Well, not literally alive, but it IS done! The Frankenlisa illustration has reached it’s conclusion, and it’s time for the grand unveiling.
First, I thought it would be good to repost the original daVinci painting that inspired it all. It certainly has inspired many variations over the years. I just thought it would be the perfect setting for a portrait of the monster. Mona’s background is naturally creepy, so adding a creepy castle and an angry mob along the path was a pretty organic decision. And the idea of the monster sitting there calmly for his portrait during all that chaos brought a smirk to my face not entirely unlike Mona’s.
Painted in oil, da Vinci’s well known masterpiece of the Mona Lisa.
Painted in watercolor (with colored pencil accents), Frye’s Frankenlisa.
I hope you enjoyed the journey with me. It was fun to force myself to actually document my process. I never quite gave it any analytical thought before. And I’ve got ideas swirling in my head already for companion paintings of the Mummy and Dracula. We’ll see if I get to those. There are a number of personal projects on my to-do list. Picking and choosing what to do in between actual real jobs is the challenge.
If you just joined my blog with this post, I invite you to go back and follow all the steps in the creation of this piece. To make it easy for you, links to each step are below. Thanks for dropping by!
Well, we are nearing the end of the Frankenstein saga. This will mark the last of the autopsy-like dissection of the process leading to the creation of my monster. All the painting has been done, and now for the finishing step of using colored pencils.
My tools of choice happen to be pretty common in the world of professional art supplies. I use the Berol Prismacolor brand of colored pencils. They are a waxy pencil – kind of a sophisticated crayon if you will. I’ve always liked the look of colored pencil in artwork. There have been many modern day masters of their use whose work I admire – illustrators such as Bill Nelson, Drew Struzan, and Carter Goodrich who each use colored pencils in ways very different from one another.
When I first started out as an illustrator, my second book, My Bible (published by Barbour & Company back in 1993) contained 40 illustrations drawn completely with colored pencil. Since then, I have favored the idea of painting first, then working with pencil on top of the paint. This allows for the paint to do the hard work of filling in all the nooks and crannies of the textured paper eliminating the white of the paper BEFORE trying anything with pencil. For me, it lends itself to a much richer look overall.
Prior to adding any pencil, Frankie was looking pretty decent as just a painting. However, since I really like the look of a drawing with my paints, pencil will be added on top. There’s something kind of gritty and more tactile about it’s appearance. Well, enough pontificating about my artistic philosophy. Let’s add some nitty to that gritty and show how pencil was used on this piece.
I couldn’t help myself. Once the painting was done, I just wanted so badly to see Frankie’s face be finished. Why not? After all, it is the main focus of the painting, right? How the face turns out will dictate the approach to the rest of the piece.
Ah, if only he had had braces when just a wee lad, he’d look so much better today.
Wanting to keep with the purple and green aspects of the painted skin tones, out came the Marine Green and Black Grape pencils. These two colors were primarily used in the hatching technique. (Hatching, for those of you not in the know, is the technique of drawing with lines. When the lines criss-cross, it’s called “cross hatching”.) Just for kicks, I threw in a little hatching here and there of Bright Purple (a magenta-ish color) to have a hint of another color in there. I outlined his face first with the Black Grape, but realized later that it really wasn’t dark enough in places. I’m not a big fan of reaching for the Black pencil either. There’s usually a more colorful way to go. So, to darken up some of the outlines, and the darker shadow hatching on his skin, the Indigo Blue pencil was employed.
Now, you might be noticing that under the nose, chin, and brow there’s kind of a light purple color. It’s Light Violet to be precise, with a smidge of white on it to lighten it even more. Having that light color in those spots really helped to round out his face, and keep the purple thing going in a subtle way.
This Frankie is not of the ol’ Blue Eyes variety. Black WAS used for his pupils, but I didn’t press too hard as I wanted them to be a bit soft around the edges. I chose not to hit the rest of the eyes or lids with pencil at all. So much is happening around them that the eyes read fine without extraneous noodling. I did hit them with a splash of pure white gouache paint for highlights, though. Do you see why it’s good to not have anything in your painting be actually white? His eyeballs were “white” before, but were really off-white, yellow and red. In comes an actual white and it adds a certain impact to the area.
The impact of true white was also utilized with the lightning reflecting off Frankie’s head. It certainly allows for that extra bit of drama.
Y’know, a decent haircut might have made Frankenstein’s monster blend into society better.
Since I was working on Frankie’s skin, why not go down and finish those creepy hands of his. The same approach was taken with them as with the face.
Frankie’s dishpan hands.
After his hands, the only other really detailed part of him was his shirt. Beginning with the torso, I started out with laying in hatching with the Henna color. Added to it was Sienna Brown and Tuscan Red. Black Grape made it’s way in, as did Dark Purple, and even Indigo Blue for some of those darker areas. In the highlight areas, Cream and White were brought out to play. And like cupid spraying his little love arrows, Light Violet here and there.
You think his shirt looks messy now, you should see it AFTER the mob hits him with vegetables!
As in the torso, there’s definitely a lot going on in the sleeve of Frankie’s shirt. Hatching is going every which way with various colors here and there. It’s the shirt of a monster – it’s not supposed to be cleaned and pressed.
After the figure was done, a limited amount of things were done to the background to punch them up a bit. They still must remain a bit vague to keep them from taking away from the attention of the figure. Since the castle was right under the lightning bolt, it needed to look as though it was under attack. Pretty basic, really – White was used as a highlight, and Dark Brown was used to help darken and define the castle. A little bit of white paint was added to show the one lit window as the castle in Young Frankenstein‘s opening credits had.
Nothing extra was done to the lightning after the painting explanation in Part 6B, but the clouds around it needed a little something. I just went in with the White pencil and gently sketched in some cloudy highlights. The origin of the lightning wasn’t quite convincing, so I hit it with some white paint from an airbrush. Stupid airbrush.
Zap! Crackle! Pop!
I have an Iwata airbrush that has never worked very smoothly. As I was ever so gently pulling back on the trigger, it surged and shot out a glob of white – MUCH more than I wanted. If working digitally, all I’d have to do is hit the “undo” button. If there was one thing to be invented for traditional painting methods, it should be a literal, real-life undo button. Sigh. Well, there’s usually a way to fix things. Grabbing a paper towel, I dipped a corner in some water, wrung it out so that it was damp – not sopping. Then I just lightly tamped up the excess white gouache from the surface of the painting. No real problem after all.
The last little bit I’ll show you today is one of the mountains. It didn’t require much. I just hit the top with Dark Brown to define the edge a bit, and lightly sketched in some darker areas on the mountainside with that color plus Black Grape. To create some lighter ridges, all that was necessary was a fine brush dipped in water. A quick rub on those areas and some of the paint there lifted making a lighter area. Easy peasy.
Yup, it’s a mountain – and not your Big Rock Candy variety, either.
That’s it for the colored pencil phase of the project. Ok, ok, I know it was a bit of a tease, but the painting IS done. I’ll reveal it in the final Frankenstein post in Part 8 after I flip the switch and laugh maniacally!
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.
The monster with a flat green added to the skin and a more reddish-brown tone painted on the shirt.
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.
Highlights that consist of only two shades of yellow applied on top of the flat green shade.
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.
The same yellows used for the skin highlights were used for the shirt sleeve highlights.
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.
The rest of Frankie’s shirt is lightened with yellows, some highlights on either side of him for the backlighting, and a purple tone applied to his hair. If you look carefully, you can see the faint outline of lightning in the right side of the sky.
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.
The angry mob a little more defined, and now complete with flaming torches, naturally.
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.
Yep, just as you suspected, it’s lightning. Additional highlights will be added to the castle during the colored pencil phase.
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!
A close-up of Frankie’s face so you can see the yellow, green and purple paint flicks in his skin – the results of a toothbrush I shall not be brushing with ever again. Also, the neck bolts got a little paint.
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.
The painting with the tracing paper mask used to prevent the rest of the painting from getting the flicks intended only for the monster’s skin.
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.
The piece as it is at this moment awaiting only the final step of the colored pencils before he becomes ALIVE!
Next in Part 7, I’ll be showing you some of the finishing touches utilizing colored pencils!
Boy, it’s been a few days since I last posted about the Frankenstein piece. I’ve been able to jump back into it this weekend. Most of today was spent finishing the painting part of it. I’ll be collecting my thoughts on that along with the images for a Monday morning post. However, to tide you over ’til then, perhaps you’d like a small peek at my working environment.
I sit at a beautiful six foot wide desk I purchased from Disney Feature Animation back in the early ’00s when they made the decision to dump some furniture as they switched to become a computerized studio. It’s a gorgeous layout desk (used by the artists that designed the backgrounds) that has a four foot wide drawing surface that is also a light table. It has pencil trays along the top and bottom (as well as animation peg bars), and a mechanism that allows for easy control of tilt. It has a built in taboret with drawers, shelves on the left side, etc. This is my favorite piece of furniture in the whole joint, which it should be for all the hours I spend at it.
So you can see that I have the painting out, along with some palette trays, and some Marie Calendar pie tins that haven’t been returned for the 50¢ deposit yet. One is water that I use to dip clean brushes in to wet the paper down with. You can see my Mona and Iggy reference material there, and yes, that is a whoopie cushion sitting there, too. Doesn’t every artist have one of those at their desk?
Just thought I’d tilt the camera up a little so you can see a little of what I look at while I draw – you know, all the typical artistic inspiration most artists have a version of in their studios. I have The Greatest American Hero, Muppet toys, a Stan Lee bust, Lilo & Stitch toys, and even a replica of the Disney Animation building I used to work in. (That one makes me feel big and powerful as I tower over it.)
When painting, another tool I can’t live without are those little plastic condiment cups you get at restaurants. No, I don’t swipe a stack when I’m there. You can buy them in places like Sam’s Club or Smart & Final here in CA. Our Costco stopped carrying them. Get the cups and the lids. They’ll keep the paint from drying out no problem! This side tray is also where I keep my water for rinsing brushes and my drink – a dangerous practice. I have been known to occasionally and inadvertently rinse my brushes in my drink.
Here’s my taboret with a top compartment for my pencils that some of my watercolors have found their way into as well.
Ok, that’s it for now. Back to Frankie art comments in the next post. Part 6 still promises to finish our chat about the painting portion of our program.
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.
Some head studies by the great Jack Davis. Notice how his underpainting comes through the transparent overpainting as nice shape defining shadows..
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 trial underpainting with only a yellow ochre color and purple that will be used to indicate shadow when a transparent green is applied over it.
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.
Frankie’s face with just a purple tonal underpainting.And here’s the underpainting for the other hand.
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!
The painting of the second hand is now pretty much finished. Five colors led to this: a light brown coat, purple tonal underpainting, flat green color, then two shades of yellow.
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.
Frankie with all his underpainting (plus some).
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.
This light brown color was the first base coat color for much of the Frankenstein background.
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.
In the top right corner you’ll notice some stippling that occurred when the painting was given a quick squirt from a water bottle. There’s subtle stippling in other areas, too.
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.
This is the complete basic painting of the sky. It may get more slight tweaks before the whole thing is done, but this is it for now.
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.
This is the angry mob loosely painted in for now. They’ll be more detailed later, complete with flaming torches.
The final castle design inspired by “Young Frankenstein” (see post in Part 3). It’ll receive some lighting effects later.
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.
Here’s the full piece with most of the distant BG painted. An area on the right only has the light brown base coat visible in this scan.
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.
And here’s the full Frankenstein piece with a fully painted BG. Everything will be subject to more finishing touches after the character is painted.
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!
It’s been a few days since my last Frankie post. I’ve been able to work on it a little since then, but other obligations and activities sometimes come along that delay my pet project. So, let’s get on with it, shall we?
Now it is time to prep the final painting. Often after I do a preliminary sketch as was posted in Part 1, I tend to redraw it for the final painting, adding in other details along the way. This time, the preliminary sketch layout was pretty tight, so I decided to transfer it directly onto the watercolor paper.
For my watercolor paintings, I have been using Strathmore’s Watercolor Block. It’s a pad of sturdy 140 lb watercolor paper sealed on all four sides so that you can work wet, and it automatically dries flat. Arches also makes a similar product. My only complaint is that the texture on the Strathmore is a little too uniform – too “manufactured”. But, I’m going to be covering a lot of it in dark tones, so the texture will do its duty.
To get my 8.5×11 sketch into a transferrable 18×24 final size, it’s a bit of a “Frankensteining” process. I scanned in the sketch, blew it up, and printed it in two halves onto Strathmore Layout Bond paper which were then taped together. Normally when I do a non-watercolor piece, I can just trace the drawing onto the final paper with my light table. Not so with a pad of thick paper. So I’ll have to trace it on top.
In high school, my art teacher (Walt Sturrock for those of you who know him) taught us how to make our own graphite paper which I still use to this day. You take a sturdy piece of tracing paper, get yourself one of those woodless pencils, and just go to town on one side of the paper. You can smooth out the graphite with rubber cement thinner on a paper towel, but I don’t bother with that step. When it’s done, you have a piece of homemade carbon paper made with pencil lead that will last for many illustrations.
So, I took my printouts with the graphite paper underneath, and traced down the drawing onto my final paper. Since it’s graphite, it’s easy to erase the inevitable smudges, and you can continue to finesse the drawing. For demo purposes here, I neglected to scan the drawing unpainted when this stage was done. Since in real life I have already begun to paint the piece and right now we are just talking about the drawing, I cut off the colored background so you can just see the drawing of the figure (with a little overpainting on his edges).
This is the final pencil drawing of the monster sans background. I had already started painting it forgetting to scan the final drawing for the discussion of this step in the process.
As you can see, this stage doesn’t have all the cross-hatching and shading the preliminary sketch had. More attention is paid to details, though. Subtle changes were made to the face. The ears were extended a little so they weren’t as smooshed (that’s the technical term – smooshed) against his head, and they were given a little more character – cauliflowering, bumpier, etc. The outline of the face is more uneven, etc. Like I said, subtle. When I finish this piece, I’ll be drawing in a lot of detail with colored pencil on top of the paint, so for now this is just a guide as to where to put the paint.
Just a close-up of Frankie’s face only a mad scientist could love.
The other area of concentration for me were the hands. Mona’s hands are pretty prominent due to the coloring da Vinci employed – light colors surrounded by dark clothing. Frankie’s hands are definitely a feature. So, using that reference photo I showed you in Part 2, I spent more time making these the hands of an old withered, yet strong monster.
No, Frankie didn’t just get out of the bathtub – these are the weathered, worn hands of a corpse that probably did a lot of manual labor without the smoothing aid of lotion.
It was also during this stage that I finally figured out what to do about my castle that needed to be silhouetted in the background. I do have my initial sketch from my sketchbook of the castle that appears in the final painting. It will read very clearly as a castle amongst the mountains. Does it look at all familiar to you?
This castle will read clearly as a castle amongst the mountains of the background.
For you Frankenstein film buffs, it is the Frankenstein (“that’s Fronkensteen!”) castle pictured during the opening credits of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein movie. It was perfect!
This is the castle pictured during the opening credits of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein movie.
Now that it was clear what the concept for the Frankenstein painting was going to be, it was time to pay more attention to the details of that drawing. Sometimes a project calls for the use of visual reference materials. While I had a decent semblance of what I wanted to create, a few things needed backup assistance from some photos.
I used to keep a file of imagery for such uses. Most illustrators did. These days, Google Images is the place to go. Type in your key words, and let them find the images for you from all the websites out there! I’d wager some of you found this blog by the same means.
Unfortunately, a scan was not made of the absolutely original preliminary sketch that showed how the monster’s body originally looked. (I kept monkeying around with the one sketch.) While it was a hulking body, it needed to reflect some age and probably some muscle. Even the monster’s face could have been bonier, more sunken, etc. – the literary monster was created out of corpses after all. For some reason, Iggy Pop came to mind. While I’m not familiar with his music, and he is not a corpse exactly, I must have seen a picture of him at one point and it just resurfaced from the crevices of my mind as being the perfect reference material for my monster’s physique. So I found a photo of him and made some adjustments to my monster.
Iggy Pop has an older and more weathered look to his physique that seemed like perfect reference for the muscular corpse that Frankenstein’s monster was made from.
Even Iggy Pop’s face had just the right kind of craggily look for the life (and death) experience Frankenstein’s monster went through.
As you can see in the preliminary sketch in Part 1, the castle is just a vague outline thrown in there. Online I found an actual “Frankenstein’s Castle” that exists is Germany. So in a subsequent attempt, I doodled that one in, but it just didn’t look right. I needed a castle that would look good in silhouette to go along with the background stylings of the Mona Lisa.
“Frankenstein’s Castle” is an actual German castle that supposedly inspired Frankenstein author Mary Shelley to write her story. It was not so inspirational for this painting.
About this time, it was clear that I just needed to sit down and watch the original 1930s Frankenstein movie starring Boris Karloff. I needed to immerse my mind into that story, and maybe pick up some inspiration along the way. Maybe the castle from that film would work? No, it was just a rather non-descript tower which I doodled anyway. It just wouldn’t read as a castle/tower in the painting where the background was full of rock formations that were similar in look to the tower.
This is a sketch of the tower that housed Dr. Frankenstein’s lab in the 1931 Boris Karloff movie Frankenstein. While it would have been fun to include, it’s design would too closely resemble the mountains in the background of my painting.
Well, the tower will have to wait. Rounding out the reference material is a photo of an old man hand to help the monster have some more age.
I needed a good old hand for reference, and this one happened to be in a similar pose to good ol’ Mona’s hand. This photo was especially used as reference for the final drawing to be seen in Part 3.
