it’s not quite dry, it’ll blend. It works differently if you paint onto dry paper than it does if you paint onto paper that has been watersoaked. If it dries, you can hit it with more water and work it some more. It’s kind of a living wild animal all it’s own.

And for those of you curious, I use Winsor & Newton watercolor paint with a variety of brush makes and sizes. What matters to me is that the bristles are soft, and the round brushes maintain a point. I also employ the use of my airbrush now and then.

When I do a piece like this, obviously the central interest of the composition is the character. He’s the reason for the painting, and he’s the subject you are most dying to paint right away. Bup – bup – bup! You must hold off on those urges, and do the background (BG) first. Why? A. Because color is relative, and B. the overlapping nature of painting comes into play.

Let’s deal with A: What is white? Your white shirt looks different inside than it does outside, right? Inside it could be gray, or slightly blueish. Outside?  Maybe a little green if you are standing in a field, maybe even more blue if the sky is blue. See, color is relative to the environment. Color reflects. The paper I start with is white. If I started on the character, I’d be picking tones that looked good in a very bright environment. I need to first make my environment the mood and tone it should be so that the character’s coloring looks correct in the scene. Since the Mona Lisa is my model, that means my BG will have warm tones (browns). So, I started by laying down a coat of light brown that I will build upon. I neglected to scan the piece with this stage by itself, but here’s a small section that survived when I did scan it.

I laid this brown down on the most distant parts of the BG, and I did it on wet paper. I “paint” water onto the area first to get the paper more malleable. If I don’t do this, the paint will dry pretty immediately which will cause unwanted streaks. A more even flow to the color is desired, so the paper is made wet. Then I added the brown. As you can see, I didn’t stay in the lines. The brown seeps into the character. That’s ok. Other darker colors will kinda cover that later on, plus, as written earlier, your coloring is affected by your environment. The brown will only help Frankie look like he’s really in the scene.

So then B: the overlapping nature of painting. If you work from back to front, you can paint broader and more efficiently. For instance, the next stage was to paint the sky. I can go nuts with the sky, painting it even in the areas where the mountains will be because they’ll cover that portion of the sky. If the mountains were done first, then when doing the sky, I would have to paint right up to the edge of the mountains. This would probably give me an undesirable visually distracting hard line all while taking too much time to paint.

So, on with it. The sky. Mona’s sky is a pretty normal cloudless brownish/yellow sky. If you know the story of Frankenstein, you know the sky HAS to be stormy. Let me tell you, my ordeal with the sky was a stormy process.

Again, I needed to work wet on wet so the colors can mix and swirl and be turbulent. I mixed some greenish gray colors, brownish gray, etc., and started dabbing in colors to try to get that cloudy, stormy, overcasty look. After finishing the sky, I stepped back and realized it was a complete mess. It resembled a mud puddle more than anything else. I was trying to make the horizon line lighter in color to suggest distance while making the top darker. It wasn’t happening. So, out came some fresh water to wet it down which was then blotted up with paper towels. The sky was back down to a grayish brown stained tone, which was fine, and then it was repainted all over again. Wouldn’t you know, once again the results were terrible. I tried airbrushing some areas, salt was thrown into wet areas (try it sometime and see what happens) – nothing worked. It was probably about this time that I was muttering under my breath and pacing the studio.

When you start a project like this, you have an image in your mind of what you want it to look like, yet you are working in a medium that has a mind of its own. At some point in the process, you have to abandon your perfect mental image, and see the unplanned beauty that is coming forth out of the paper.

I think I let it sit for an hour or so, then made another attempt. Whether real or imagined, I was becoming afraid that the stamina of the paper was going to be exhausted. The first colors were laid in. Not too bad. Threw in some others, got some darks in there, pulled out the airbrush to lay in some subtle smoothing, and as the paint was halfway dry, I hit parts with a squirt from a water bottle.

When the sky was dry, I even went back in to lighten certain areas by adding lighter paint, but also by painting with pure water and dabbing color back up. This is how I was able to form some of the swirling cloud shapes and the look of distant rain falling. When I sat back, it wasn’t what I had in my head, but it became something neat that I hadn’t expected. SUCCESS! Of course, it’s not quite done. If you recall from the rough sketch, a bolt of lightning will be in the sky, but that will wait until even the character is done.

So, the rest of the more distant BG came together when I laid in color for the farthest mountains, the little water area, the castle, more hills, the angry mob, and all that jazz. Everything from back to front.

Browns, reddish browns, greens and even purple thrown in here and there for good measure. Through all of this, the colors have been kept somewhat lighter and loose so that they are a little “out of focus”. All to help keep the BG from being the star of the show.

Now with Mona, you have that area in the foreground that is kept really dark. It’s as if she’s sitting in a chair and no light is exposing it. So that’s what Frankie must have as well. This time I laid down a much darker brown, because I want to keep the warm tones going, even in this dark “black” area. I’m not a big believer in solid black for areas you think are black. I may use a little of it here and there to make other colors be darker versions of themselves, but rarely am I using solid black. With a big flat bristled brush, I painted wet on wet again laying in that dark brown, then a reddish brown, then purple here and there, and then a much darker brown. When that dried, it was a little too streaky, so I took the same color and airbrushed it in to get a more even tone, though not quite eliminating the brush strokes. I still wanted a hint of them.

So, there you have it, the basic painting of the BG. Later, after the figure is painted, I’ll go in and finesse the BG some more with paint and colored pencils, but for now it is done. And now you probably know way more than you thought you cared to about my thinking process in using watercolor on the background!

Next in part 5 – beginning the character!