Hi, I’m Nick and this is a show about Art.
This show is all about your art and your creations.
Every episode is different but every episode will challenge you to try new things, learn
new stuff and become a better creator.
Oh, and let’s inspire and encourage each other through it all.
Let’s get into it!
Hey artistic badasses!
Welcome to a Show About Art!
Last week’s challenge asked you awesome people to try out Dominic Taranto’s Automatism
artwork experiment!
This challenge definitely tickled your creative nerves, as many of you participated and many
of you handed in your artworks!
Let’s take a look at them now!
PineApplkween decorated her base linework with gold, yellow and red colour as well as
adding pattern work.
The design looks amazing on these phone cases!
SharkaSplat decorated his line-work with a series of waves, triangles and patterns with
a blue, green and yellow colour scheme which works a treat!
Stefan decorated his linework with a flower which grows out from the ground.
The words written below and above the linework makes it feel like a journey through growth.
Malthe digitally decorated his linework with colour, patterns and awesome animals including
a crocodile, bird and lion.
And lastly, Billyart added some organic blocks of pink shades to his ‘splat’ shaped artwork.
Awesome!
Picked at random, SharkaSplat win’s the artistic badass sticker prize for his awesome
entry!
Remember, anyone can participate in these episodes, it doesn’t matter if you just
started drawing yesterday, haven’t drawn in years or just won a trophy for your artistic
endeavours – anyone can get featured and anyone can win a prize!
But now let’s get into some art inspiration – let’s boot up the segment machine!
The three colour challenge!
I’ve been waiting years for this challenge for years – slowly preparing for this very
day.
Slowly Training to defeat this beast, this adversary, this undertaking, this challenge…
Just kidding – this artwork is actually pretty easy to do.
All you have to do is pick 3 colours and create an artwork with them.
We can use our three favourite colours, 3 unusual colours or just pick 3 colours out
of the pencil case at random.
On the face value, this challenge might sound easy – but if we draw something which requires
12 colours to look normal, but we only have 3, then we’ll have to be inventive and use
colours in an unconventional way.
So I decided to draw a woman and lion together – I thought it would be a real challenge
to make the lion and female look separate from each other while only using 3 colours!
Just in case this goes pear shaped, I’m going to scan my linework first.
I printed my linework out on 3 pieces of paper.
I’ll use one of these copies as my first attempt!
Scanning my linework also gives me the opportunity to test out my 3 colours to see if they’ll
work together.
As the Lion will probably look the best in a sandy sahara colour, I thought I’d base
my other 2 colours around that.
So I choose a lighter brown for the skin tones and a darker brown for the shadows.
It’s looking like it might just work really well together!
I can also use the lighter brown colour as a highlight colour for the lion – it’s
a win win.
Now I just have to find some markers or art materials which match these three colours.
And I found three copic pens that kind of look the same as the colours that I choose.
They look pretty good and you can blend them a little bit so even though I’m using three
colours, I can kind of play around with the shade a little bit more.
I’m using my copic marker here to create the linework.
I thought I’m pretty obsessed with this marker at the moment because it’s very organic
in how it feels and it’s just a nice rough kind of pen that gives good rough linework
characteristics rather than it having to be perfect.
So I kind of printed it out on this low opacity paper so I could just do the linework and
recreate it very quick.
I’m using paper, just normal colour paper with the copics because that works really
well.
It doesn’t suck too much of the ink out like watercolour paper does.
And this is actually the first time I’ve ever used copic pens, so right now this isn’t
really a tutorial, this is an experiment for sure because I don’t know how to use them
and just jumping in the deep end trying to use these and blend them together is probably
the best way for me to learn in almost anything I do.
Just jump into the deep end and figure out how to swim.
And in this artwork, I certainly did that with these copic pens because at the moment
it looks really terrible.
And it’s almost enough motivation to quit the artwork but I’m glad that I’ve had
this experience before where you want to quit an artwork but you just keep on going because
you can make it into something great – just takes a bit of practice.
So the good thing about copic pens as I learnt here, is you can blend them in together.
So although it looks crap before, once you start adding in some more colour, playing
around with the shadow and tone, you can actually make it look pretty good.
This is a slow process and the copics don’t dry instantly, they kind of bleed a little
bit so even though it doesn’t look like the shadows are that great, they do improve
with time.
And this is a really valuable lesson I learnt with the copic pens.
So with the copics, it’s just layering, laygfhing, urghhh, that sounds weird doesn’t
it when I said that?
It’s just layering!
Lyagfhjhing, urghh!
I can’t say layering twice!
It’s like a tongue twister!
Irish wrist watch!
I can say that alright…
I guess I kind of failed at that still.
I found like when I did the portrait of the female, my brush strokes were very short and
that kind of made it look very bad, so I seeked some advice from someone who use copic pens
at work and they suggested that I use longer brushstrokes.
So I kind of did that with this lion, but I still doubled up on the middle around the
eye level with my brushstrokes because I didn’t really know what I was doing.
And I feel like copic pens are very difficult to start learning on with a massive artwork.
This piece is actually only A4 so it’s not that big.
But you definitely need the layering effect to make it look really really good.
Like the female portrait that I did, I’m just using the copic pens to layer up.
When I was going over with the layers with the lion, I kind of kept my brushstrokes very
short, because I wanted to replicate the hair of the lion a little bit and the short brushstrokes
definitely did that.
And Here is what my final artwork looked like!
It’s not my best work but it ain’t my worst.
All in all, it’s a pretty good effort considering I’ve never really used copic pens before.
So as you can see here, the original colours and the colours that I used with the copics
I ended up finished up with, are pretty close.
Obviously I couldn’t get them perfect but I really like the texture of the copic pens
and I’m pretty happy with it overall.
So I thought I would try and improve it with a couple of saturation and levels adjustments
but I didn’t find they did the job.
So I actually started digitally painting over the top of most of the colours to just smooth
them out and give a little bit of less harsh lines of the copics, but using the copics
as kind of the texture and the base layer of my artwork.
I found this technique worked kind of well, so I started doing it on the lion as well.
Just using a really low opacity brush to fix it up a little bit.
And it worked well as you can see now, just using the low opacity and flow, mixing around
with that.
I noticed I could add the hair effects really easily by playing with that and a very small
brush to make it look even better.
After that, I just kind of decided to clean up the linework and see what that looked like.
So I did that in illustrator as like the tutorial in episode 2, which is in the description
below, of how to turn an artwork into a t-shirt design, and I’m just kind of following that
tutorial again.
And deleting what’s left over from destroying the linework.
This process really didn’t take me too long to do with the lion, I didn’t have to clean
up too much, I was just keeping the original copic linework and adding on to that.
So as you can see, here’s the fixed up linework and I’m going to quickly go through the
layers of how much I fixed up the lion there.
So there’s a big difference there!
And as well as the female which I will be clicking on in a second – there we go.
It’s pretty good I think, the digital way of cleaning things up and working it better.
I also tried to clean up the bleed effect that I failed at a little bit down the bottom
– I tried uploading it to redbubble to see what it would look like in this form and I
didn’t really like that bleed effect.
It just didn’t look very good on the products, with the colours it didn’t blend well as
I hoped it would.
And there wasn’t any real way I could fix it up with digital painting.
It did fit some products like the pillowcases really well, but there was a lot of empty
boring space there so I ended up taking a picture of the night sky using a royalty free,
no attribution required license on that photo and putting it onto my artwork which made
it look better.
And with the t-shirt, I also turned it into a diamond and put some colours, sorry, not
colours, some leaves, grasses, on the bottom to hide that crappy blur.
I’m really really happy with how it looked like at the end of its journey.
I’m not 100 percent happy with it but the funny thing about being an artist is that
some people love your worst artworks and feel indifferent about your best.
And now that that’s finished, it’s time for a certain art challenge that you might
now be familiar with!
Artist challenge.
Participate in this challenge with the hashtag #AShowAboutArt on Instagram and Redbubble.
Participants will be featured on the next episode!
Your challenge for this week is to try the 3 colour artwork challenge for yourself!
You can pick whichever 3 colours you want, and can draw whatever you want too!
It’s pretty popular to try drawing a portrait, an animal, a plant, or a landscape for this
artwork challenge – but those are only a guide.
If you have your own inspiration, run with it!
Your design could be simpler than mine, or it could even be more complex.
The most important thing is to do is to have fun with it, challenge yourself and experiment!
And of course, it doesn’t matter what your skill level is as an artist or what materials
you use.
Anyone can get featured and anyone can win a prize.
Just use the hashtag #ashowaboutart on Instagram and Redbubble so I can see it!
I can’t wait to see your badass creations next week!
Thanks for drawing with me, and goodbye for now, but not forever!