Thursday, August 05, 2010

'I love Whitstable' 1st colour study

The complete study shows how crude the laying down of paint is, but hte important thing is establishing where those colours are. It would take  a braver (or more intuitive) artist to work without a study - but this works for me! Note that there are now 4 seperate colour swatches on the right, (if we count the gradation as one). The other great thing about applying colour by brush at this stage is that you will get more natural effects when not simply covering a flat area, see an example of this in the centre of the oysters, where the colour adds modelling and plumpness to the shape of the oyster's fleshy centre. That form would have been quite hard to have 'guessed' when cutting blind with a lino blade! Next stage is doing a tighter layout in pencil on tracing paper. The lettering for instance, needs a bit of crafting, although I always strive to show a hand-drawn and hand-cut font, as it lends a special quality to the piece you simply can't achieve with a 'proper', hard-edged, computer-set typeface.

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Illustration for upcoming 'Lake District Map'

Hand-drawn in brush pen with digital colour.  © Peter Gander