Watercolor funtimes!

Tomorrow is mail day, so today became a full-on commission grind day.

Here's Max the board gamer. Oh man, I would *love* to do a Precocious parody of Clue - but I know that would never work in a strip format. So, all you producers out there, time to pick up Precocious and turn it into an animated series. (While we're at it, someone grab Lauren Faust to redo the character designs. THIS CAN'T FAIL.)

And here's our darling sea turtle. I painted it while watching cartoons. I'm totally an adult, you guys!

Oh, wait. That's true. I have to be an adult now and pack up everything tonight for mailing. Noooooooooo.

Watercolors! *unsniffle*

Finally feeling better today! Hooray! Now I have no excuse for slacking off!

And, since I can't slack off, here are the watercolors! Enjoy!

Watercolor inks! *sniffle*

It took me a full day before I realized I had to actually scan these things if I wanted to share them. I blame illness.

This is how wussy I am. I have the weakest cold known to man, and it's turned me into a whiny and useless baby. It's not the actual feeling bad thing - it's more psychological damage done by three days of "Am I coming down with something? This can't be it. It'll surely either go away or become a real illness come morning. What's with this stupid thing!?" Still, I went to Costco today and I DIDN'T FEEL WELL ENOUGH TO BUY A PIZZA. Do you know what a tragedy that is? Costco pizza is the best and I missed a rare chance to get it! (Rare because I don't go often and I'm too lazy to drive across town just for pizza.) This is a real tragedy. I'm so very lightly sick, but it's enough to wonk out my sense of smell and make eating much less fun. Didn't discover this until last night when I had to triple the seasoning on my chicken to get any flavor across. Thank goodness I wasn't cooking for a group, as was originally planned.

Anyway, on to the watercolor inks. Yes, I wanted them completed earlier, but it doesn't really matter *when* they're finished, because the plan wasn't to ship them until Tuesday anyway. If I wasn't such a whiny baby, I would have done them today. Instead, I'll try to knock them out tomorrow.

Here's the happy Precocized Fenris ink. You get the full body for the final, but not much has chanced. With all watercolor inks, it looks a little weird because the paint will do most of the shading.

And here's Ursula reading in her bedroom. I'm going to have to do a printout of this one and do a few tests before I do any final painting. First I must figure out the best color scheme, then I must make sure I am capable of mixing those colors.  (I've had lots of struggles with getting a nice pink so far.)

I have one more watercolor that needs to be sketched, and then things get quiet. (Note: It's not good when it gets quiet.) Well, I guess I can do convention prep...

Di-Va's corruption

Forgot to post the one watercolor I did complete over the stream. Here is Di-Va trying to influence the Ticking Time Bomb.

Turns out painting a character cloaked in shadow with limited watercolor skills is pretty hard, but I think it all came out decent enough. The dark spot at the top center is not on the original, by the way. The paper is warped slightly - what with it being a WATERCOLOR and all - and that part simply wasn't in direct contact with the scanner glass.

The remaining watercolors will be done in the next few days. I was hoping to do them tonight, but I remembered there's this strange webcomic thing I'm obligated to do - and that comic's buffer is down to one. Since Tuesday is a streaming day, and it's a bad idea to wear out my arm too much before a live drawing session, I'm guessing the next two will be completed on Wednesday.

Night of the Watercolors!

Today seemed like it was going to be a loss. I woke up feeling terrible, and I didn't stop feeling terrible until around 7pm. By then, I had given up and decided to watch some Homeland via On Demand... but I have lots to do before Intervention next weekend, so I must use all my wellness!

I had mentioned I was going to do a dapper owl last night for the convention - Intervention's mascot is an owl - and that seemed the proper project. (I had the reference pic open from the night before anyway.) The goal here was cartoony fun, and I had cartoony fun. I win. (You can click on all the paintings for a larger version.)

Weeeeell, in order to make that owl painting, I had to rip my watercolor paper into four parts. Since I already had my painting setup out, why not keep going? I wasn't sure what I was going to paint, but I figured a fox would fit well in my con portfolio, no matter the con. Who doesn't like foxes?

When finished, I posted the pic to twitter... and got 15 favs/follows/compliments/retweets in five minutes from it. Maybe this is something good! Let's keep painting! (Note for readers/followers: Artists crave all those feedback things. Silence = perceived failure.)

I began looking for reference pics, taking some twitter advice, and found a cute calico that I wanted to paint. (I should note here that I change around the composition for all pics, so it's not a direct copy. The original calico photo was actually a shot from the behind the cat.) I had started laying down paint when I decided I was finally feeling good enough to be social, so I did an impromptu stream!  (Poor people that showed up were subjected to the usual bad camera angle, but this time also had to suffer through me watching the Nationals/Braves game.)

One page left to paint, I went with a request and did a cutesy squirrel. This one was finished pretty quickly, so I decided to pull out my smaller watercolor pad and take another request.

I'd had a request for a genet earlier in the night, and I taunted the poor person. Well, I'm a softy, and the request was repeated, so I did a quick image search and found an adorable baby pic I could use.

By the time this one was gone, I was all painted out - and all my watchers had abandoned me. The night of watercolor had ended! (I don't blame 'em for leaving. Listening to local baseball commentary, with heavy political commercials every break, since VA is a battleground state, must have been awful.)

These pieces will be put into my Intervention portfolio, and I think I can add critter paintings to my commission catalog. Bonus:  Commission a watercolor, and you can watch me paint it over a stream!

Edit: For the record, the large pieces were all 11x7.5" while the genet was 8.5x5.5"

The Wheel of Fortune

As promised, here is the piece I used for my second contribution to The Webcomics Tarot Project: The Wheel of Fortune! Go to the website to see it in card form, and make sure to check out my Copper Road contribution there too: The King of Wands. Both pieces from this project will be for sale soon - I just need to figure out the best method of offering them. I'd like to try an auction, but where and how has yet to be determined.

I did this piece in a special way, too! I STREAMED! It wasn't planned at all. Some organizing left my new webcam sitting on my desk, so I opened it and plugged it in. Hey, it worked! I went to Ustream and logged in, then click the "broadcast" button. Hey, I was streaming! Setup took, like, two minutes! So, hey, check out my streaming page! I don't have a good streaming setup yet - thanks to those who came today, as feedback is very valuable at this point - nor do I have a set schedule for streaming, but the page is there and I'll do more test runs when I have non-Precocious traditional media projects to share. Won't draw Precocious on streaming, as I intend to build a buffer and I don't want to spoil future strips. Copper Roads are fair game, though, as they are normally posted the day they are made. I wonder if these streaming places are also good to use just for chatting. Some days it might be fun to just have a chat session with readers. When I'm arting, I obviously can't pay full attention to questions. Streaming announcements will be made on my Twitter feed for now. Once I get it going for real, I'll have a set schedule, with advertising on Precocious' main page.

Back to the piece, I am rather happy with how this one came out. It's quite close to the idea in my head, and I didn't botch any coloring *too* bad. Watercoloring went well, and the touchups I did with colored pencil really helped some parts pop. As someone noticed, Roddy got left out of the mix. Blame the format. While I painted extra stuff on the side/bottom of the piece, the tarot card is tall and thin, which means it took a lot of planning to get as many characters as I did in the active space. Originally, this was my only tarot card contribution, so I felt no pressure to cover all the main cast. When Copper Road got a card, I went back and made it all the Gemstone kids. Sorry, Roddy.

Moving into darkness

Here's an update from my watercolor adventures. Hoooo, how did I forget what happens when you try to depict a night scene with a naturally light medium? Layers and layers and layers and layers of paint later, here is where we stand:

This is the current stage of work. Everything is presumably working OK, but the light level is for a "Hollywood night" scene. We're getting to a scary point of the darkening: When do I cross the line that divides "suitably dark" and "loss of detail dark"? I mean, this is a big bright full moon night no matter what, simply because it'd be a silhouette against a night sky otherwise - but how bright am I making this moon? (The stars in the sky will be added using colored pencil or gouache, if you were wondering.)

Basically, I'm hoping this post is a normal process post and not a "where things went wrong" milestone.

EDIT: I sucked it up and pressed forward. Here is a piece I'm pretty happy with:

I color corrected this one to match the actual piece on my Photoshopping monitor, but I know from checking this blog out on my Macbook that screen brightness counts - especially in a piece that's reliant on brightness. Newer screens are probably showing this as lighter than it actually is, but I hope it's close enough for you all to get a sense of the level of light I aimed for.

The Dynamite Jester - painted

Here's the result of my first watercoloring attempt in... man, a long time. It's neat to get back into that habit. Painting was pretty uneventful for this one. The only hiccup was my inability to make a super vibrant magenta with the basic set of watercolors I have. The photo was taken with my iPhone, because I didn't trust the scanner to catch all the lights properly.

The dance is done

So here's what happened with the Deirdre commission. I decided to get playful with the dress on a whim. Hope it panned out.

With this, my venture into watercolor midriffs ends.

The heart attack piece

This one came into existence kicking and screaming. What you see here is actually attempt number three.  Even the scanner fought me, as it decided to pull that trick where every light yellow comes out as pale blue. I did my best to correct that, but I can only do so much.  The *actual* blue isn't nearly as choppy as the scan makes it out to be either. The whole piece is actually darker in real life, which makes it doubly frustrating that the scanner ate it anyway.  The aforementioned white ink technique was attempted on a sample page, but the ink came out too uneven to be useful.  I am artistically worn out.  Anyway, enjoy the second piece in the belly dancer series.

Belly dancing, take two

Here's Ms. Bard doing her belly dancing thing, this time in different colors! I hope this one is better than the first attempt. The scanner seemed to hate the lighter, subtle purples of the drapery and veil, but that's to be expected.

My work schedule is going to be shuffled yet again. First of all, I have to work around construction that'll be happening in my apartment next week. I doubt the workers will be here for more than a couple days, but for the duration of the project my coloring computer will be under a tarp. That means getting my comic work done this weekend instead of next week.  Next, it's putting the finishing touches on the book, which means some back and forth about design, drawing/scanning a few more pieces of art and writing some copy. (I am SO slow at copy.)  Everything else - commissions and one special project - can be worked on in my studio, so that stuff will be the priority when the workers are here. Yeah, I've been moving pretty slow - but I try to keep moving.

What is color theory?

Here's the Ms. Bard watercolor as it stands now. I made the mistake of diving into the piece without planning. One part of my brain told me a gold bikini would look good. Another part of my brain wanted to try using only cool colors in the piece. The result is a mishmash that I'm not happy with. It's going in the con portfolio, but I'll probably redo it for the actual commission piece - this time with some color tests done first.

As a test, I desaturated the image and upped the contrast. When *that* looks better than what I made, it means I should start over. Darn it.

There's evil inside me!

(The blog-spamming continues. Be sure to look around for all the recent posts)



First off, here's the inks for one of my watercolor belly dancer commissions. Isn't it nice? I wanted to have it finished already, buuuut....

I'm sick. Booooo.

I've been fighting this for a few days now, and today I chose to give in and let it turn me into a whiny weaklng. No luck so far, but it *did* put me behind with my work schedule... so yay? This is one of those sicky things that won't make up its mind. I'm not sniffly or anything. I'm not in full-blown flu mode by any stretch. Instead, I've been steadily hovering on that border of "sleep if off" and "fight through it." I've got what feels like a slight fever, I'm continuously nauseous and I've got persistent head and body aches. It's enough to make me miserable, but not enough to justify a complete shutdown.

I'm gonna fight as much as I can today (the plan was to get three more blog-worthy things done) but I'm not sure how much progress will actually be made. Wish me luck!

Awkward Max is awkward

Commissions may be closed for now, but I still have a few left over that need attention! Here's the Max watercolor for your approval.

I'm not sure how active this blog will be the rest of the month, since most of my work is for the book and can't be shared yet, but I hope to have *something* up every few days. Don't lose faith in me, folks!

Watercolors for you!

The photos aren't that great, but the finals of these commissions are super awesome! Enjoy. The pieces will ship out Monday.

$25 Commissions are still available!

Update, 12/12/11: Commissions are currently closed. I'll open up again sometime in January.

The old commissionathon page may be gone, but that doesn't mean the fun is over! I'm still taking $25 watercolor commissions. What you get is a one-character watercolor (be it Precocious or your own character) and either a prop or simple background. The size is 8"x5".



As a bonus, I will also be including an extra limited-edition Precocious gocco print. Get 'em while they're still around!

For more watercolor samples, look over the sketch blog. I also have some more-talented artist friends who are looking for commission work, so if you have a big project in mind, use the feedback link to drop me a note about it and I'll pass it on!

The slickest of kats

As promised in the last post, here is the final of the Slick Kat commission! I cheated on this one a bit an used pen for the black markings... but they kinda look awesome so I think I can get forgiveness.

Another watercolor done!

Here's the Quincy in summer piece! Slick Kat is up next. I've been holding off on him because I'm scared of his precise markings. Today it will happen, though!

The mission is commission

Today I bring you two more commission pieces in progress.



The inks for the Quincy piece are done, and now the tough stuff begins. This is easily going to be my most challenging watercolor due to the tree, but I also must figure out how to properly render Quincy as being in the shade. I'm aiming to get to the coloring tomorrow, but don't hold me to it!



And here we have concept sketches for a commission of a reader's character, Slick Kat, done as a Precocious kid. I need to work on the markings a bit more before it's correct, but it's a start. The clothing and pose are not set either, although I do equate vest with "slick". This was just a first try.

I demand a lot from my readers

Look! It's the lost Yvette watercolor! The good lad who received her was kind enough to take the photo I forgot to take and send it to me... and it only cost him the price of a NEW CAMERA! (I appreciate the dedication, but that money could have been spent on ME instead!)

Anyway, if this is a trend, the next person I send a watercolor to has to buy one of those extremely sensitive $2000 large-format scanners to capture the essence of the piece. And then they should send me that scanner, because daddy wants.