Future Plans - Mid to Late Summer of 2017

It is no secret that things have been a bit dead around here… I think a spider’s building a web on my single June post, and some dust has been collecting atop those date blocks. But I’ve not been dead, I assure you — at least, no more than usually am. In fact, I’ve still been maintaining a presence on my DeviantArt account, here.

As a bit of a resolution, I am going to attempt (and ideally succeed) to increase my activity both on this site and over on DeviantArt. However, I have made the realization that I am probably not yet in the position to be giving out meaningful tutorials. After all, you haven’t seen much of my work on this website. And that’s important, if I’m going to be someone worth listening to when it comes to tutorials.

Good point...

To accomplish this goal, I’m going to make a few changes around here. First, as I stated before, I’m going to cut back on the tutorials (unless there is something that I can really help you with, like working GIMP). Second, I’m going to try to keep my posts shorter. If you can’t tell, I like to be verbose. Being verbose, however, makes posts a bit intimidating when I can only manage to free up an hour of time in a day.

Damn you, day-job!

Third, I plan to dedicate most of my posts to my projects and work (that is, instead of releasing half-baked tutorials). For now, my current projects are limited to a graphic novel — that I will explain a bit more in future posts — and an album of related artwork. The latter will be in the vein of that morbid stuff I usually draw. It will have a consistent style and perhaps some “lore” to accompany it. We will see. The idea is to, upon its completion, branch out into a different style.

Fourth, I will try to write posts about drawings that I am currently working on. I’ll also try to grab some scans of these as I work on them to show you my process. I also want to add color to my work.

See that gallery.  No color.

But the only way for me to really practice with it at the moment is digitally.

I hope you will find some of these things interesting, and I look forward to seeing you in the next post!

Now, about that dust.

Colors via Pigment and Highlighters

Colors via Pigment and Highlighters

In a bit of a diversion from the “Studying Feathers” series, I decided to explore colors. As I wrote in the first part of my “Using Values and Gradients” series, I have relatively little experience with color. Now seemed just as good a time as any to delve into the topic.

I was inspired to write this post upon looking at the color theory page on Wikipedia. Specifically, I was interested in the CMYK, subtractive color mixing diagram. Essentially, all printed colors are made using different ratios of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink. This goes a bit against the traditional theory that, to obtain any color, you must mix red, blue, and yellow. Mixing red, blue, and yellow tends to produce unsaturated or “muddy” colors, and usually “pure” pigments — or ones that directly resembled the desired color — were used instead of the mixtures. Put simply: if you wanted purple, you were more likely to use a pure purple pigment than a mixture of red and blue.

Today, we use CMYK mixtures to obtain all of the colors that we require, because using such a wide variety of pure pigments is impractical for the purposes of mass production. This explains why your ink-jet printer cartridges only use those few, odd colors.

Further delving into the topic, I found that this also explains those strange circles you see when looking closely at printed materials — each “channel” of the CMYK model is offset from each other by a given angle. Each channel consists of a screen of equally spaced dots aligned in a grid that, when rotated around a center point, produce circles. This is perhaps better explained by the diagram on the “Screen Angle” article on Wikipedia.

Knowing these few things, I wanted to see if I could — to some extent — replicate this effect using various traditional coloring media.

Colored Pencils

As you can see, the results were quite underwhelming. The first set of colored pencils did not have true magenta or cyan pencils. Opting for the red and blue in their stead provided the muddy colors expected by the information above. The second set of colored pencils again did not have magenta or cyan pencils either. It did, however, have pink and a lighter blue. The results were slightly better — some mixing can be seen in the overlap, but overall the results were minimally successful.

This is of course not to say that successful mixing cannot be achieved with any colored pencils. Again, I have little experience using colors in my own work. It also easily demonstrated in other artists’ works that a full set of “true pigment” colored pencils can produce an impressive range of realistic and vibrant colors. However, the success of CMYK-only colored pencils is not something that I have looked into.

Oil Pastels

Oil pastels are a distant departure from most of the media that I use. They are highly saturated and thick when applied to paper. In some ways, I would liken them to a dry form of acrylic paint due to the purity of the colors they provide.

As you can probably tell from the mixing of the “CMYK” pastels (using red instead of magenta, again due to the color not being present in my set), the results were surprisingly ineffective. The mixing was so weak that the colors appeared to overlap more successfully than combine. Obviously, pastels are meant to be blended with each other to form broad ranges of colors, and such a small region of application was not going to be suited for this purpose.

Therein lies the reason that there is an ugly, purplish blob next to this sample. I mixed the red and blue pastels to create a purple base by smudging them with my fingers and then added black to the bottom in an attempt to create a gradient. This again provided the muddy result expected by my research.

Sharpie Highlighters

I was running out of materials to test, and each of my results were rather depressing. Not wanting to give up, though, I tried one last thing: Highlighters. These, in particular, were produced by Sharpie and likely not intended for use in art.

Surprisingly, they actually mixed to produce a fairly wide range of colors.

The entire combination of colors possible using highlighters.  Also known as a "Color Gamut."

This entire range of colors was created using only the highlighters seen above. I have green highlighters, but did not use them to produce this result.

Each highlighter had a different range of “intensity” characterized by how many times it was overlapped with another layer of the same color. This explains why each range looks rectangular as opposed to square.

Put more simply, the yellow sharpie had a range of 2 (or 0-1, for the more technical readers). It was either there or not there, as adding more layers atop the preexisting yellow did not impact its intensity. The cyan sharpie had the widest range of 5 (or 0-4) intensities. And the magenta sharpie had a range of 4, or (0-3) levels of intensity.

The first range mixes cyan and yellow, the second range mixes magenta and yellow, the third mixes cyan and magenta, and the fourth mixes all three (assuming that yellow is present).

As a result, we have this wonderful mix of nice neon, and “tropical” colors that would perhaps be expected from the use of highlighters.

Ok, so this isn’t exactly the kind of color theory most artists are interested in — what colors look nice next to others, how color impacts mood, and how lighting influences colors — but it is an interesting base to the study, as printed art will necessitate an understanding of the CMYK color model. Even if you plan on working digitally, you will likely need to convert your work to this color model in order for it to look accurate in the physical world. It would make an interesting art-challenge as well — to use these three highlighters and some media for adding value to create a finished piece of artwork.

And of course, I just found it a bit interesting, heh.

Studying Feathers (Part 2)

Continuing with the idea of my previous post, I will briefly cover a few of the methods artists have used to meaningfully portray feathers in their work. Note that I won’t be using any of the original artwork to avoid infringing on copyright — which is a shame, because it muddles the point a bit.

The first several pieces established the most common motif in the rendering of feathers on birds: the use of curved lines to indicate the leading edge of the feathers’ vanes. In the case of the large primaries, these took the forms of full outlines around the feather. The smaller vaned feathers that covered the rest of the bird only had a small portion of their leading edges visible. These curved lines followed various wavy patterns to indicate the almost “stepped” appearance of the birds feather topology.

Aside from these leading edges, the primaries were individually shaded while the other feathers were treated as a mass with little variable shading. Another important thing to notice is that the rachis is not visible.

The technique of shading the leading edges of the feathers also appeared in this style. However, the feathers on the body of the bird — and particularly the coverts on the wing — were portrayed by blocking out sharp, flame-like shapes of darkness that then stepped upward towards bright white in a gradient. The primaries were again treated individually, with basic crosshatching that followed the direction of the barbs of the feather as opposed to arbitrary angles. Again the rachis is not visible in any of the primary feathers.

This style appeared to be the most popular — particularly among drawing tutorials. It also clearly demonstrates what I mean by shading the edges of the feathers. However, in contrast to the previous styles, this shading is accomplished with lines seemingly meant to represent individual barbs as opposed to entire vanes. The birds rendered in this style were shaded according to their own volume, with little consideration of the feathers.

This style breaks the motif. Instead, entire regions of feathers are shaded with flat colors that step up into differently shaped regions. Notice how the feathers look particularly sharp, thick, and again flame-like. The effect could be used to similarly represent long hair or fur. The edges of the bird sport large, wavy wedges of feather to help complete the texture.

Onto individual feathers. This first style consisted of no shading and only used outlines to convey the shape of the feather. The edges appeared to be created by following a basic, whole shape with breaks in the vane only appearing in the outlines around the clusters of barbs. The afterfeather did not have nearly the same amount of complexity as the vane. The basic idea of this style was to use as many tightly configured, curved lines to indicate the barbs as possible.

Not my best work, I will definitely admit, heh.

This style was very similar to the first individual feather style, but differed in how it portrayed the barbs. Instead of using a line for each individual barb, it used lines to separate blocks of barbs.

Finally, a very particular feather. This one had a very basic, rounded shape surround the rachis to indicate the vane. Little cuts were made into this shape to break up the vane. Some of these cuts were shallow while others went all the way to the rachis. Rather than using lines to indicate each of the barbs, this style used crosshatching to hint at their existence all along the edge of the feather. Additionally, crosshatching was used around the edges of the rachis to create a gradient effect on the vane. The afterfeather was drawn as a huge puff, with separate lines to indicate its extent instead of one contiguous outline.

These were only a handful of the numerous styles used by artists to draw feathers and birds. There are more observations to be made by looking at the works of other artists, and I encourage you to do your own studies.

Also, I must apologize for the long gap between this and the previous post. I’ve had a bit of a nightmare schedule at work and am also tackling another project to the side. Regardless, I am hoping to return to a somewhat normal routine of posting soon!