A little bit about the paintin' process

Hellooo! Welcome back, if you read last weeks post, and if not, hello, nice to meet you, I'm Rachel, and I'm going to give you a little run-through of what I do from start-t0-finish of the design process for each and every one (sometimes several times..) of the cards/canvases/mugs that I create. So basically, it's a pretty long-winded process, and while a lot of people think I paint them on the computer, digitially, or just paint them using traditional media, I actually use a mixture of both techniques, and so in this post I'm going to take you through how I made the 'Paintin' Puffin' piece. (With pictures and everything! I'm so fancy.) So let's get to it!

STEP 1

This is one of the most fun steps. It's basically trying to translate my brain onto paper, and whilst that might not sound like a lot of fun, it really is. This step can take place anywhere, at any time, on any material. So, for example, the idea for the Christmas card 'Merry Christmas Deer,' struck whilst I was on my lunch break at work, and I didn't have many 'proper' materials to hand at the time, and so the original idea looked a little something like this:

Top quality, I know. (Biro and a scrap of paper. Sold out of prints in this one, I'm afraid..) However, what we're talking about in this post is the Paintin' Puffin piece, so (focus, Rachel!) I'd better get back to that. It starts out with whatever vague idea I have in my brain, sketchy, messy lines and a lot of little thumbnail sketches, mostly trying at first to work out the composition. Anatomy and detail is out of the window for now, those are rules that apply later, for this stage, it's just whatever I can do to sort out a clear image of what I'm working towards in my head. Usually, I'll do anywhere from 2 to 30 of these messy little sketches, until eventually (eeeventually) I'll draw one that just works. Sometimes I'll know when this is, sometimes it'll be another 7 sketches later and I'll go back and look again, and have an 'oh. I could have stopped an hour ago..' moment. So finally, I'll end up with what I have labelled in my brain (and in the sketchbook, too) a 'final draft sketch.' Still pretty messy, and still rough, no correct anatomy in sight just yet..(Gravity? What's that? An easel can fly if it wants to in Rachel's sketchy land)

STEP 2

So, once I have this done, I then work out the details. Anatomy, proportions, details. This is where I would use references, photographs of my own, images from books, and online resources to get the details down correctly. (You would not believe how many random puffin folders I have on my laptop. Seriously, it's actually quite impressive. Or frightening. I'm going to stick with impressive, though.) I tend to doodle these correctly-proportioned creatures wherever I can, sketchbooks, scraps, tens of times, until I am familiar with the position and joints and feathers and all. (This bit often gives me hand cramp.) Now, since I don't have a 'light box,' I use a little cheaty technique to transfer my rough sketch to my fancy (read: expensive and don't want to ruin) watercolour paper. However, (because I'm cheeky) if you want to find out more about that, you'll have to wait until next weeks blog post! (See what I did there? I'm sorry, I've got to keep you interested, I can't reveal all my secrets in a single blog post now, can I?) So. Sketch transferred, fancy paper, some anatomy sorted:

STEP 3

Time for step 3. Time for paints!! Now, anyone who knows me will be able to vouch for the (I think artsy and endearing, they think clumsy) fact that I have paint on most of my possessions. (Clothes, laptop, walls, mugs, cat..you name it, at some point, I have likely spilled/splashed/spattered paint on it/them. ) If there is anyone reading this currently who has never before experienced the sheer joy of painting, I urge you, give it a try. 'But I have no artistic capabilities!' I hear you cry - Let me tell you, if an elephant can paint, so can you. It is (for me, anyway, excuse me a little bit of preaching) one of the most therapeutic things you can do. Anyway, painting is fab, and this is one of my favourite stages. Adding colour to the piece! I'm sure there are lots of rules and techniques for this, which I should likely be following, but that's not really why I paint. I paint for fun, and relaxation, and so I tend to take a gut-feeling kind of approach to painting. So, adding colour, the next steps look a bit like this:

These are the 'base layers' of the painting. Usually, as I tend to be a bit of a night owl (if you read the last blog post, you'll have cottoned onto this from the dim lighting anecdote), by the time I've reached this stage of a painting, it's well into the early hours of the morning, and so I'll leave the painting to dry - usually precariously balanced somewhere high up, away from little kitty paws, I think my cat has artistic aspirations of his own as he frequently walks/sits/sleeps on my wet paintings, and then proceeds to print his own artistic impressions on the floors/curtains/windowsills. By morning, the painting is usually dry, and so I can then add some shadows, highlights and smaller details, before scanning it so I can move onto the digital stages of the process.

STEP 4

Successfully scanned in, it's now time to make sure the scanned version resembles the real version. Now, maybe it's me, maybe it's my scanner in particular, but I am at a never-ending war with my scanner. The scanned image might resemble the original in the same way that a Winter tree resembles a tree in Spring. The branches are there, but that's pretty much it, all the colour and detail are somewhat lacking. So off to Photoshop we go, to play with colour balances, hues, saturations, etc, usually holding the original up next to my screen - trying to match the two. After this stage, I plug in my trusty Bamboo Wacom tablet, which is essentially plug-in-digital-pen-and-paper, and take the enhanced image over to my other favourite art programme, Paint Tool SAI. Here, I tend to just neaten up all the messy edges, add any shadows or highlights I've missed in the original, just nit-picking and tidying up in general, which leaves me something like this:

And that's pretty much it. I then save the file as a high quality .jpeg or .png, but always keep the original file so I can save it as pretty much any file type should I need it for a certain printer. The last step is the most tedious, and so I won't go into too much detail as that is something I could probably dedicate an entire blog post to in future, the formatting process! The final step is essentially creating a layout for a certain product printout- for example the card layout is a rectangular sheet with a line down the centre to mark the fold of the card- and so the formatting step is to ensure the image is within bleed lines and all the correct information is on the back of the card. Like I said, quite tedious and quite a lot to explain, so I'll leave that for another time! I hope this wasn't too boring for those of you who don't spend your days dedicated to watching paint dry (as I do), and I hope I explained everything well enough. (If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments for me and I'll be sure to get back to you!) Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post. As for improvement in blog writing, I think I'm still going to need more time and more caffeine... Catch you next time, Rachel x