Sketching, painting, and compositing

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Today I started a painting that I couldn’t finish in one hour. It was a somewhat complex painting of two of my characters passing each other on the street, Jimmy Jay and Topaz the feral cat. So far I’ve got a sketch and some colors. My contract says that if I don’t finish in one hour, I have to post the work in progress.

I scanned the sketch before I started painting. Too many times I’ve been lazy and didn’t take the 2 minutes to scan and have regretted it.

Off to a good start. Gotta work on the extended arm perspective.

And the colors.

Redo with lightbox, pen and ink, & watercolor

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Today my commitment to myself was to get out the light box and pencil trace yesterday’s watercolor of the jay in the chimney, ink it, then transfer the image to watercolor paper using the lightbox. I then dressed the inked watercolor paper up with watercolor. After all this old-school processing, I digitized the watercolor painting by scanning it and importing it into Photoshop.

Here’s how it turned out. The dark background was added in Photoshop.

One more thing… I’m signing all of my images now on the off chance that any images posted in Pinterest will give interested folks a way to find the original source, doukat.com.

Retro Color Palette for Procreate

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A page from What’s Cooking, Tormont 1990. I Found this book in one of Ashland’s Little Free Libraries.

As I was lying on my yoga mat enduring the discomfort of a Lower Cobra pose, I was distracted by one of the book covers on my shelf. It was a cook book with an appealing 60s-style color palette. Later I shot some pix to grab a color palette and included the Color Munki color reference card so that I would have a true white in the picture.

I processed the image in Photoshop to reduce the colors to a mere 16 by doing Image -> Mode -> Indexed Color, then I airdropped the image to my iPad and Procreate. I used the default marker brush. Here’s what I came up with.