happy november! last week was the last of inktober 😦 I’ve really enjoyed the challenge and definitely think I’ve discovered my favourite inking method (brush and india ink). In the past I’ve always avoided using ink because I can’t seem to get my head around the technique but this challenge was a good way to try to start conquering my ink fears!!
Due to other things going on, I only managed to get one ink drawing done this week:
‘nature study’
AND I thought I’d make it into a free calendar for you to download! Just click the image below and you’ll be able to download the full resolution A3 image. Hope it helps with your end of year planning!!
Hope you are enjoying your weekend. Check back tomorrow as I’ve got a very exciting giveaway (the first on this blog!!).
last week I finished up a series of paintings of the Spur-winged Plover (Vanellus miles) – which is a relatively common bird species where I live in Auckland. Last year I did a small painting of a Spur winged Plover chick, and thought I would add to it by painting an adult and an egg.
All were painted in acrylic using a sort of watercolour wash method:
the adult- with distinctive yellow wattles
the chick
and the egg!
Interestingly this species is one of only 2 NZ native bird species that have no legal protection – it was removed in 2010 after so many public complaints about the species as a nuisance bird (mainly due to crop damage and “interactions” with aircraft).
I am planning on compiling these illustrations- together with some small habitat drawings I also have just finished- into a small poster showing the life stages and common habitats of this species (such as roadsides, airports and sports-fields), and the ways in which this species is threatened by people because of the proximity it lives to us.
BLOG update: If you’re a regular reader you may have noticed a couple of small changes to my site. I have updated the Useful Resources page- it now has more of a visual overview of the books I recommend. If you have a goodreads account, you can add them to your own reading list by clicking on the books image. I have also removed my portfolio page and the link above now directs you straight to my official portfolio site. Also new is the Categories drop-down list in the right side bar (under the about info), so if you are looking for posts on a certain subject hopefully that makes things easier to find! I am hoping to do a full blog re-design at the end of the year so stay tuned for some bigger changes in a few months time.
This month I wanted to highlight a beautifully illustrated identification guide to primates. Primates of the World: an illustrated guide by Jean-Jacques Petter and Francois Desbordes was published on 2010 in French, but has just been translated and published by Princeton University Press last year.
The primate illustrations in this guide, by french wildlife artist Francois Desbordes, are absolutely phenomenal- and I recommend checking out this book for them alone. There are 72 realistically rendered watercolour plates, as well as a number of looser watercolour sketches in the introductory section entitles ‘Fascinating Primates’- including a very colourful evolutionary tree diagram.
RING-TAILED and BROWN LEMURS from Primates of the World by Jean-Jacques Petter and Francois Desbordes, pg59Primates of the World by Jean-Jacques Petter and Francois Desbordes, pg11
I have read other reviews that say some of the scientific information is slightly out of date now (that’s how fast species phenology can change) but it is a comprehensive guide of the major primate species of the world, sorted by continent.
TARSIERS from Primates of the World by Jean-Jacques Petter and Francois Desbordes, pg105
What I really liked about Mr Desbordes illustrations is that they not only show the animals morphology but also give some clue to the postures and behaviour of the different species. I couldn’t find much information about the illustrator however it appears he has illustrated a number of books about wildlife in French.
GORILLAS from Primates of the World by Jean-Jacques Petter and Francois Desbordes, pg177
I highly recommend taking a look at this book- its a masterpiece.
emma
blog update: you may have noticed a new link in the right-side bar- best of drawing escape. I’ve made a collection of the most popular posts from the drawing escape archives- you can check them out here!
just one week left of the inktober challenge! I haven’t been inktober-ing every day of the week- mainly because I’ve been focussing on getting an illustration portfolio all made up (a big job!!)- but have been trying to make 3 or 4 inked pieces a week.
more toucan drawings! a sort-of story line is developing with them…
This week I also got hold of a pack of Sharpie Brush tip markers in a bargain bin at the Warehouse Stationery (I think I’ll do a full review of these too at some stage). I’ve been trying them out a bit too as you can see below- I got the ‘fashion colors’ set; lovely bright colours of lime green, aqua, hot pink and purple.
drawn onto a piece of recycled cardboard…those pens bleed right through regular paper!
then corrected in photoshop:
All set for the last week of Inktober? I’ll be sad when its over!!
see you in a couple of days with a newly reviewed Illustrated book of the Month.
Though I much prefer the look (and the process of making) art using traditional materials, it has been a goal of mine for a little while now to learn more about digital illustration techniques. Digital techniques are an indispensible skill to have today, and lend themselves quite well to many scientific illustration applications. I also love the idea of combining traditional and digital techniques so that the final work is not 100% digital- as can be seen in one of my first completed Photoshop paintings ‘Journey’ done for IF challenge.
I am very much a beginner but I thought it might be useful to post some of the simple tips and useful tutorials that I have been most helpful in my attempt to teach myself to paint digitally. Hopefully it might be useful to some of you too!
I started off with trying out pure digital painting and then moving on to colouring traditionally drawn/painted stuff that I scanned in. I have discussed ideas for both techniques below.
Pure Digital Painting
Not my favourite mode of using PS but definitely important to know!
Blending the paint: While I’ve played around the photoshop before, the major issue I had trouble getting my head around to start with was how to blend colours in a digital painting?? It seems like this should be really obvious but there wasn’t too much information that I could find- nothing mentioned in any of the digital painting books I have looked at. Some less sophisticated graphics programs the paint blends as if it is wet in real life, however in PS, you have to go about blending in another (more controlled method). I would be lost without the excellent tutorials on this from Ctrl-Paint – especially this one:
Essentially this is all you really need to get started playing with the program! Give it a go and see what you can come up with.
this dusky dolphin illustration was painted in Photoshop after scanning in the original sketch
The other essential I think is finding a brush you like. Though I know there are people out there who manage to use the default hard round + airbrush brushes in PS with great success, in my hands they usually end up making my digital illustrations look, well, digital! I’m not a huge fan of the digital polished look (as shown in the above dolphin illustration), so instead have enjoyed using Drew Greens gouache brush and also have just started using Kyle T Websters watercolour brush. This is an area that I’m still discovering and trying to figure out what works best.
Colouring traditional line work+washes
This is now my preferred approach to creating illustrations with (partially) digital methods. Its something that I am definitely experimenting with a lot at the moment. I’ve tried a few methods of colouring traditional work, and this is the best I have come up with so far…
To colour traditional line work and washes…I initially started off using the method of making your line work set as ‘Multiply’ blending mode- so you can then paint in the fill areas on a layer below the lines. To colour the lines themselves, I would apply a clipping mask to the lines layer and set the mode of the clipping mask to ‘Screen’, then paint on my colour to the clipping mask. BUT I found this method gave very patchy results, with ‘screen’ colours not showing up at full vibrance and the painting beneath the line work showing through the lines, making them look messy.
I created this ‘Journey” illustration using the method described above
My new approach is one picked up from a couple of tutorials online- most helpful were these two:
Here’s a basic summary (total credit to the tutorials listed above- check them out for a full run-down on how to do this): to colour the line work/wash (also works really well with gradiented pencil or wash work) I remove any colours by desaturating the scanned image (make sure to convert it to RGB or CMYK mode first, if you scan in grayscale like I do, or it won’t work). Then go into channels menu (next to the layers tab) and CTRL+click the icon next to RGB channel. This selects all the white areas in your image. To invert the selection (ie select all your lines/washes etc) click Select–> Invert selection (or key board shortcut).
Next go back to the layers palette, create a new layer and fill it with your selected colour (you can use the quickly fill layers key shortcut described above). At this point you can also use your brush to paint in various colours in this layer. You will only be painting on the area selected by the marching ants.
Once you are done with colouring the linework/wash, you can deselect the linework, create a new layer and paint underneath the linework layer the fill in any white areas.
this little poster I made using the “new” method
This is a great method because it produces solid coloured line work that can be manipulated in many ways. The variety of options is endless once you start to realise the things you can achieve by utilising layers as well!!
Some other little tips I have picked up:
If your brush tip disappears it means you have CTRL lock on…oops, no need for a panic attack
When you start making really big files with all your painted layers, don’t be alarmed when PS tells you the file exceeds the 2gb limit to be saved, simply save the file as a .PSB (large document format).
To reduce the size of your document you can merge the layers into each other (but only if you’ve finished working on them), or add a white-filled layer above all the others- which is supposed to reduce the document size considerably. Also if you scan your images in as 1200dpi grayscale tiffs as I do, when you place your grayscale scan into your working document, make sure to reduce the resolution (about 400-600dpi for colour images). This makes them much easier to handle.
Start to think in layers. If you haven’t used PS or Illustrator much before it is really useful to learn more about layers because they allow so much flexibility when you want to work on isolated areas of a painting without potentially ruining the rest of your illustration
Choosing colour palettes in Photoshop: I found this REALLY DIFFICULT until I found this awesome tutorial by Zoe Piel. She says that creating harmonious/limited colour palettes in PS is actually really difficult because you have an infinite number of colours to choose from (as opposed to a number of tubes of watercolour paint). Her tutorial makes total sense and has been so useful to me. She also has an awesome tutorial on making a blender tool in PS.
To quickly fill a layer with a colour use ctrl+backspace to fill with the foreground colour, alt+backspace to fill with the background colour (those are the colours on those two little square swatches in the tool menu [screen shot it]
A really cool tip I picked up from Edible Perspective (awesome vegetarian recipes!!) was that you can change the background colour (that is the colour behind your canvas- I have CS5 and it is automatically grey) by right-clicking on the background and selecting custom colour. This can be useful to know if you need to change the background for editing or colour correction purposes.
I hope you enjoyed this quick run down of the various tutorials and tips I have found useful so far in learning about digital illustration techniques.
If you have any tips that you have found useful I’d love to know- leave a comment below!
second week of Inktober is over! Here are the inky sketches I did this week- all india ink with calligraphy brush:
a forget me not flower sprig (really close up) because they are everywhere at the moment. It kinda looked better in my head…
Then I thought I’d try and expand on the little Toucan character that I sketched out a few weeks back (apparently that was actually a few months ago!!), and that ended up being what I did for the rest of the weeks sketches:
compare this, to this…
the difference a good paper makes! The first was done on cartridge paper, the second in a cheap Montmarte watercolour (190gsm) sketch book. I have found my favourite inking paper and will be doing all the rest of my inktober sketches on it.
and
Thats all for this week of the challenge.Are you taking part in Inktober? Have you managed to do a sketch for every day so far?
The project involved illustrating diagrams of the male and female moths, showing the sexual dimorphism (especially obvious in the antennae) as well as dorsal and lateral illustrations of the caterpillar. These illustrations were fun to do because they were the first entomological illustrations I have done in watercolour- and it was fun to add some colour to these pretty little moths!
Here are the final illustrations:
female moth
(smaller hairs on the antenna)
male moth
(much longer hairs on the antenna)
magpie moth caterpillar
(dorsal view)
magpie moth caterpillar
(lateral view)
Another thing I really enjoyed in this project was reconstructing life-like positioning of the caterpillar (especially in the lateral view). The specimens I had to draw from were dead and so didn’t really look so much like a living caterpillar would anymore- so that was a fun challenge to try and depict what a living caterpillar might look like.
here is also the palette of colours I used. I used Winsor and Newton cotman watercolours and the most used colours were Ultramarine Blue and Burnt sienna to mix up varying shades of brown-black and blue-black. They were the perfect colours for this species!!
All images copyright E. Scheltema 2014. Please respect my client (these illustrations are part of their research) and do not copy or use any of these images without permission. If you are interested in commissioning work or collaborating on a project like this please contact me
Just quickly popping by to post this Dusky Dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obscurus) illustration I did in Photoshop. I roughly followed this tutorial (main difference being I used different photoshop brushes and I drew the sketch with pencil+scanned it in, rather than drawing it in photoshop). This was one of my things to try out in my september goals (and one of the few I actually did end up completing!!).
Not 100% sure I like it but I think I need to play around with the technique a bit to see if I can get it looking right.
How is your October going so far? This calendar download is a few days late but I hope it is still of use in helping you organise your projects and making October a productive month!
Don’t forget to make some goals for the month and break them down into individual tasks that you can plan into your calendar!
Click on the image below to download the free A3 October calendar.
I hope you have a great month and get a chance to get involved with this months awesome Inktober challenge.
What creative projects or goals have you set for yourself for this month? Let everyone know in the comments below!
emma scheltema illustration 