Sunday 5 March 2006

29,000 Floating Ducks

At the moment I'm working on a design for ATC's for the fellow members of the 29,000 Floating Ducks blog, and I thought some of you might be interested in the process. This is the start - draw out the thing in biro, and sort out the tones. Not just any old biro will do. It's got to be one of those see-through plastic bic medium jobs, or it's considerably more difficult. I'm glad that you don't need really expensive ones.

Then I will put this through Photoshop, and drain most of the tone away so as just to leave faint outlines. Then that means that I can sort out colours. In fact with a piece this size I wouldn't normally go to all this trouble because it's a fairly simple composition, but with the more complicated ones it's a good idea!

Then, having done that, I'll trace the design onto watercolour paper, put in the background colours as a wash, and then begin the laborious task of doing all the cross-hatching with watercolour. Again, this is a small piece and won't take that long, but some of them do ...

I hope you wanted to know all this. Sometimes people do ask!

And for those of you who haven't visited '29,000 Floating Ducks' yet, there's a link on the right.

Lots of love,

CAS

3 comments:

Joanna said...

Its always interesting to see how people work.

Gail said...

Yeah, it's great to hear how people get to the final result - sometimes I find that more interesting than the final result itslef! ;)

Gretel said...

Yes, I am a bit nerdy when it comes to how other people work, lay those techniques on me, I can't get enough!