Trying to get emotional

Here is the sketch for the recently added painting: The Claw

As the title suggests I am trying to play with the different displays of emotion . I really wanted to convey the horror in the monster’s face and the unbridled joy in the girls. I am having a lot of fun with this new series of paintings and am trying to push myself to show much more dynamic reactions from characters.

A good friend of mine is obsessed with these machines. I am sure in the secret underground world of stuffed animals she is viewed as some kind of menace. Snatching poor souls from their plexi-glass support center, like the Passover ghost. I swear I once saw a machine with a red x painted on it’s mantle and she quietly muttered “ Not this one….”

Speaking about the process as an artist seems like it might come off as horribly self-indulgent. Of course I think it is interesting… but does anyone else? It’s a good thing my apprehension is smaller than my ego I suppose. So here goes:

I used to have a painstaking process for composing a picture. I would work out thumbnails, than draw a fully finished sketch. This drawing was worked out on various sheets of tracing paper, where I painstakingly refined the drawing up from loose sketchy line work. Than I would produce a final polished drawing on one solid tracing sheet. After the drawing was done I would transferred it to water color paper (involving a whole other agonizing process) then Ink the drawing before coloring. I would have ground the paper into pulp myself and harvested the trees from the soil of mother earth herself too, if only I had the chance…

Suffice it to say, this process was really dumb.

The result was I ended up redrawing the same image at least three times, which made it very hard to not make the final look stiff and forced. It also took forever and was totally unnecessary. I have since streamlined my process. I still like to start a drawing really rough and then refine the drawing over multiple sheets but now I use animation paper

That stuff is so great! It not only has a good tooth but it is also translucent. When I get a drawing to this point where I can start nailing things down I use a light box to transfer the image to my final working surface. I used to work on the thickest water color paper possible, 300lb ! This stuff was tough, and you had to use a diamond tipped ban saw to cut it. It would never curl from the paint, but the transfer process was so ridiculous I had to abandon using it for “planned-out” illustrations. Now that I am better at managing the paint I can work on 140lb sheets with out it wrinkling and I can light box the drawing through it’s thickness.

When transferring I solidify the last revisions and forms on the watercolor paper, rather than just painting by the numbers like I did before. I also don’t plot colors out anymore. I will just jump right into laying color down. This makes the process feel more like painting, rather than just going through the motions. Since doing this my finals have been much more confidant and much more fun to paint (which I think shows in the work.) It also makes trying to show emotion easier as it feels fresh and less labored.

I am really happy with how the colors came out in this one, and in general I feel great about my new work. With the free time I get from a streamlined process I liberate stuffed animals and extradite them back home to claw machines…but that is a different story.

That’s all for now,
Vincent