Long time no ink (+acrylic)

[Prometheus|ANJ]

I decided to paint something with acrylics for a change, but the paint jars have probably dried. I did a sloppy ink however. There's no point in wasting time on lines you gonna paint over more or less.

I think my inking style has become 'marvel-ized' though, with thicker and more cutesy lines (and design). I used a 0.3 pen seen on the pic and a fat felt tip pen for the larger black areas.

My earlier inks were made with a 0.1 pen, and since it's so thin you can't really vary the linewidth much with it. You can squeze in a lot of texture and stuff though. The relatively clean style I have now doesn't allow that. I feel I can't really control where my inking style is heading.

I might document further progress. As for now, here's a digicam snapshot.
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/misc/borgink.jpg

...as you can see, it's the usual backgroundless pinup... sigh. I'm pretty happy with the arms though. He has a claw thing and a laser...uh, glove/fist. Pow pow.

If I paint it I'm gonna make a dark base of thinned acrylics and then add darker and brighter spots from there. If I make the base too dark I can't see the lines, so I have to add the extra dark spots individually. Thinned down black acrylic works a bit like multiply so I only have to go over the same area twice with the base color brush. Rendering black is hard, the only lighter spots are usually (cold) speculars. I'd be making those with more opaque paint.
Some green fill light might work with the borg theme.

[killing.people]

i love you.

[Snowfly]

very nice. i'm not into the comic book style, but it looks like you pulled it off with finesse. it looks really fluid too, considering you used .1's and .3's.

i hate ink....i fear it!

[daG-ELLO]

First off I'll say that it's really cool. Looks like it's going to be a good pin up when you finish it up.

I haven't tried using acrylic when painting over my penned work, so I'm not quite sure how much you will be able to clean up (though by some of the work on your website I would say that you're going to clean it up nicely). The only part that bugs me about the inking is the sketchiness of the closer arm, and the fact that you "drew out of the lines" on that shadow near his crotch. And other nicks here and there, but they're not that important or noticeable.

Other than all that it's most impassive. Kind of like Thanos goes Borg. Man that would be a scary thought wouldn’t it. @_@;;

Anyway, FINISH IT! I want to see! :D

[Johannes]

I like everything except the head, its to small and pointy for my taste.
The left arm could be a sort od powerfist, like the one Batman took down Superman with! :)

Noobquestion - I wonder - is that paper? How will it survive the acrylic and the ink, DR. theyre waterfast I hope...

[WildSpruceMoose]

It looks nice. Good clean line art. Detailed and the pose is still, but somewhat complex still. Acrylics over pen hmmm. Should be interesting.

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Thanks! Luckily my colors were not all dry yet so I decided to have a go at it.

Here's the setup. I also used a W&N Titanium white jar. The brushes are:
$1 cow-hair brush (or something) - I used that for all the details rendering.
Toothbrush - used to make the splatter seen later.
Fingers - great tool to cover large areas, like for making base color or background stuff.
A plastic lid from an icecream jar helps the colors stay wet, and the tissue is for wiping the brush.
The paper is Copymachine/Laserprinter paper, 160grams.
The DR pens don't bleed when used with acrylics or watercolor.

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/setup.jpg

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Base colors. Fingers and brush + watered down black. I don't worry about the edges or paper wobbling. As you can see the line art quality is already irelevant. It's just there as a guide.

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/base.jpg

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Added splatter and started some rendering with various hues.

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/wip2.jpg
http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/wip2close.jpg

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Rendering. I used some pencils but not much since I they don't work well with acrylics. I need those PrismaColor ones.

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/wip3.jpg

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Finished. Head is wonky. BG and pose is dull. Lighting type the usual. It's hard to paint with acrylics cuz their value change when they dry (10% or so). They also go grey as the brush and palette gets polluted, plus, the amount of colors you have is limited. That's due to lazyness though, I could probably spend time cleaning the brush properly and put more colors on the palette, but then it would take ages to paint and I'm a lazy git.
I try to use saturated colors to compensate for the 'greying'.

Woot woot? A grey BG??? Yeah, it's not the usual white BG cuz I supected that the white would kill the darker values of the figure.

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/fin.jpg

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/borg/finsetup.jpg

[Johannes]

Weeee! - very hardcore guide. i like it! :D Favourite part is the green light on powerfist and the chestplate. Kudos for showing this, very bravely done I must say - respect.

Look - theres a can of humbrol fantasy! Oh, the memories!

[stephen]

nice prom, i love seeing how you work, very educational.
mabye next time try and indicate him in a borg ship or something?

either way nice work!

[fukifino]

I nearly fell off my chair when I opened that first image and saw a bunch of Citadel acrylics on your table. I never even considered using those for anything other than painting miniatures. The end results look really good, but I'm wondering if actual artists acrylics (meant for painting on paper or canvas) won't have that graying problem you encounter.

Still, very awesome work, and nice to see some of the process. Of course, it helps to be able to draw such awesome lineart in the first place. ;)

[AmadorL]

outstanding:blue:

A

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Thanks. Yeah it's Humbrol Fantasy and Citadel colors. They are probably not the best colors out there, but it's better than nothing. Oils are the best for getting good colors I think. I hate oils tho as they are a mess to work with and don't dry.

I have a couple of tube colors too but they are too slimy and transparent. I think they are meant to be used thick. I paint really thin and the figure paints are meant to be used like that.

I know I took the easy way out with the flat background, AGAIN. Sigh, some day I will need to start doing proper ones.


You can see the value change of the BG behind the cables of the rightmost arm. The grey inside was painted with the same value as the dry outside. When it dried it made the inside look darker so the silhuette holes doesn't really work.

[daG-ELLO]

Man that cleaned up oustandingly! I see your process of thought and think it's great! I might have to take my acrylics out and try that myself. Very cool! I kept this picture. :)

[Snowfly]

outstanding. a lesser artist would've cried at step 2. so are you adding a real bg in digital? the figure is awesome.

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Snowfly> Yes, people often think I'm ruining the piece when I do the base color, but it's necessary to add it cuz painting on white detail by detail is not a good approach. The ink is just there to so I know where the details should go.
Also, the brush has a much lower resolution than the ink pen, so when using this technique it's pointless to spend time on the line art quality. I try to work with a big brush so I don't get caught up with lesser details. The major shapes should be correct first. I don't know how well I did with this piece though. It's hard to be brave with acrylics and there's no undo!

Sometimes I clean up and edit digitally, but this one is pure natural media so far, except for the curve and slight sharpen in Photoshop. The original is a tad more grey. Some varnish might amp up the contrast though.
As the 'painting blindness' is going away I start seeing stuff to fix. I'm not sure I will touch it more though, as it's a rather pointless pinup anyways. I just wanted to play with the acrylics for the first time in a while.

[WildSpruceMoose]

Absolutely awesome work! I mean it. You have such a great style and this is a great example of it. I would like to get control of acrylics the way you can. I would hate to have no crits on improvement because I sound like a drooling moron, but this is incredible.

[Porkasaurus]

The colors in the metal body are awesome. I love how there are tons of colors but it stays looking "right."

I need to know how to do that. I see a lot of brown and blue in there, with some green. What I'm wondering is what method or order did you apply those colors?

[Ant4d]

prom, wow, very nice! do more please!

[Robolus]

5 Stars from me for your insight of your working process! It is very helpful, you should post this on your webside too.

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Thanks, again.

Porka> I used the colors on the palette to make the different hues, like the rust and blue/cyan. My blue color had dried so I had to use an old Humbrol darker cyan I had (5039). For the rust part I used 'Blazing orange' (citadel) and for the greens is Bilious green (also Citadel). The white is Winsor Newton Titanium white, a squeezy jar tube thing 250ml. It costed me around $18. The citadel and humbrol colors are 12ml and close to $2 each. My fav color is probably Bestial Brown (Citadel), but I didn't use it much for this piece. Snot green (Citadel) is pretty useful too. Humbrol 5060 is a good red.

I can't keep all the colors on the palette because they dry up, so mostly I only have access to 70% of the colors. I decided to make some parts dominant blue and some dominant rust so the different parts of the borg looked ...different. Other than that it's pretty random where I added the hues. I tried to make the blues looks like speculars though.
By keeping black and white blobs on the palette I could control the saturation and value of the colors somewhat.


Do more? I get a terrible neck-ache from doing this piece, because how I lean over the 'canvas'. The painting process took me about... four hours according to the digicam date but it felt like longer.
I wrote some other tutorials/faq/'how I work' but they're still on my HardDrive awaiting my lazyness to go away.

[garg]

Thank you sooo much.. You started me with acrylics with the tutorials you have on your site and I'm really grateful to you for that :)

I lovee this one!!

[Pencil Soldier]

Thats great! Im jsut startign with arcylics and now i have one more method to try. :)

[Fipse]

Nice! Thanks for sharing your process. Maybe I´m putting my modelacrylics out and try something too - i Have spent too much time behind the computer anyway ;). BTW I´m using for modelling normally Lukas-Acrylics and Magic-Color Inks. Has anyone experience in using esp. the Acrylics in fine art?

Fipse