Art Weirdness

[the_gneech]

Friday's Dover & Comfort pic, while I was pleased with the final result, was a long journey of weirdness and frustration.

Penciling and inking were easy enough. Fortunately, I had the foresight to scan just the inks so I could color it digitally if need be. But my intention had been to color it with the markers for practice, since I was home Friday and had some time to work on it.

I inked it with my usual Micron Pigmas, which are supposed to be waterproof and archival quality. I let the ink dry for an hour or two, then started to color. My first hint of trouble was when I was working with the green for the grass and my signature smeared. None of the other lines had given me trouble, and since I'd signed it last, I figured the signature just hadn't quite dried yet.

Then came the yellow. I was coloring the base layer for Comfort and Dover's fur, which is the same color, and the bifurcation line down Comfort's lip went SPLORRGCHH, giving her a big black smudge under her nose that made her look like Charlie Chaplain. I spat out a few choice expletives, decided to fix that "post-production" in Photoshop, and went on to Dover.

Dover, who is covered with spots.

Lots and lots of spots.

Every one of which smeared.

I was halfway done with one arm when I gave up. There was no way to salvage the piece at this stage. It's still sitting on my light table, looking sad and forlorn. I went back to my scan of the inks, and colored it on the computer with the Wacom tablet.

I don't mind saying, this frustrated me a bit. In the past, I've tried coloring the pencils and then inking over that, which works to some extent but is awkward. Should I have let the inks dry overnight? Would it have made a difference? Some people scan the inks then print those onto bristol and color that. But it seems to me I should be able to color the original. I've seen other people do it! How do they pull it off?

In Other News...
Also art-related, I discovered much to my surprise on Friday that I have an Artspots Gallery. Given that my application for one was declined, I'm a little surprised by this. My first guess is that the powers that be over there have decided to consolidate Artspots and Jaxpad — I can't really imagine they went back over my application later and said, "Nah, let him in, it's cool." I haven't bothered to reapply because I haven't done enough new art that I thought was good enough to apply with. If my perspective needed work before, surely it still does now.

Oh, also, the only comments on Artspots/Jaxpad about the pic? "She isn't wearing pants!" Le sigh. ;P

-The Gneech

Comments

[radbaron.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was the fresh infusion of alcohol (into the ink, not artist) that made the original lines go back to thier wet period.

You seem to be getting a lot of mileage out of "splorch" :-)

[confusedoo.livejournal.com]

The original inks were also on Bristol, no? Looks like something in the Tria yellow dyes are kind of funky. I would guess that the alcohol does have something to do with it, but I've never experienced that when using my Prismas, and I rarely let things dry for as long as an hour. I personally wouldn't bother with the scan and print unless you wanted to do multiple different versions of color on the same linework. Current smudging issues aside, pigma ink is of much higher quality than 99% of inkjet inks.

[kylet.livejournal.com]

So put some pants on her :-p

Never had that trouble with Prismas, not with an hour of drying o.0

[exatron.livejournal.com]

This warrants further investigation/experimentation. If it doesn't do much harm to your markers, try drawing a few lines in ink, waiting for the ink to dry, coloring over them with a few different colors, then repeat the experiment with a different drying time.