Trying out color shapers

Color shapers?

I read in the January 2018 issue of Colored Pencil Mag - I just got an annual subscription to this monthly -  about these paint-brush like tools which do the work of moving the color pencil pigment around, thus smoothening color transitions and getting rid of color pencil stroke marks. They work like blenders, in other words.

At the end of each paint-brush type handle is a silicon tip which has quite a bit of give as it is run across paper, so it moves color around without adding additional color. These silicon tips come in several sizes and shapes and are good for blending tricky corners, applying masking fluid, defining pastel lines and fixing painting mistakes.

They are also called clay shapers, and were originally made for sculptors...until color pencil artists appropriated them!

The magazine article recommended the shapers from ZXUY, which I found on Amazon (at this link). I ordered them and they came in a set of five, each with a differently shaped tip. They cost me under S$20, including shipping.

How have they worked out? Well, I like that they have fine tips, but am finding them a bit too soft - too much give. And where I have laid down more than a few layers of color, probably where I have killed the tooth of the paper, they don't seem to blend so well.

I would say the jury is still out on this. I'll keep them in my box of tools with my pencils. At least they didn't cost a bomb.

A phoenix rises ... from flowers

We have all read about the mythical phoenix, which when it dies, resurrects itself from a funeral pyre of its own making, so that it rises from its own ashes, as it were. Bizarre though this sounds, phoenixes are associated with rebirth, everlasting life, starting over.

In Chinese cultures, phoenixes are used to depict brides. Grooms are represented by dragons. So the coming together of two - it is assumed, majestic - mythical creatures heralds a good union.

In Chinese cuisine, chicken claws (braised or prepared in whatever way) are euphemistically referred to as "phoenix claws". No amount of sugar coating is going to make me like eating the stuff. The scaliness of the chicken claws put me off.

Anyhow, the next pic I colored in was from my Kerby Rosanes Mythomorphia book - one of a phoenix rising, not from ashes, but from a bush of what looks to be hibiscus flowers.

I went with a red/orange/yellow palette for the bird, the wing tips of which Rosanes rendered to look like flames. His twist to the myth comes in the flowers.

My interpretation here is that the phoenix is resurrecting itself by drawing on the life force (that is, the colors) of the plants, instead of a bonfire, hence the greyness of the flowers nearest the bird. I used brighter pinks and greens in the plants at the foot of the page.

A mermaid

The mermaid from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book, you're up next.

I didn't want to overthink things in picking the colors for this drawing. I went with apple green for her lower body and brilliant yellow/orange for her fins.

Should I make her a blonde? No, this would be a brunette, with hair so glossy that the highlights are pale, pale pink. An unlikely combo, perhaps? It doesn't look wrong though! She looks like she just stepped out of a shampoo commercial.

I haven't done too much in skin tones, since most of Rosanes' drawings are of other-worldly beings and therefore not in human skin tones. I laid down some seashell beige or some such for her arms and back, but found this mermaid too white, so I deepened the skin tone with sepia, especially in the shadows.

The other critters on the page were quickly done... while under the influence of a bunch of flu medications. Haha.
  

Back to Egypt

The focus returns to Egypt for my next piece, following the one I did last October on Anubis, also from my Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book.

One can't get more Egyptian than the Sphinx, the mythological creature often depicted as guarding pyramids and pharaohs' tombs. This animal has variously been depicted as male or female, but often with the body of a lion, a human head and the wings of a bird.

With this drawing, I worked on her headgear, arm band and cuff first, using bronze, pale yellow and a deep brown to give a bronze/copper finish. It was another exercise in rendering the high-contrast finish typical of metal. I find myself getting more confident with this, having done gold and silver in previous works.

I knew early on that tawny browns would dominate this picture, given that it would be a lion's body,  and it being a desert setting and all. I was therefore not too sure about making the blanket on her body brown as well; to take the monotone out of this, I gave the hem a pop of color with one of my favorite jewel-color combos - scarlet, bright blue and teal, and picked up this trio of colors also for the tassels. I was fairly pleased with it when done.

With no strong push one way or other on the color of the wings, I picked a stronger brown. It was only after the wings were done that I felt that this whole thing was becoming too brown - which is far from one of my favorite colors.

Then again, maybe it isn't "too brown". I'd rather a picture be monotone than one with colors that sock you between the eye. I see some online coloring works that are totally raw in color. In my Sec 4 art teacher's view, that's anathema. No color in nature is like that - straight from your tube of paint, she would say. (RIP, Mrs Woon.)

The Sphinx done, I took the chance to play around with color in the other objects in the background. I went with warm grey (70%) for the columns, grading it to violet for the parts facing the sun. The pyramids were in cool grey (50%) and deco peach. I was aiming for the colors one might "see" in the golden hour of day, amid the brown-ness.

Out of playfulness, I made the cat blue and the two birds a combo of rust red and pink. With all the browns in play, there was some sort of palette there, I guess!

The sun to the far right presented a chance to lay down rich layers of vermillion, Spanish orange and pale yellow. Carmine red was added to the rim for depth.

The sky: The parts nearest the sun were a lavender, graduating to a lilac, then light cerulean and then cerulean furthest from the sun. I used a tissue paper to smooth out the gradations and obscure the pencil lines.

Right half of the picture

The left half, close-up. 

And now... a fire dragon

After doing the water dragon (see here), I attempted a more conventional kind of giant lizard - the fire-breathing kind, also from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia book.

These two dragons are on facing pages in the book, likely meant by Rosanes to be tackled together. I did so because it was an exercise in rendering water, and then fire. Two very basic elements in nature.

Bottomline: I'm not good in doing backgrounds. 
This one, like some of my other works, is a disappointment. 

There would be a lot of yellows, oranges and reds for the flames in this picture, so I went with blue for the dragon for a nice complementary color scheme, although I had my doubts that fire-breathing dragons would be blue. (But since dragons are mythical, who's to say, right?) 

I turned to the scumbling technique for the dragon's skin, using a fairly light touch and various shades of blue, going with a lighter shade where the scales catch the light. (See here for useful pencil techniques.) 

To do the fire, I used a similar technique, going with pale yellows generally in the centre of each flame, where it would be white hot, and grading to increasingly darker oranges towards the edges. Tuscan red went into the recessed "folds" of each plume of fire. 

As with the water dragon, whose fore limbs are towers of water, there is no real clear line where the dragon's scales end and tongues of fire begin here - or at least, that's how I see it. I checked other color pencil enthusiasts' work on this dragon online, and saw that most of them had colored the two large plumes of fire by the side of the dragon in the color of the dragon's skin. The way I did it, however, depicts the flames as part of the dragon itself. This dragon is the fire!

No matter, I suppose. This work is continuing to draw "likes" in my Instagram feed. 

After I was done with the reptile, I moved on to the rocky outcrop, using three shades of French grey for lit and shadowed areas. The emerald comb and card were done quickly, without fuss.

... and then, I should have stopped right there and called this piece DONE, and left the background white, like with the water dragon. 

As has so often happened when I am faced with a large expanse of background after having worked on the subject, I get impatient to be done. 

I couldn't even decide for a number of days what kind of sky I wanted, and sort of decided on a sunset palette, glowing peach around the dragon, and grading to pink and then lavender. And that's what didn't turn out so well! I tried the scumbling method so that the gradations wouldn't show, but it didn't work so well, despite using my blender pencil and a piece of tissue paper to smooth out the pencil marks in the bits when i got impatient. 

I am measuring myself from the benchmark set by Matthew Vaughn (@manlycoloring on Instagram). This is definitely something I need to work on. 

  

A water dragon

I'm on year-end vacation now, so I'll have more time for this!

Today, I completed this picture of a water dragon from Kerby Rosanes' Mythomorphia coloring book.

I picked purple, my favourite color, for the critter, but the challenge for this piece lay in rendering the water - how to depict transparency. I'm not too satisfied with this one. 

I used my Prismacolor powder blue and pale sage as the base color and then used a deeper blue and deeper green for the darker areas, and white and pale yellow for the parts where light is shooting through the crest of the wave.

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.