d339 110919 Boats 2011 Part 4

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Well, there’s a painting in the works (third one this year, and it’s almost done, actually), but J doesn’t look like he’s going to update anytime soon, so next update, and thus, said painting, may not go up for a while. This week, it’s Titanic redux.

We last left Titanic about a month ago after it lost its propeller thanks to my craptastic piloting. I didn’t intend to get it back out on the water again this season, but obviously, fate intervened. Through some sequence of events, I made a trip out to “local” J&M Hobby with some siblings and family friends, and I asked them if they had any propellers for model boats and the like.

d338 110914

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Quite some time ago, I posted about something I saw in the Chobits anime. Well, as of this week, it exists! Unfortunately it costs more than all my laptops combined, and I don’t really have any room for one… but I can dream. Minoru’s seems like a 27 or 30 incher though. In some strange way, it’s surprising how accurately we predict the future.

Between some reading, Transport Tycoon, and the usual distractions, I actually have been drawing, too…

This is, as is the case once in a while, something different. My sister is trying to learn how to draw, so I’ve just been tagging along and working off of the same reference drawings. I’d say the last time I did anything remotely similar was back in 2009.

d337 110904 Tales 2011 Painting

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The third “official” painting of the year (seventh if you consider the character sketches) is my now called Tales 2011 painting. It used to be that all the characters got their own paintings, but obviously times have changed. The last time I had a painting with a comparable or greater figure count was 2007.

I’ve actually been meaning to do a painting in this style since the first character sketch a couple months ago. I just didn’t have a vision of what it should be until more recently (about a week ago), so it obviously didn’t happen ’til then. I think in general the figures are okay and the painting is okay, but I think the tree is pretty good considering it’s the first time I’ve tried to paint a tree at this resolution since basically the year NW started (and that painting was rubbish). I think the ground and the colors turned out pretty nice as well. I don’t usually use yellow as a master color.

There’s a little bit of cheating here and there: J always asks me how I stay in the lines on single-layer paintings like this one, and part of the answer is that I don’t. In some cases here, neighboring, discrete colors across a “hard” divider blend into the same shade of yellow, so I just merge the two colors instead of stay “in” the line. The other part of the answer is just “be pro”. Obviously. The other notable shirk is the fade-to-white background. It’s not that I didn’t want to paint anything in there, it’s just that nothing I put there, whether it be hills or simply a curved horizon line, seemed to give the same suggestion of space on paper so I just blanked the whole thing out.

And of course, since the lineart is basically a sketch in and of itself, it stands alone pretty well:

This painting would have been posted earlier, but I got distracted by one of my occasional urges to move stuff around.