Fantasy Art Class Week 4 8th February

For those of you who are planning to colour the exercise for week 3 here is a suggestion of colour pallet and breakdown. This is only a suggestion, I hope you will explore other possibilities of colour scheme. I usually use copic markers for rough colour breakdowns as shown on this post. This is an  example of how I generally colour preliminary  rough sketches.

As I have mentioned many times in class, the main reason for taking some time to produce rough thumbnail sketches and rough colour sketches of your intended final drawing or painting is so you can explore the many possibilities of layout and colour before deciding on your final layout and colour pallet. This will save you a lot of frustration later when you are working on your final piece.

How many of you have had a great idea for a drawing and dashed straight on to the nice quality cartridge paper or watercolour paper or board only to find that you have not plotted your drawing properly and either run out of space, maybe you have not enough room to include the feet or some other part of the drawing or that maybe the colours simply don't work and the whole thing looks a garish mess?

Well, that's why it's good practise to do a few small rough sketches first. Many great fantasy artists use this process. Rough Work (see images below) is crammed full of Frazetta's preliminary sketches that went onto become some of his most iconic work.

The benefits of using rough sketches and thumbnails are:
1.Enabling the artist to develop and refine the drawing before embarking on the final piece
2.Saves on wasted materials as the trial and error process has already been done.
3.Saves of wasted time and frustration when it is realised that though lack of planning the final drawing lacks balanced layout, colour or both.



Below is a breakdown of how I produce a colour rough to determine the colours of the final illustration.

First decide on your colour tones, warm or cold. Here the tones are clearly warm and are all of a similar tone.
























Here the flat colour is strengthened by using darker tones to add shading and tone. For this I used a neutral grey 4 marker.

By adding black to the areas that would be in shadow you can give your drawing more impact.

Finally I've added some highlights by simply flicking a bit of white gouache over the areas that I wish to be highlighted. This helps break up the colour and also adds another layer of definition to the image.

You can use markers to colour your final piece and it will still look good. The thing to remember is to keep the ink flowing until you have finished the area you are colouring and try not to press on too hard or the ink will bleed heavily and you will have less control. Also avoiding using heavy cartridge or watercolour paper as these are hard surfaces to lay maker in down  effectively.

If you are using watercolour, I will be giving a breakdown of how to approach this in the next class.