I’m not a big app user. There are so many little applications you can have on your portable hand-held computers (I use the iPod Touch variety) that are mostly distractions from living the life that surrounds you. That being said, I was intrigued by a relatively new app and decided to give it a try the other day. The app in question is Character Design Shuffle created by my pal Stephen Silver.
The idea behind the app is to give you the inspiration to create a random character design. The app has several parameters to suggest what type of physical character it is, gender, outfit, action, age, body type, height, etc. Each category rolls by and stops on some crazy combination that you can then go draw. Some of the suggestions are waaaay out there, so it can be a challenge AND be a lot of fun. Mostly it helps get your brain to think in a way that is different from what it is used to.
So, I gave the parameters a spin and it spit out panda, male, athlete, playing foosball, muscular, and intimidating. This is the result…
I might consider subscribing to ESPN if they had interspecies competitive foosball.
Another fun aspect of Silver’s app is that they have a Facebook group (CLICK HERE to see it) where no matter what your skill level, you are encouraged to share your efforts with other users. Pros and amateurs alike have been displaying their inspired creations. Some designs that have been posted will knock your socks off! It is fun to see how this little tool is inspiring some fun drawings.
So, no matter who you are, if you need a little inspiration, check it out and give it a try. Always keep drawing to improve or even develop your skills!
Even though it has been a few years since I worked on a Mickey Mouse project for Disney, I still get a kick out of drawing the gang now and then for friends. This little watercolor sketch was something I did a little bit ago for the first born son of a friend whose friendship began sixteen years ago when we worked side-by-side at Disney Feature Animation.
Thought you all might enjoy seeing it, too.
How a mouse, a dog and a duck ever became best friends is beyond me.
Yesterday started out like any other: wake up, get lunch put together, shower, get dressed, and take off for work. The trouble was in the “take off” part. There was no “up, up and away” to be had.
You see, I drive an old car. It has served me well as it served my grandmother well before me, and some dude before her. However, yesterday my ’95 Mercury Sable decided to require service of its own. The power would not work at all. So, a tow was required.
While waiting in my car for a tow truck to arrive, I pulled out a trusty thin blue Sharpie marker, and found an old piece of paper in my trunk and began to doodle randomly. There was no rhyme nor reason to the sketching – no frustrated mechanics or dilapidated vehicles. Just some good ol’ fashion creatures. Although if I were to analyze these drawings, I was probably experiencing the disposition of the giant turtle creature while the happy-go-lucky guy inside the jaws was the mechanic about to make some coin.
Waiting for a tow truck can bring out some weirdness – in a good way.
So, no matter what curve ball life throws at you, with a pen and paper, you can get through it okay. I can’t wait to see what my next jury duty will inspire!
So, today we come to the conclusion of the steps it took to create The Pic-a-nic on the Grass, a parody of Èdouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass from 1863. While the background is virtually finished, the characters and some of the foreground elements need to be painted.
The characters and foreground elements receive a bit of watercolor paint.
Color choices were once again fairly easy. Yogi, Boo Boo, the Ranger and Cindy Bear all have predetermined color palettes from their days in the cartoons. The clothing items on the picnic blanket are right out of Manet’s original painting. The basket, food, and checkered picnic blanket were my little doing while keeping in mind the cartoony nature of Yogi Bear’s Jellystone National Park world.
Like with many of the background elements, wet the blank areas with water first, let them sit a minute to allow the water to saturate the paper, then the paint should be applied on those wet areas. The result is a pretty smooth application of color with seldom random edging in the middle of the figures. You can really see in the image below how the transparent nature of watercolor paint allowed for the purple underpainting to show through creating the shading on the figures.
Cindy Bear and Boo Boo with their top layer of color applied with the purple underpainting showing through creating the shadows.
Originally I had thought to use a dark gray/black for the eyeballs and noses of the characters, but upon reaching this point in the work, it seemed best to just darken those areas with purple. My #2 brush was useful for those areas along with the mouth colors.
Do you see the highlights on the noses? During the first pass at painting the noses (which you can see in yesterday’s post), I had left the top areas paper white. In this later step, I painted some purple in lightly, then let it dry a bit. Once it was mostly dry, I went in with a wet brush and applied water, then tamped up the color lightly with paper towel. In essence, I removed some of the purple which helped give the nose highlights a gentle edge and still remain light purple. Sometimes painting is knowing when to remove paint.
So now that everything is painted, it is time to finish this up. This is where I leave painting behind for a bit and rely on drawing skills. For this image, the edges of the characters are going to be defined with colored pencils. Creating a dark line for the characters will help to define them as foreground elements, and it is a common cartooning convention. Once again, I do not use a black pencil, but I do resort to using a dark purple color called Black Grape (#PC996 in the fine line of Prismacolor pencils).
You can see the colored pencil line is pretty tight, with some sketchiness to help keep things a little loose.
You may notice in these close-ups that there are also some highlights. Those were painted in with some watered down white gouache paint after the dark outline was drawn first. An exception to that is the white on Yogi himself. In his case, I used a white colored pencil for some of his highlights in combination with white paint. The white pencil captured the texture of the paper better.
The tough part wasn’t creating the highlights, but was trying to keep the real Yogi and Ranger still while they modeled for me.
So, there you have it. That’s how you can create a fun watercolor painting in five easy steps! It is fun to see what looked like a little bit of a mess in Step 3 has now come together all ready for a gallery show. Now you pick a subject and give some of these techniques a try!
Here is the final 21×17 inch better-than-the-average-bear painting all ready for hanging!
FOR SALE
ORIGINAL 21X17″ WATERCOLOR PAINTING (WITH COLORED PENCIL ACCENTS) – $2,000.00
(FREE SHIPPING WITHIN THE UNITED STATES – ADDITIONAL FEES MAY APPLY FOR INTERNATIONAL)
Welcome to Step 4 of Build-A-Bear – watercolorly speaking, of course. Yesterday I shared with you the beginning step of applying the color to the background of The Pic-a-nic on the Grass. Since the background is not quite done, shall we continue along that line of thought?
Just as was done yesterday, the rest of the background needs to be fleshed out in shades of green and yellow. The various colors continue to be laid in wet on wet (shorthand for wet paint onto pre-soaked areas of the paper). I have a darker green for much of the foreground section of grass, and an even darker shade that will be dabbed in around the base of the characters to ground them to the — well, to the ground.
If a tree is painted in the woods, would a bear notice?
You may have noticed that the trees have also received a bit of paint. Maybe two shades of brown were used on the bark, and a little bit of light green. You really don’t need too many shades of a color because you can control the color’s intensity by how much water is in your brush before you paint. An excess of water makes the color more transparent. The trees further back were painted in lighter to help create that sense of distance. Regarding the cluster of trees on the left side, that one horizontal tree was painted in darker to make it seem like it is more in the shadows.
The large tree on the right I left without brown for now so you can see the green tones put on the bark. The addition of green on the bark helps blend the trees into the scene. There could be multiple lessons on how light affects color, but the shorthand explanation is that colors bounce around in light in real life. It is reflected color. If you stand next to a red car while wearing a light colored shirt, your shirt will look slightly red from the color bouncing off the car in daylight.
Here’s a closer look at that tree bark so you can have a better idea of how those colors work together to give the illusion of trees. I may have added more purple to the wet brown paint on the more foreground of the three.
Remember how I said in a previous Step that it is wise to paint from the back to the front? You would want to paint in those tree trunks before painting the leaves on the tree because the leaves need to be on top of the wood. It is far easier to paint individual leaves over the wood than it would have been to paint the wood in between all the leaves. No longer working wet on wet, using my trusty #12 Round brush, I began to dab in a few shades of green to build some volume to the leaves.
You can see the cluster of leaves on the foreground trees have more individual definition while the green bush below and further away is more generalized with color, and the farthest area has even less detail.
Obviously no longer dominant in the art, hints of that purple underpainting still peek through the greens keeping things a little light and airy. The darker greens are used in the foreground all to maintain a sense of depth. What helps is being able to see that light green peeking through the dark leaves creating a sense that the area behind those trees is getting some sunlight that is not present in the foreground. Once all the tree leaves are painted in, you can really see the composition coming together.
No, it’s not a family of polar bears enjoying a summer holiday. Yogi and friends will get the full treatment in Step 5.
I am really a character guy. I work as a character designer in the world of animation after all. So, when you look at the image above, mostly what is left are the characters. I like to think of it as saving the best for last – kind of like eating the icing after you’ve enjoyed the cake.
Come back TOMORROW for the final step in this series on how to create a watercolor painting!
Welcome to step 3 of building my traditional watercolor painting of Yogi Bear & Co., The Pic-A-Nic on the Grass. Previous stages in the process that we covered were the drawing/research stage, then the underpainting stage. Today we begin to add color.
If the under painting is the foundation, then today’s application of color is the framework of our construction. The goal is to lay in thin layers of color for atmosphere and to fill in the divots of the paper with color that more detailed painting would not do later on. When you paint, you should always start from the back of the scene to the front. There are several reasons why, most of which have to do with helping you create depth in your work. It helps to build on top of what was done before to create a more lush look by the time the whole painting is completed.
Since this is a parody of a Manet painting, the color palette is somewhat predetermined. Manet figured out the color scheme, so this is just an interpretation of it. I’m not making a direct copy. If I was doing that, then I would be painting in oils and there wouldn’t be a bunch of cartoon bears in the composition. So, when mixing colors, I’m trying to get to the essence of the antique work that has come before.
This is primarily a woodsy scene, requiring lots of green. I mixed about three different shades of green for the trees. Also in the mix are two shades of yellow, and one shade of blue which, oddly enough, is for the sky.
By the way, the painting needs to lie completely flat on a horizontal surface. If you paint with watercolors on a tilted surface, the paint will follow the laws of gravity and streak down your paper. Since we are not creating a rainy day scene, use a flat surface.
I know that I want these colors to blend and mix right on the paper, so to do that, I start applying plain ol’ water with a large brush. I try to apply it mostly to just the white areas because if I get the purple underpainting too wet, that will start to smear. The empty dry patches will be filled in as I apply paint to the wet paper and all will smooth out without smudging the under painting too much.
In this stage, the base colors begin to be added all swirly-whirly like onto paper pre-soaked with deliberately placed water.
So, with my large #12 brush, I started dabbing in paint onto the wet paper, and spreading it around to my satisfaction. You do need to keep an eye on it while it dries just so that you can control any pooling of paint where it was too wet. If a pool dries, you will get sharp edges of color in that spot that may be undesirable.
You can see in the image above how the purple underpainting shows through. It still has a purple-ish hue, but also takes on the colors of whatever is applied on top. Lots of young artists starting out immediately think that shadows should be painted in with black, but that is not true to life. Shadows are usually darker shades of the color they are shadowing. In art, it can be fun to make shadows a color like I did with purple. There are no blacks in this painting at all.
You can see in the close-up below how the colors blend in spots, and have edges in others. It will all come together later. You can also see some of my original pencil drawing under the paint. If you leave your pencil lines too dark, this will happen. In this case I knew that would happen, and even in the finished art you can still see some of my pencil lines. This was intentional. In this age of so much art being created digitally, I wanted this to completely have that handmade look.
You can see how the greens blend in with the yellows and blues which is the result of painting with wet paint onto wet paper. Since the purple was pre-painted and dried, the green only covers the purple, not blend in with it. If you work it too much, the purple would start to smear and look “muddy.”
So, come back tomorrow to see how the background was finished up!
Welcome to the second step in our discussion of creating my Yogi Bear parody of Èdouard Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass painting. Yesterday we covered drawing the composition and prepping the art for painting. Grab your smock because today it’s about to get a little bit messy.
I like Winsor & Newton watercolor paints. They have tasty colors that go down smooth. They also make waaaay too many colors. I only buy maybe 15 – 20 colors, then mix them to get what I want. Some artists like using paint right out of the tube, so they buy everything. Good for them. Better for the pockets of Mr. Winsor and Mr. Newton.
A selection of my Winsor & Newton paints. And yeah, I use a white gouache instead of white watercolor. That’s how I roll.
Many students want to know what kind of brushes you use. I like soft brushes that hold their liquids well. The brushes I often use MUST come to a sharp point when wet. A good art store will let you test this with some water. You dip the brush into the water, then tap it on the lip of the cup. If the bristles snap to a point, you have found a good brush. If the bristles are forked in any way, avoid that brush. Yours will fork in time with use. You don’t want them to start out that way.
Name brand brushes don’t really matter, though, so long as you like what a particular brush can do for you. I do have this one larger Grumbacher flat brush I have had for at least 20 years that I like for quickly swathing on water and color in large areas like skies. I used it on this painting for some general ambient colors in the green of the trees, and for the large tree bark on the right. Otherwise I used a nice Round #12 brush made by Princeton Art & Brush Co. for 90% of the painting. For some of the smaller detail I used a #2 Round by the same company.
My #2 (brush, that is), #12, and an old Grumbacher brush I’ve used for 20 years.
Ok, so when I started this painting, I wanted to do what is called an “underpainting” first. Underpaintings are when you paint down some color in areas where you want it to show through your final layers of paint at the end of the project. Since watercolor is a transparent medium, most of my underpainting will show through in some way.
The underpainting on this Yogi Bear piece needed to help the overall intended feeling of “fun”, so I chose a bright purple color for all of my shading. Then I began to paint a monochromatic image of various shades of purple that was going to help create a little depth for this very flat piece of artwork.
When I first tried this technique a few years ago, my tendency was to paint the purples too lightly, and most of them ended up getting completely covered which was a huge waste of time to have painted them to begin with. So now I paint them in a little more aggressively so that they can serve their purpose when the other colors are applied over them.
Sometimes you just have to view the world through purple colored glasses.
One tip about applying watercolor paint onto the very absorbent watercolor paper is to paint down a layer of water first, let it soak in a little, and while it is still wet, apply your paint. That way you can get colors on there with less chance of an edge starting to dry and causing weird lines to show up in the middle of your work.
Watercolor is kind of a living creature until it dries. It looks one way when you first lay down the paint, but as it dries, it starts to change. You can push it, pull it, wet it some more and it continues to change. It is your sculpture to play with until it dries the way you want it to, but know that it does still have a mind of its own.
Here’s a close-up of the purple wonder so you can see the nuances of the paint.
When your underpainting is all dry, you are ready for the next step of adding the rest of your colors. Come back tomorrow as we begin that step in the process!
Recently I created a traditional watercolor painting of Yogi Bear, his buddy Boo-Boo, his girl Cindy Bear, and the Ranger for inclusion in a Hanna-Barbera themed art show at Van Eaton Galleries in Sherman Oaks, CA. (Photos from the opening night reception are in yesterday’s post.) Van Eaton invited over 100 artists to participate in what is a spectacular display of creative interpretation of the Hanna-Barbera stable of characters. The show will be on display until April 20. (CLICK HERE for details if you would like to go see all the work!)
When I was first approached to contribute, I was slightly hesitant. You see, I grew up watching Looney Tunes cartoons, and even some Disney ones on the side, but the Hanna-Barbera shows rarely saw face time in our family room. So I didn’t have any childhood fondness from which to draw – literally.
I did, however, help my pal Dana Thompson paint a Yogi Bear children’s book back when I was a young illustrator. The book had been penciled by famed Hanna-Barbera designer Iwao Takamoto, and I remember how we enjoyed looking, with great admiration, over Iwao’s very precise and brilliant pencil lines. So, with fondness for that experience, Yogi Bear was destined to be my subject.
Penciled by veteran Hanna-Barbera designer Iwao Takamoto about eighteen years ago, Dana Thompson recruited me and fellow illustrator Julie Speer to help him paint this Yogi Bear children’s book on a tight deadline.
To make it interesting for me, my mind wandered into the realm of parody. Exactly one hundred fifty years ago in 1863, Èdouard Manet created his massive 105 by 85 inch oil painting titled The Bath which later became known as The Luncheon on the Grass. He had created his piece for a group artist show in Paris, but the jury rejected it. Its subject matter was deemed unfit for the tastes of the day, and they didn’t care much for his technique and seeming ignorace of perspective by having the figure in the background appear far too large to be natural. So, Manet entered it in the Salon des Refusès which was a show of rejected paintings put together to spite the big show. Many pieces from the rejected show went on to define the modern art of their age.
While I don’t anticipate any controversy with The Pic-a-nic on the Grass (my parody title of course), it seemed like a fun way to portray the Yogi Bear cast in that natural setting along with the picnic basket that was always the focus of Yogi’s energies.
So, as with any artistic process, it must begin with a drawing. These days I generally do my preliminary work on a Cintiq tablet (a fancy monitor that allows you to draw right on the screen with an electronic pen). I work in layers in Photoshop so that I can resize and redraw bits and pieces here and there to get my composition just right. In this case, the setting was already figured out for me since I was doing a parody of an existing piece of art. I don’t often do this, but I imported Manet’s painting into Photoshop, and literally traced his environment.
Then I drew, and redrew Yogi Bear, Boo-Boo, Yogi’s girl Cindy Bear, and the Ranger along with the picnic blanket containing elements from Yogi’s world and Manet’s painting.
You can see that my drawing closely follows the layout of Manet’s painting.
The next step was to get that digital drawing onto actual watercolor paper. After figuring out what I wanted the final size to be, I printed out the drawing in two pieces onto Strathmore Layout Bond paper, taped them together, then traced them down onto my watercolor paper using homemade graphite paper (same concept as the old time carbon copies one might have done in the days of typewriters).
On top is graphite paper made by rubbing a soft pencil lead on one side of tracing paper. The graphite side faces down onto the surface of the final watercolor paper, you place a drawing on top, then trace down with a pencil.
The watercolor paper I used was Strathmore’s rough textured Watercolor Block paper. The paper comes in a stiff stack that prevents the paper from curling up when you apply wet media to it. I actually prefer Arches brand because I feel I can have more control over the paint on Arches, but I still have some of this Strathmore in the studio and decided to use it for this piece.
Once the drawing is down on the paper, you can erase the graphite and redraw areas if you feel it is necessary. I then taped down the borders of the image area with white Artists’ Tape (low tack so it peels up easily later, but also helps give you a clean edge to your painting if so desired). It is now ready for paint!
Come back tomorrow to see the first steps in the painting process!
