Thursday, May 10, 2018

Archery scroll, shading and white work

Today was shading day! It's a step that makes everything look a little ugly, until the highlights and white work go over the top and tone everything back down again. I started with the green, celebrated that the blue mostly didn't need to be shaded because it was almost all dark to start with, and then did red over the pink.

Here is the scroll with all the dark green shaded in. For some reason the camera decided that we didn't have enough light and really dimmed the image down. Sorry about that.

A couple of closeups of the green work, on leaves and vines.




And here we are with the red shading in on a line-fill critter.


More closeups of the red shading on a border critter and the cloak it's wearing. Drapery is hard and I'm still not sure I really pulled off the right look here. It's not quite an exact mimicry of the source material.


After shading, it was time for white work. I really need to take a moment to endorse Dr. Ph Martin's Bleed Proof White as the most amazing non-period white I've ever worked with. If you're a scribe looking into doing white work, a jar of this stuff costs about $15 if I remember correctly, but will likely last you for decades, so it's a really good investment. Goes on nice and opaque so you don't have to go over your lines more than once, and, as advertised, doesn't bleed into the other colors underneath it and ruin your work.



I mean, just look at that. Wow. Love my Bleed Proof White!

Elsewhere someone asked me what size brushes I was using for this. I typically work with a much larger brush than people recommend, because I don't like having to reload the brush with fresh paint every two seconds. As long as the tip comes to a good sharp point, and you have the dexterity to control the brush so you're only using that point, you can almost go as large as you want. It's easier for most people, though, to eliminate the risk and work with smaller brushes, like a size 0 round for the bulk of the work and a size 3/0 or even 10/0 for the detail bits.

Bleed Proof White tends to blob in my larger brushes, so for the first time today I sucked it up and went with a 10/0. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. This brush happened to be a cheaper brand (Artist's Loft), and it comes to more of a wispy point than the sharpness I was hoping for, but I never had to worry about blobs, and that was my main concern.



And here's the white work all done for the day. All told, shading plus white work were another 2.5 to 3 hours. I think white work was actually only about an hour or hour and fifteen of that. Tomorrow, it'll be time to finally tackle the figures: the archer and the crossbowman, which are meant to be the main focus of all the decoration.

(I should note here that the blog is about a day behind the actual work. This will post on Thursday, and the shading and white work were completed Wednesday. I'm having difficulty pulling the pictures off my phone, so I'm posting them to a Facebook album first, then importing them over here. It's a pain, but the Android apps for posting to my blog are... not the best.)

(Edit: As of December 2018, pulling from a Facebook album is a good way for links to be broken and images to disappear from your blog. I'm replacing them as best I can, but it's not working as well as I would like.)

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