7" Kara Chapter 2 Watercolor Progress (part 2!)

Hey guys, just checkin' in with more ugly cellphone shots of 7" Kara pages in progress.  Trying to complete so many pages in such a short amount of time means I have to give some serious consideration as to how I spend my time.  While waiting on pages to dry, I'll do any number of things- work on blog posts, ink monsters for the upcoming Little Book of Monsters anthology, sketch, or even clean house.  These pages show a departure from my reliance on colored pencils to bring out details, and further demonstrate using a mixture of indigo+paynes grey and complimentary colors to create layered shadows.  I believe this is particularly successful in skintones, where I use a red violet as the compliment to peachy orange, the skin reads as more natural.  I think in Chapter 1, my skintones tended to verge on zombie, since they were greying out.

Since the weather has dried out just a little bit, I'm able to accomplish glazing techniques again without colors becoming muddy or pulling up.  This is particularly useful when adding washes of indigo+paynes grey to the background to enhance atmospheric perspective.  In the middle panel at the top of the above page, I was able to introduce a technique I learned over winter break- carefully dropping rubbing alcohol into wet ink creates a fisheye effect, which I thought played nicely with Ma's concerned surprice.

Retrospectively, I could have gone darker with the above page, but I'm somewhat glad I didn't, as the rest of the chapter is about to get really dark (color wise, not tone wise).  By holding back, I'm left with somewhere to go.

Some of these pages were so poorly photographed, but rest assured, this is just me checking in with a work in progress.  I hope to have the completed chapter available by MoCCA.

I think these pages have also photographed somewhat light.  This can be chalked up to the camera I'm using (actually my phone, which allows me to sync to Sugarsync and Blogger).

These night scenes are actually pretty time consuming.  The candles require a build up of color around them, in order to create the glow effect, and the large washes of color must be allowed to dry fully before further layers can be applied.  Color consistency is also harder to maintain, and multiple washes do cause some color migration.

 

 And here's the last finished page, a continuation of the glow effect.