New Drawings/Paintings!

In this post here are a few paintings and drawings.

These 2 are "sketches". The first one I was experimenting with putting down color first without a sketch then inking over the top of it, the second one I was testing how things would look if they were all outlined in blue. Both are colored in watercolor, the second one also has crayola marker blended in.

 This one is watercolor, small bits of children's acrylic paint, lots of watercolor, colored pencil, some soft pastel, white pen, and before coloring the while image was outlined in brown ink.

This one is just pen.

I hope you enjoyed these pictures!

~ God Bless ~

~ Firefly

Coloring VS Rendering (Drawing)

Hi! In this post I will be talking about the difference between coloring and rendering a drawing.

Note: When I say render I am referring to the drawing realm only, I am not talking about rendering a picture by cutting it out using a program or 3D rendering.

Okey so, lets get started!

If I was going to ask you what is the difference between rendering and coloring what would you say? This might be an obvious answer for some or maybe even most people but to be honest I never thought about it until a few days ago when I was working on a picture. Well today I'm going to give you that answer, and even if you already know what I'm about to say please stay with me, I might say something new to think about, you never know!

If I was going to put simply the difference between rendering and coloring I'd say this:

Coloring = Colored "in the lines", or put color in the areas they belong.
Rendering = Making the image really pop, by adding shading and details so it looks more polished and professional.

Like this:

There is another key difference between coloring and rendering. If you color, obviously you need to use color to define the area, but rendering you do not need to use color to shade your sketch or pen drawings. If you use hatching, cross hatching and other types of ways to shade using patterns you are not coloring but making lines, yet you can still make something look three-dimensional.

 Look at this drawing for example, the first image is pencil, the second is pen (Pardon the low quality images). As you can tell there is no media being used to color in the areas to make everything look defined, it's all rendered color-free.

Here are a few other ink/pen drawings, these don't have any color but they are fully rendered.

 The truth of the matter is you do not need color to render pictures, you need color to bring another dimension of life to a picture. You can make photo realistic images without color, but there is something about color that makes an image look truly alive. Using color properly can make it look as if a person has blood running through their veins and life in their eyes, and flowers look so alive the scent is almost in the air. Color adds to be magic but it's not needed for the magic to begin.

Here's a picture I rendered first in pen but then I colored with watercolor. See how the color makes the character seem more alive? Now, I'm not a professional colorist but I think the results are still nice.
Where the shading is, there are pen lines, they might not be as bold but they are there.

There are different levels of rendering, you have the illustration above which is done in light coloring. Then you have this illustration where much more time was taken, more types of media are used and all the rest. The pen outline was rendered nicely, but the color made it alive.

You can still color and have amazing art. If you have ever watched Looney Tunes the characters themselves never had shading unless it added to a scene (like lightning or something dramatic) but they still looked alive somehow, even though they did not look "real" in the sense of visual realism. Part of that was of course the genius that was the late Mel Blanc but still voice acting aside, the expressions and visual appeal of the animation made them look alive. Or even Steam Boat Willie, The first official Disney cartoon, though maybe not the most advanced it still looked good even for it's age. No color, bad sound but it still was appealing.

I'll end this with a little video, it's a shading demo me taking one flower and going from simply color to a more advanced rendering. It's done in GIMP but the principles still apply. I hope this was an enjoyable article, and thank you for reading

God Bless,

~ Firefly

Animation Demo - Me Animating Atoms on a Path

Yes, you get two posts this week! Yay you! This time it's an animation demo, what I mean by that is you will see me animating something. It won't be in real time but double speed.
All animation is done in GIMP.

 Hopefully something useful will come out of this for somebody!

I'm animating this:

 This is a sprite for Tilly's Rose Garden. It will be used when she "dies". I don't want bloody violence in my games so this is what I came up with so you get the point she's incapacitated but without the blood or anything.

I did sketch out the basic idea of what I wanted to do in my sketch book.

Here's The Video:
No sound for your own convenience. I also didn't put any captions because doing that takes up too much space on the screen. I'm uploading directly to blogspot not youtube or anything like that so I can't add annotations. 

This animation only has 8 frames, and took me about 20 minutes to make, maybe less or more I can't tell by the footage. It says a very low amount of minutes and I find it hard to believe I did this that fast. LOL

Oh well, I hope this was enjoyable!

~ God Bless ~

~ Firefly

Mourning Monastery - Timelapse + Poem Excerpt

This week we get a speedpaint! Ohhhh God, it's been so long since I've drawn/painted a picture on the computer that my arm literally hurts right now. It had a pump for a while even, that's just sad to be honest...but anyway.

Okey so, this is a darker drawing than what I normally do but it's based off of a poem I wrote and my writing is normally somewhat dismal with a dash of sass so...Yep.

I also tried out a new screen recorder called ShareX...I don't know if I like it or not yet, the number one thing I don't like so far is I can't find a pause feature only stop, and lots of clips is a pain to edit so...........

I'll give an excerpt from the poem since it'll give the artwork more context. There are 8 verses these are 1, 3, 8.

Look at these old walls,
Perfected in their height,
Sculpted as if from angels in all their holy light.
Painted ceilings a plenty,
Majesty of which only the galaxies would compete,
But yet there is rubble, and dust on the seats.
 ...
These walls though having no voice,
Looking at them they speak,
They remember the times when they used to be a sanctuary for the weak.
The echos of hymns and spiritual songs echo in the gale,
If you listen close these echos prove that will angels prevail.
...

Perhaps though a brighter end will come to pass, and in to play,
Maybe the sun will shine again and show the light of day,
And possibly, you never know, maybe back will come the might,
And maybe, just possibly, back will come the Holy Light.

Everything drawn/made in GIMP.

I hope you enjoyed this little set here.
Thank you for looking!


~ God Bless ~

~ Firefly

3 New Drawings

Hi! These are 2 new drawings I've done. These are for a project I'm not gonna talk about yet.

Enjoy!



These the more abstract one is a do over of the fully colored one. 

Fully Colored one is watercolor, marker and colored pencil.
Abstract is pen and markers.

This one is mostly watercolor and colored pencil with some pen and marker.

  


I hope this was a pleasant little post!

~ God Bless ~

~ Firefly

Dry Mediums Versus Wet Mediums

Hi! This week I'm going to talk about some of the major differences between wet and draw traditional art mediums. I won't go in to express details but just some general things to keep in mind.

Okay, lets begin!

Control-ability:

This is in general easier with dry media; Colored pencils and charcoal pencils can be sharpened to a point and do fine details, whereas things like watercolors and gouache is a lot harder to control because you need brushes and water. Markers are much easier if you want wet media, and the harder medium for dry would

be soft and oil pastels as they are neither brushed on nor always in pencil form but are closer to being small blocks most of the time, but you can but soft pencils in some places as pencils.

 

 

Blending:

Blended with baby-oil and blender pencil

Blending things like colored pencils is based off of layering and burnishing , there are many techniques including using a blender pencil, a white colored pencil, or baby-oil to blend colored pencils. For graphics pencils and soft pastels there are blending stubs that are made to blend the more powedery medium together, you can also use cotton swabs you buy from the bath section of he store or your finger, but I've had some unhappy accidents with using my fingers for blending like forgetting which finger had which color then I mixed and made an ugly color...ugggghhhh don't do that!

Watercolor blended with more watercolor and water

For watercolors you need water to blend, and water-based markers...well...you pretty much don't have a good blending capability with them unless you want to use them also as watercolors (how to do that will be

talked about another time). For alcohol-based markers they're blended using a colorless blender and eachother, different brands have colorless blenders and I have never used one but I have watched many other artists use them and they are quite useful.

Color Depth:

This is something that can be a bit irritating but c'est la vie. With wet media the color you put down is never the color that dries, it always dries lighter. Depending on the medium and quality, the color, texture, and depth will change from not so bad to drastic. For example, you can put down a wash of watercolor from a decent brand, the color you put on is vibrant and saturated, once it dries the white of the paper comes out a bit and lightens the color. Markers are the same, and a side tip never believe the color on the barrel of the marker, test it first, the colors they put on the barrel are never accurate; But anyway back on point... Here's another example: If you put down a medium purple but it looks very dark wait a few minutes for it to dry it will lighten up a bit. 

Colored with Colored pencil - Background with watercolor

Dry mediums on the other hand, the color you put down is the color you get, there is no drying time so whatever you see on the paper is what you will always see (as long as you consider aging which cause things to fade over time). Another thing to remember is the color of your paper will account for

the color of the medium you put down. If you have a black toned paper, don't expect to see any marker unless you have some kind of neon paint marker. If you use something like colored pencils on the other hand, you're much more likely to see the pencil. Lighter colors are obviously recommended.

____

Okay, after reading these 3 contrasting differences which one do I think is better?

None! Each are different, and special, taking days, months and/or years of practice. And to be honest, I generally do not use only one medium in a drawing. Even in a colored pencil dominated drawing I will use watercolor for the background and/or pastels. For a marker piece I'll use colored pencils to shade. For watercolors I'll use water-based markers and colored pencils to shade. Just because these things are different doesn't mean they can't work together. I find it a bit amazing actually that each one of these mediums when used alone or together can all make photo-realistic artwork or super cartoony artwork. Some do it better than others, but the results are astonishing.

So where to start? Well, that's also for another time, but if I was to say anything, I'd say a graphite normal pencil, an eraser that works, and a sketch book. That's really all you need.

Now go out there and draw something! The world is looking for new things to discover!

Thank you for reading.

~ God Bless ~

~ Firefly