A disappointing result

Finished coloring in Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia ghoul yesterday, a month and then some after Halloween, and I don't like what I see.

The blood moon and the glow it would have thrown on the dark sky aren't well done, and the pencil lines are too obvious, even after blending with a piece of tissue paper and with my blender in some parts. 

I had done the ghoul, his pet wolf-dog and their little hill of skulls first, and, as always, the blank background stared back at me, melting away much of my patience. I think I was in too much of a hurry to finish it, after the subjects in the foreground had sat there half finished for a couple of weeks. It was a busy period at home and at work.

The ghoul: I settled easily on making him a shade of dull green, since he's "undead". Again, Rosanes' shadow shading helped me greatly in where to go with a deeper green or even French grey to denote shadows.

The wolf dog: I wanted it to be a dark, dark grey, nearly black, so that the red/vermillion eyes would pop.

The tree: This took a while, with all the gnarliness in deep brown to offset the paler brown of the trunk. I had wanted to make the lone apple on the branch red, but since I already gave Mr Ghoul a scarlet loin cloth, I didn't want to repeat the color. So this became a granny smith tree!

The roots, among which sat all those skulls, took a while, and I was running out of patience, because doing it pretty much restricted my palette to browns, greys and black. The skulls were done easily enough.

Then... the background, my nemesis. With ghouls being creatures of the night, it had to be a night sky, and the inspiration came to me to draw in a blood moon. With its deep red hue, such a moon would add to the spookiness of the scene. I looked up the Internet for pictures of blood moons for inspiration, and built my palette from there. I layered several reds, oranges and deep greys, and left the lower right quadrant a paler yellow for some variation. I had to tone down the moon with a deep grey overall, because it looked too red to be believable.

It still looked all right at this stage. Things went south only when I attempted the sky, especially the part around the moon.  For the sky to the right of the picture, I applied three shades of deep blue - the ultramarine, indanthrone, dioxazine purple - then deepened the top of the picture with 90% cool grey to darken it.

I put a layer of orange round the edges of the moon, and then introduced lilac, blending the edges to try to get the gradation smooth. The plan had been to make the lilac morph into blue through shading to join up with the rest of the sky, but, as you can see, the blending didn't go according to plan and just looks Plain Wrong. Because the colors at this point seemed too bright, I brought in my deep grey again to mute it down, but that too, didn't go well.

The rim lighting: The trusty white gel pen came in useful here for the silvery threads of bright white where the ghoul, wolf-dog and tree catch the moonlight.

Maybe I should have done a regular yellow moon. Might have been less demanding and not required so many colors. 

Unicorn from the Mythomorphia coloring book

I believe most unicorns depicted in popular culture are white and come with magical rainbow-colored horns. Meet this, a gold/brown unicorn with a flaming red mane and a horn that seems to be a part of a silver armor!  Since no one has ever seen a unicorn, these colors can't be wrong, can they?

I did an online search of color pencil artists' renditions of this drawing from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book, and yes, most did the unicorn in white.  I had meant to do the same  - it would have been an exercise in creating the illusion of white. Such a unicorn would probably have entailed using various shades and layers of yellow, pale blues, pale greens and greys to make the animal look white.

But I started with a pale cream around the eyes, and before I knew it, the face was too brown/cream-colored to make it a white horse already. Ooops. So gold/brown this thing came to be.

Oh yes, before I go further, I need to note here that this drawing was done using my tin box of 72  Derwent Coloursoft pencils for a change. After months of using my Prismacolor (set of 150), I found the Derwent pencils nowhere as soft and easy to blend or even lay down as a first color. I wonder why.

Back to this unicorn drawing: Online renditions of this drawing by Rosanes' mostly went with blood-red roses; some had lurid colors on the headgear, like brilliant blue... To be contrarian, I picked blush pink and dusty lavender for the roses for a softer look, and after doing the gold for Anubis (see post here), I made this one an exercise in rendering silver.

The roses: Rosanes' ink shading made the roses a cinch to do. Darker pinks and lavenders went into the lined shadows, with the paler shades of pinks and lavenders on the parts of the blooms facing the light.

The silver armor: From reading Alyona Nickelsen's Colored Pencil Painting Bible (a worthwhile investment if you want to learn the finer points of rendering ice, glass, water, wood, flora/fauna, metal, gems and jewellery!), the tip I picked up was that to convey the illusion of shiny metal, the darkest values and lightest ones have to sit right next to each other, with little or no grading between.

It is really much more complicated than that, for Nickelsen also delves into how to create the reflections of objects on silver. Here, I simplified it by not drawing in any reflections. The unicorn's headgear was assumed to be isolated from any surrounding objects, hence the broad bands of pure, bright white against 90% grey or sheer black on the metal and the horn. I hope it looks believably silver nonetheless.

A horse this majestic could have done with a more generous mane, I thought. And with red being my favourite hair color, I went with that, using pale yellow and my white gel pen for the highlights.

The scattered gems around the unicorn were quickly done. Most of them were done using a jewel tone - a strong green, blue or red - with a dark grey pencil for depth around the edges, and my trusty white gel pen for highlights.

Coloring in the background: Matthew Vaughn (Instagram handle manlycoloring) does awesome backgrounds with his pencils. And from his WIPs, it looks like he does them first. When the colors are done right, backgrounds do make the subject jump out and provide a context for them. Kudos to him!

BUT... they are a lot of work. Matt Vaughn says that because the backgrounds in most coloring books are blank, they are a great canvas for the imagination. True. But it is still a lot of work! And after I have colored in a picture, especially a double-spread one, I'm too pooped to think of filling in that expanse. Matt Vaughn does show the possibilities though.

I am dropping the idea of doing the background for the unicorn, and have moved on to my next picture.

My mum-in-law asked me an existential question the other day: So after you are done coloring this picture, what then? I was floored for a moment. "I don't do anything with them," I replied. "My pictures aren't good enough to sell!" Coloring is an end in itself to me. I take breaks between pictures to draw my own pictures, like I did with Marutaro here, the carnations and the carousel horse. No immediate plans for another!

Anubis from Egyptian mythology

This might be my best work so far, if the number of "likes" I get on my Instagram feed (look me up under yinpheng) is anything to go by!

I'm still learning by doing, and for this drawing, also from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia coloring book, I made it an exercise in rendering gold. I have no idea whether those striped pieces of cloth one sees on Egyptian mummies and royalty are actually fabric, but this Anubis - the Egyptian god of mummification and the afterlife - seemed to wear those striped pieces of fabric as well as what could be armor, so I went with gold for what I thought was the hardware part of his head gear.

The gold was rendered with a few yellows, a coup le shades of brown and white to create the illusion of gold. I didn't use the gold color from my Prismacolor 150 pencil set at all. 

Anubis is pictured here with objects typically associated with him - the crook (lower right, in blue and gold), the flail (in deep red, to the upper right) and the ankh (traditionally in gold, but rendered in silver here, just behind Anubis' head). The other objects in the picture are also deeply connected to Egypt - the scarab beetle (on Anubis' sleeve, which was too small for me to color its iridescence effectively), the pyramids and ancient columns, together with a scattering of precious jewels and an earthen pot.

It was on a whim that I also rendered the shadows cast by these objects on Anubis, since they appear to be floating above him. Rendered in deep grey, they turned out quite nicely. I realise greys work nicely for shadows or to deepen the shade of any color, and that I seldom have to use black.

The nerd in me went to read up about Anubis, in search of extra information that might aid me in my decisions on color. He is the god who oversees the souls of the departed into the afterlife, and is typically depicted as a black wolf. 

A nine-headed hydra

The left half of the picture

The right half.

This is my first attempt at one of the double-spread drawings in my Mythomorphia coloring book by Kerby Rosanes. I did it over several days, but still felt the strain of the size of the work. That's a lot of sea, a lot of lizard and a lot of sky to cover, and I must say I lost my focus several times over the course of it.

Online renditions of this drawing often put the hydra in green, and so did I. It just seemed appropriate. Some online versions of this drawing have the hydra in a raw, blinding green not found in nature. One could argue that this is a mythical beast after all, and it could technically be in any color, really,  but, oh well... At least, I know that if the hydra really existed, this would be the color of its skin.

Using my  Prismacolor 150 set, I picked Kelly Green as the base color for the hydra, then used a dark green for the parts in shadow and lightened the green with yellow and pale sage for the parts hit by the light.

The underside of the hydra were rendered in putty beige and a deep brown for the parts in shadow.

The sea: The challenge here was to make the water look transparent. I don't think I succeeded, with my palette of sky blue light, ultramarine, artichoke and pale sage. The crest of the waves catch the light, so these parts were in yellow/artichoke/pale sage. The sea foam was in sky blue light and the lower parts of the wave, the darker ultramarine.

The sky: I wanted the palette to be in the pale blue, lavender, pink and peach commonly seen at dusk. The left side has a pinker/peachier hue because that's where I put the sun at, so the clouds picked up this warm shade as well. The skies and clouds to the right were bluer.

The other minor elements in the picture - the birds, the two ships and the world tarot card were quickly done. My reserves in focus were pretty low by this point.

[The tarot card: As an aside, Johanna Basford also does this - "hide" some symbols or small objects in the picture, so that one finds them as one colors in the picture, and they are supposed to be put together by the time the pages of the book are all done to "solve" some mystery. I don't really see the point in this. They distract from the picture, I say. This is why I've usually rendered these objects in non-obtrusive colors.]

My gel ink pen in white came in useful again for the bright whites of the sea foam of the waves, and the highlighted parts of the hydra's skin, where the scales catch the light.

The two halves viewed together. 

A siren

This is my second piece from my Kerby Rosanes Mythomorphia coloring book.

Sirens are undersea monsters who lure sailors towards rocks with their beautiful music and lovely singing voices, and who eat sailors for supper after their ships get wrecked on the rocks... hence the two skulls at the foot of this picture.

I went with purple, my favorite color, for the siren, and a complementary sage green for her fins. I lightened the purple shade to lilac and pinks on the parts facing the (imagined) light source. I colored in several layers of color with a light touch this time, after having pressed much harder with the harpy (see previous post here).

The treasure chest was layered in several shades of brown, and my Prismacolor set didn't disappoint with its sheer blendability. I picked several shades of warm grey for the anchor, from the 10% (lightest) to the 90%, to recreate the sharp contrasts one would expect in metal. The other objects in the picture were fairly quickly done - the fish, seaweed, skulls, sand and items in the treasure chest.

The siren's hair: I was undecided on the color. I had thought to make her blond, but ended up going with pastel rainbow hues. It makes her almost girly, which is hard to reconcile with her grisly dining habits.

I was going to leave the background white again, like I did with the harpy, but decided on the spur of the moment to color it in to see whether I could recreate rays of sunlight piercing the water, shining on the creature's face and upper body. I can't say I'm entirely satisfied, but I don't regret trying.

This page gives a good idea of what it should look like.  This one too. I thought of adding those wavy strips of paler color over the siren's face and upper arms, but was afraid it wouldn't turn out right, so I left it as you see it.

Looking at the completed picture, I wonder now if I should have rendered the siren in a stronger color so that she would pop from the background, which is in the same family of colors. I have seen several other artists' renditions of this same picture; I do believe, however, that colors can be too raw and too strong. Some artists like to go with raw greens, blues and reds. The result seems too garish for me.

My Sec 4 art teacher (RIP, Mrs Woon) used to berate us for using paints straight out of the tube. If you are painting something for nature, the green that comes in the standard set of 12 tubes of pastel paints will almost always never do. Add yellow, she would advise.

Mythical creatures by Kerby Rosanes!

My coloring book Mythomorphia by Kerby Rosanes has arrived, and the pictures are awesome. They feature mermaids, gnomes, kitsunes, dragons, phoenixes... any critter that has featured in stories from long ago.

Many of the drawings are double-spreads, but I chose to start with a single-page one, to warm up.

Harpy. Drawing by Kerby Rosanes, color by Amy

A harpy, from Greek and Roman mythology, is a rapacious monster described as having a woman's head and body and a bird's wings and claws. It is often depicted as a bird of prey with a woman's face. The word can be also used to describe a grasping, unpleasant woman.

I picked a palette of blues and greens for the feathers, and used my white gel ink pen to give some highlights to the tips of the feathers. Yes, colors can be too raw at times, like for the teal colors of the feathers, so I toned it down with some warm grey at 70% saturation. 

I decided against giving her human skin tones, since she does look evil. A dark greyish tone seemed to me to convey her other-worldliness better.

I quite like the way the feet turned out... yellow like most bird feet, but given more depth with orange on one side to convey shadow. 

Stuck for the color to use on the harpy's helmet (or is it supposed to be the beak?), I asked the family. R said "red" but I went with orangey-red instead, since orange is a complementary color to blue. Worked quite nicely. 

The tree and leaves were quickly done after that. I went with a yellow-green for the leaves, rather than a blue-ish green, which wouldn't have provided enough contrast with the main subject. 

The two hidden objects here were the axe and a goblet with lighted candle in it. They are too small to expend that much time and energy on, but I tried to convey metal surfaces with the use of contrasting tones.

Then there is the matter of the background, which I have left white. I posted this work on my Instagram feed with a question: Is this a WIP, or can it be considered finished with a blank white background?

Someone said it's a WIP. Another person said it's finished.

The expanse is a bit too much work for me to color in the background. But I have seen the payoffs from the effort. Some color pencil enthusiasts really do a lot of work on the backgrounds of pictures they color in, going so far even as to draw extra elements in.

Goodbye, Johanna Basford, hello, Kerby Rosanes.

Limiting the color palette, Part Deux

I have taken another look at the color palettes I saved to my board on Pinterest lately, and have decided to continue being more disciplined in my choice of color. (See my last post on this subject here.)

Sites such as Design Seeds, for example, put on display dozens of beautiful photographs of scenery, nature or every day objects which are beautiful because of the way the colors work in them. Alongside are color palettes drawn from the photos themselves, so a photo of cactus succulents, for example, would produce a palette of dusty rose, sage green and deeper purples and pinks, perhaps with cream or warm greys. Nature really does show us how some colors just work together.

The following work, another from my Johanna Basford book, The Enchanted Forest, shows the result of working with a limited palette:

 

The colors are dull greens - no "raw" greens here - used along with dusty pinks, purples and some browns or warm greys... much like the palette for the cactus succulents.

The yellows of the bug wings and the centre of the flower kind of stick out -- a lesson in what happens when you depart from the palette. Or maybe the yellows work, I am not sure.

Another recent  work I did, also with a view to restricting the color palette, was this one:

 

I uploaded this to my Pinterest board on my color pencil work too, and also to Instagram, where it is continuing to draw "likes" -- more than the other picture -- probably because of the element of whimsy in this one. Notice the quaint tree houses on stilts and the green house with Moorish architectural elements in it.

For this one, the greens were yellow-green (chartreuse) rather than sage green, and all other colors were from an earthy palette - browns, warm greys, yellows, ochres and some pumpkin orange. I doubt a bright blue or red would sit well here. It's just a feeling!

This whole color pencil adventure has taught me a lot about color. I find myself looking at things in a new way, seeing how the colors work, such as whether they are in ombre palettes, flowing smoothly one into the next, or whether they contrast each other.

As an aside here: I'm fast running out of pages in my Basford Enchanted Forest book. Will I get another of her works? I think not. She draws far too many tiny leaves that are a test of patience, and because they are that small, they don't offer much scope by way of shading possibilities. Her other books that don't feature "enchanted forests" may have fewer leaves and plants, perhaps?

I've ordered a new book from Book Depository, Mythomorphia by the illustrator Kerby Rosanes, which has taken the world of adult coloring by storm. This is his third book, his earlier works being  Animorphia and Imagimorphia.

And I still haven't given up on making and coloring in my own drawings. It's just that Life happens, and it did happen in a big way this past month, shaking my family to its core and yanking the rug from under our collective feet. So we are picking up the pieces and finding a new pattern to move on with.

I hope to carve out time to do this strangely calming hobby from hereon.