tomikaze

A year or so ago, I loaned some of my traditional art to a local improv theater to show in their lobby. All was well until I unwittingly made one of the worst mistakes of my life. Being a bit of a procrastinator, I waited a little too long to retrieve the artwork from the theater and without notice, they shut down. After a year of trying to contact the individual that supposedly had the art, I started to realize it may be lost forever.

One of these lost pieces was completed the day before I was to put up my art at the theater, so I never got a proper digital scan of it. I was however, left with some evidence of it’s existence. For whatever reason, I decided to photo-document the process of creating the piece.

So here’s the the remnants of the aforementioned lost art. It’s an untitled sequel to “a League of your Own” and “Congratulations Colossal Squid”

Stage 1: Pencil lines

Pretty self-explanatory. Drew the picture with a pencil. This was the second time I drew the line art because I wasn’t happy with the first version.

Stage 2: Big Flat Undertones

I was going for something of a yin and yang theme with this so I gave the two characters contrasting warm and cool undertones. I just applied ink with cotton swabs and q-tips at this stage. Pretty basic stuff. Note that the blocks behind the characters are the opposite tone.

Stage 3: Hard Shadows

Here I markered in the darkest shadow areas with flat black. I rather liked how it looked at this stage and considered leaving it.

Stage 4: Detailed Shading

Blending up from the black shadows with grays and coloring in the skin tones on the faces. I also go back with a pencil and re-draw details that might have gotten lost under the layers of ink. This final image doesn’t really show the effect of the undertones from the second step. Just another reason it bums me out to have lost this.

So there it is. Had I known this piece would disappear, I might have taken better photos. I may see it again someday, and the many other pieces that I lost.

Sigh

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Filed under:
Art, Finished Art, In-Progress, Pictures by tomikaze