This progress post is a bit late and a bit messy, but my work on both the independent and studio projects has been steady and good. Although I haven't posted much regarding the independent project I'm almost finished with it. Here's some of the pictures of the whole process these past weeks:
This was the process and test spray for the first stencil layer, and I did a similar process for the second layer for the highlights. I took the test spray and drew on/cut out the white portions where needed. Here's the final test spray of both layers.
The cardboard was too small, so I'm doing the final one on a white bedsheet. I'm still working out the content of this piece, but right now I see it as a meditative piece. A reflection for myself about how and why I create art. But that's kinda vague haha. I'm really happy with how it's turned out so far though, and I think the craftsmanship is superior to my last project.
Here's the work I've done on my studio project! I decided to make a comic but with the unique twist of inking it entirely with ink wash painting. Its core theme is balance and how we have an arbitrary fixation to maintain balances we've invented, leading us to end up doing rather weird acts to maintain that balance. An elderly monk sees a butterfly caught in a web and saves it, but seeing that it weighs down his scale, he feels a need to correct it. So, in response, he kills a caterpillar, rebalancing his scale.
I quickly made a rough storyboard of the three pages just to keep in mind the events I want to portray moving forward.
Then I made a more refined pencil drawing of what I want the first page to look like, working in light, loose marks.
I inked in the main shades and features for the panel, trying to emphasize the brush strokes themselves. The most interesting part of the ink wash paintings I've been studying is the heavy, expressive brushstrokes. The kind which don't really look like what they're trying to paint, but really "feel" like what they're portraying. I went back later, adding more texture and detail to the panel.
I went and inked in my second panel, unfortunately doing the fingers on the left too dark, but it might just have to be one of those errors I have to live with. Not sure of what to do to correct it, but I might buy some white paint or correction markers and toy around with that. Or I might just embrace the over-shading and push the values.
Here are the latest two panels, and the comic as a whole. I'm really enjoying the composition I've made and how it "flows" one panel into another. **It's meant to be read right to left in case you didn't notice, I've been pulling a lot of inspiration from mangas and Chinese ink wash paintings, so I thought it was fitting.
There are areas I'm not so happy with, such as where the ink bled underneath the masking tape I was using and past the lines of the panel, but it's overall fairly nice. I've been happy with my progress.