Assignment 3 - Interpreting a Quote (Variation 4)
Variation 4
“Not all Who Wander are Lost”
This is my fourth variation for assignment 3. This time I took variation 3 and cropped really tight in on the face and then used the scratchboard method. In the past, I have done real scratchboard art and I thought this would be a fun experiment to try to make it as close as possible to the real thing. To that end, before I even started, I spent over an hour making custom brushes that would mimic the real tools as close as I could get them. I made two different traditional scratchboard tools, a wire bristle brush (which I used the most), sandpaper, a fiberglass blender (for soft blending), and two types of pens and an airbrush for fixing mistakes (which luckily I didn't have to use too often).
I started by doing a quick sketch of my tiger from variation 3 using the 6B pencil in red (and used my reference to fix it up a bit and add more detail since his face is MUCH larger now than in the previous variation.) Then I put a solid black layer under the sketch but over the original tiger and began to draw in all the details using the scratchboard tools. It took a while to get the hang of it but I enjoyed the process. I used the wire-bristle brush that I made for the majority of the drawing and I was careful to do fewer brush strokes in the darker areas and more in the lighter areas to build up the contrast.
After I finished with the scratching (all in black and white,) it was time for adding the colored "ink." I set the layer to Gel so that variation 3 shone through and I added some color correction in areas and added some additional shadows and highlights to the color as needed. This project was definitely a challenge but I really enjoyed it.
