Today in the progression of my Where the Wild Things Are tribute painting being created for TerribleYellowEyes.com, the time has come to show you the background.
In Part 3, you saw an explanation for the purple underpainting. Now I want to start laying in the actual colors of the piece. My intent with the leaves is to ultimately paint them each with a cool green (cool means a little blue-ish in tint) slightly different from one another. Mr. Sendak did that in his book on the spread that inspired this composition. I’m not really trying to mimic, but rather maintain the tone – the feeling – of the original.
So, before I hit those leaves with a cool green, perhaps spreading a warmer wash of yellow/green would be good. Since this is watercolor, a transparent and wet medium, this tone will not only bleed through the next layer a little, but will also mix in to the next layer of wet paint that’ll be applied. It’ll help give a little commonality to all the leaves despite the fact that I’ll be using about five or six different shades of green for them in the end.
My “Wild Thing” piece with a yellowish tone painted on all the background leaves.
So, now that the foundation for the leaves has been laid, it’s time to mix the shades of green to be applied next. You’ll notice in the image above that the purple underpainting is still showing through. I may have painted that underpainting a little light now that I look at it. Another layer or two is going to be applied to that area which may cover that purple. Ah well. I rarely look at a piece and think that something was a mistake. The painting is a living breathing thing with no one solution to solving a problem. I’ll keep pressing forward and see what happens.
Next, the application of all the various blue-greens. The greens are going down a little hot, and a little warmer than intended. Hard to tell yet if the background will compete with the characters. If it does, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. No big deal.
The background now with all the leaves painted in. In the final stages of the illustration, colored pencil will be employed to add details to them.
Come back tomorrow to see Part 5 in which I’ll share with you the beginning of painting the characters. It all leads to seeing the finished piece at TerribleYellowEyes.com on Friday!
Having worked on television projects with both Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, I still love to draw the characters from time to time. Usually it’s for friends such as this piece I share with you today. This was a birthday card I made a few weeks ago for a friend on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday. As matriarch of her family, I thought she deserved the whole queen bee analogy.
Winnie the Pooh bringing a pot of honey to the queen bee on her birthday.
If you’d like to see other things I’ve done for the actual Disney Channel show My Friends Tigger & Pooh, click HERE.
If you’d like to see my other fan/friend sketches and cards of Pooh and the gang in a previous blog post, click HERE!
In 2005 I was one of the first two production artists hired on to work on a brand new pre-school show for The Disney Channel called Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. After three seasons of being on the air, those of you with toddlers know exactly what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, the show is an intentionally slow paced educational program starring Mickey Mouse and the gang that primarily helps teach basic math to the little tykes. While the show is animated on the computer, fellas like me did some preproduction art in a more traditional method. My work for the actual show can be seen in the Animation section of my website.
Working on this show was a blast. For years I had doodled Mickey and his posse. In fact, when in college, I would often subliminally hide Mickey in my still life oil paintings until the teacher caught on. So to eventually get to draw Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, Minnie & Daisy for a living was an unexpected blessing. Not only were those guys in the show, but I also regularly got to draw Chip & Dale, Pete, Ludwig Von Drake, Clarabelle, and one of my favorite Disney side characters – Willie the Giant (from Mickey & the Beanstalk and Mickey’s Christmas Carol).
Much like the work I did for the Disney Channel’s My Friends Tigger & Pooh, my production art consisted of drawings of the gang done in ink, then colored in Photoshop. Now and then I have cause to draw the characters for friends and fans. When I do, it usually involves a nice sketchy pencil line, and some watercolor. I thought I’d share a few drawings from the past couple of years that were done for that purpose:
Mickey and the gang from “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse”
This pencil and paint piece above was actually done for a charity auction that I organized. I had called upon many of my professional cartoonist friends to donate a piece of their art, so I felt it was only fair to also step in with a piece. This ultimately went to my pal Bill Morrison, editor and art director for Bongo Comics. (I also bought one of his pieces!)
Mickey, Donald & Goofy doing their best on a birthday cake.
This was just a birthday card I did for a friend named (if you couldn’t tell) Patty.
Mickey, Donald and Goofy who were a bit overzealous with putting out the candles on this card for the occasion of my Uncle Ken’s 70th birthday.
My Uncle Ken Frye passed away earlier this year from cancer, so this card is a fun reminder of good times with him. A big chunk of the family gathered for his 69th birthday in 2007 and treated it like it was his 70th. He surprised us all and made it well past 71 for which we were thankful. This one was inked and watercolored.
And this last piece was something I actually did for work – unofficially. I organized a crew lunch at a local chili joint in Burbank known as Chili John’s. They’ve been serving the best beef, chicken and veggie chili since the 1940s around their lunch counter. Fire-breathin’, toe-curlin’ Mickey (you won’t see THAT as an action figure anytime soon) appeared on the flyer that went out to the crew announcing the lunch.
Well, since last fall, NBC has not let up on reminding me that this is ER‘s final season. Every week since, there have been ads promising “an episode you can’t miss!” I’ve missed every one of them.
The show was enjoyable when it first started back in the fall of 1994. I watched for a few seasons completely fascinated by the intense medical drama they portrayed. But the show flatlined for me over a decade ago when it slipped down the slope of soap opera land.
This is a musty Must See TV ink and gouache illustration from the Illustration Guy Archives drawn during the second season of ER in 1995. Thought it should be trotted out as NBC mourns the death of their show this Thursday. I was out of college for only a year, and was trying to drum up caricature work while living in South Carolina. It turned out okay for what I was capable of at the time. I loved putting all the silly stuff on the shelves in the background.
Christine Elise, Noah Wylie, George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle, Sherry Stringfield & Julianna Margulies
That second season of ER they introduced Christine Elise (in case you are wondering who that first blonde is). She was introduced as a love interest for Noah Wylie, even having a part in the opening credits, so I thought she’d last. Turns out she was only on for 17 episodes. Next to Noah is George Clooney whose likeness could’ve been better. Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle, Sherry Stringfield, and Julianna Margulies round out the bunch.
Since moving to California, I have been to the Warner Bros. lot many times and visited the indoor set once with my cousin’s husband Dr. Scott Ries and daughter Grace. Even though I hadn’t followed the show in years, it was fun to see that make-believe set which looked VERY real. Scott was giddy – as a doctor himself, the visit must have held a little more significance. It was fun to see the actual room that inspired this piece so many years before.
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!
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.
