"Do you intend to make me drag you all the way?"

School assignment: little Gawain Fox and his auntie Morgana Cat :-). It's really a scene adapted from page 12 of the comic. This was great fun to do!

Painted with Reeves acrylics on watercolour paper. Quite te experience - I may repeat it to try and get better :).

The painting is A4 size; I am adding some close-ups to show the detail. I used a teeny-tiny brush for the fur...   

Gawain Project CONTEST: Win Your Mystery Man!

Today we interrupt our regular programme for something ... irregular. Instead of drawing a new page, I did something I had been missing for a while: a pencil portrait. It's the Mystery Man, whom I have actually never before drawn anywhere except in my sketchbooks. And I thought, because you are all so kind and patient and your support gives me energy, I'd give him away once he's finished. 

But since I can only give him to one person, there is a contest attached. You have to guess who he is. I'm going to give you a tip that will allow you to take a stab even if you don't know your Arthurian lore inside out. Googling is allowed.

WHO IS MYSTERY MAN? 

Tip: Tristan and Isolde 

E-mail his name to gawaincomic at gmail dot com. 

Don't be shy if you'd like to have him, there are not many contestants so you stand a good chance XD! 

Mystery Man, once he is properly finished, will be sent to the first person who manages to come up with his name. Different spellings are entirely allowed, as long as we are talking about the same character, but I need a name :P. One guess per person. Good luck!

***

THE STORY SO FAR:

Part I: The Darkest Hour

1-3 - 4-6 - 7-9 - 10-12 - 13-15 - 16-18 - 19-21 - 22-24 - 25-27 - 28-31 - 32-35 - 36-40 - 41-44 - 45-47 - 48-50 - 51-53 - 54-57 - 58-60 - 61-64 - 65-66 - 67-69 - 70-73 - 74-75 - 76-81 - 82-84 - 85-87 - 88-90 - 91-92 - 93-97 - 98-101 - 102-103 - 104-108 - 109-111 - 112-114 - 115-119

Interlude: The Sword of Kings

1-4 - 5-11

Part II: Sunrise

Brothers and Sisters

1-3 - 4-6 - 7-9 - 10-12 - 13-15 - 16-18 - 19-21 - 22-24 - 25-27 -28-30 - 31-33 - 34-36 - 37-39 - 40-42 - 43-45 - 46-48 - 49-51 - 52-54 - 55-57 - 58-60 - 61-63 - 64-66 - 67-69 - 70-72- 73-75 - 76-78 - 79-81 - 81 - 82 - 83 - 84 - 85 - 86 - 87 - 88 - 89 - 90 - 91 - 92 - 93 - 94 - 95 - 96 - 97 - 98 - 99 - 100 - 101 - 102 - 103 - 104 - 105 - 106 - 107 - 108 - 109 - 110 - 111 - 112 - 113 - 114 - 115 - 116 - 117 - 118 - 119 - 120 - 121 - 122 - 123 - 124 - 125 - 126 - 127 - 129 - 130 - 131 - 132 - 133 - 134 - 135 - 136 - 137 - 138 - 139 - 140 - 141 - 142 - 143

Gawain with Níassa

A5-sized drawing in a Moleskine sketchbook, using colour pencils from a variety of brands (and some of which I have owned for most of my life).

Every time I work with colour pencils, I find I enjoy the medium very, very much. But it takes such an inordinate amount of time to get a good result with it! I spent most of one weekend working on this and continued working on it for almost every day of last week. There is no end of layers in this small drawing. At least I am really glad with how it came out... :-)

Níassa, it will be clear, is not a girl. It is Gawain's Pictish-forged sword.

Kundry

It's my favourite snarky lady, Kundry! This is an exercise, drawn/painted in my mini Moleskine watercolour notebook. It taught me that I actually like working with my good old Staedtler pens best, but for some reason I like the result of the brush pens better :/. Sometimes with my Staedtlers I drift towards a kind of half-baked realism, whereas I prefer a more stylised drawing style. I'm just no good at realism - of any kind.

I like the colours in this one. About the rest I'm not so sure :p.

Scanner! :D

Double post because the new scanner has arrived and I've just made my first scan! :D That means I can share a better version of 'Bluebell Spring' - much brighter than the photo I posted last time. I have noticed that if I use the Photo Correction function on the scanner, the colours are much better. Yippee!

Loyalty binds me

Richard III, painted for Cecilia :). I think she is the only Italian member of the Richard III Society... Her Ricardian comic, The Boar, is for sale on Lulu, Amazon and probably a few other places.

Poor Richard. His reputation got tarnished forever because Shakespeare's patrons were Tudors. Then again, he is probably my favourite Shakespearean villain!

Florie

Sometimes I think that watercolours and I can be great friends. Like now. I'm beginning to know what I am doing with these paints, and I am surprised at the amount of control I turned out to have this time round. I think I'm also getting better at distinguishing between the colours things have and the colours they need to have in order to look good. So this painting of Florie has been great fun for me and I'm happy with the result. The lesson to learn (as if I didn't know it already) is that I should just paint as often as possible. All in all, I have painted 11 pictures this week, and I notice the effects. The happy result is that I am getting less scared of doing the comic in watercolour. I'm not looking for "great art" - just something that looks adequate and pretty and less likeliness for me to ruin a page of line art. 

So let's see what I can do in the new year :).

Digital painting

Oh look, it's an update! ;-)

I have been pottering around with Photoshop and came away from a tutorial with a really helpful tip: locking transparent pixels! That means that once you have set down a flat colour for a particular area, you lock the transparent pixels for that layer, and when you set down the shadows, you stay neatly within the right colour area. It makes painting in Photoshop that much easier. So I couldn't resist trying out my newly-honed skill on some old line art.

This girly cutie is Ambiorix from my (long-term) War in Gaul project.

And this big brute is Conan the Barbarian, drawn last year as a birthday gift for the only Conan fanboy of my acquaintance ;).

The contrast between those two almost hurts my eyes. Heh.

Experiments in Illustrator

My Illustrator classes will soon come to an end... Hopefully I will be able to continue next semester, because at this moment we have really only covered the basics - as you can tell by the attempts below :). The teacher showed me how to import and trace my line art to vectorise it. So far I haven't discovered how to manipulate the paths (*-_-*), but some things I have figured out. The vectorising function itself is great: it allows me to enlarge images without quality loss. The original Morgana picture is the size of a postcard. Now I have turned it into an A4 printable mini-poster. Squee!

SO MUCH still to learn, but I'm doing what I can...

An Emblem

Do you remember my Virgin Mary? I traced and coloured her in Illustrator. Last Monday I had a go at designing an emblem for my Gawain site, taking into account a few things I had learnt from the Mary Experiment. This time I didn't trace, but made my own design, once more based on the Book of Kells. It was fun, though I suspect there must be better ways of doing the knotwork than the process I used ;).

Well, I hope you like it. Personally, I find the wide-eyed, never-smiling Celtic look rather endearing *g*.

Ygraine

I don't want to count the hours I spent working on this small picture! It measures 13 x 21 cm and I started it on the Thalys to Paris. (I have a little something with trains and drawing, don't I?) All that remains from what I drew on the train is the nose, the hand and the rose. All else was reworked again and again. All that to end up with such a flawed drawing... But somehow I like its flaws. They give Ygraine something a little bit otherworldly, which is quite appropriate to the character.

I didn't expect I would be happy with the colours I got from using colour pencils. But it turns out that I am. Maybe my colours skills have improved, because when I tried colour pencils in a Moleskine sketchbook before, I didn't like the result at all. Now I am actually looking for a type of paper as close in texture to Moleskine as I can find, because I want to do this again in the future on loose sheets :-).

I spent more time and effort than usual researching the costume and jewellery (even though you don't see a whole lot of it *g*). That is because this drawing is part of my concept pictures for the final version of The Darkest Hour. More will follow.

King Emrys - for Sien

Bren Emrys, or King Ambrosius, is one of those half-mythical kings who are said to have ruled Britain after Rome left the island to its own devices. Legend (and John Morris) has it that Ambrosius Aurelianus succeeded King Vortigern, who notoriously invited the Saxons Hengist and Horsa to Britain. Ambrosius' reputation is as good as Vortigern's is bad - because it was Ambrosius who is said to have been successful at pushing the Saxons back.

One of Ambrosius' clever moves was to befriend a sorcerer born from the union of a demon and a nun: a young man called Merlin, or Myrddin in Welsh. It was at the request of Ambrosius that Merlin used his stupendous magical power to transfer from Ireland to Britain a monument known as the Giants' Ring. Nowadays we call it Stonehenge. Merlin's association with Ambrosius earned him a second name, and he became known as Merlin Ambrosius, or Myrddin Emrys.

When King Emrys, scourge of the Saxons, lay ill, a Saxon spy disguised himself as a priest and, pretending to offer the King medicine, poisoned him. Emrys was buried in Stonehenge and succeeded by his younger brother Uther, called Pendragon, who would soon father Arthur.

So that is the story of Emrys in a nutshell :-).

King Emrys doesn't actually appear in my comic. He is only referred to on page 9, ushering in his brother Uther, one of the main characters of The Darkest Hour. This portrait of the king was drawn at the request of my friend Sien, who earned herself a gift picture by being the 3000th viewer of this blog. Sien's adorable baby boy is called Emrys, hence the subject :-).

It is my first painting in Photoshop, so I beg your indulgence. The linework was done in pencil. By my standards, this portrait is unusually realistic. I don't go looking for realism, normally, but I found that painting with Photoshop somehow invites it - at least for a beginner like me. I lost count of the hours I spent working on this, but it certainly was great fun.

And at that holy tide

"And if the wars were unwelcome, the winter was worse,
When the cold clear rains rushed from the clouds
And froze before they could fall to the frosty earth.
Near slain by the sleet he sleeps in his irons
More nights than enough, among naked rocks,
Where clattering from the crest the cold stream ran
And hung in hard icicles high overhead.
Thus in peril and pain and predicaments dire
He rides across country till Christmas Eve,
our knight.
And at that holy tide
He prays with all his might
That Mary may be his guide
Till a dwelling comes in sight."

From: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part 2 (translation by Marie Borroff, 1967)

I'm trying. But clearly I still have a loooong way to go. Why is colour such a difficult matter to me? Painting this was so very hard. And in my head the colours looked better :/.

Kundry

Because sometimes I need to use a pencil, an eraser, a Staedtler pen and some watercolour paint, to prove to myself that I can still do more or less finished pictures.

Ballpoint pen studies

Have some sketchies :-).

I usen't to like drawing with ballpoint pens, but if I have paper that is smooth enough, I enjoy it.

IM IN UR INTERNETS, EFFEMINISING UR HEROES

More celebration of the coming Ambiorix exhibition in Tongeren, intended especially for those who think of the Eburone king as a moustachioed, muscular, axe-wielding sort of bloke. Not in my book, ladies and gennelmen ;-).

This one painted itself and just went miraculously well (in my terms). Try a close-up (by clicking) if you want to see more detail.

In this one I like the paint, which looks rather as I hoped it would look; the hair colour, which for once is not yellow; and the gold bracelet, which actually looks like a gold bracelet. For the prosecution: my token long nose is really too long a nose, so dear Trix looks less handsome than he should.

That's it for this rare non-weekend post. And I'm wondering what else the Eburone muse may bring in the near future. Dare I hope for a short story?

Gawain & Ragnell

Remember my Gawain and Ragnell sketches? I finally completed the inks yesterday, just in time for the contest. I did intend to add colour, but there was no time - I would have had to copy the drawing onto watercolour paper, ink it and paint it. Now that there would be no colour to draw the attention away from the lines, I gave the inks my all.

Does this work on its own, though? It's very pale; I guess it would have been stronger with some blacks. Only, as I did originally intend it for colouring, I didn't reckon with any blacks, and adding them as an afterthought would have looked messy.

Hm.

(Click for a large view.)

Aaaand ... we are off!

Here is the deal:

To make sure that the story gets to be written at all, I am drawing and writing the entire thing in thumbnails. No pencils, no sketches - just raw material. I will be posting a first draft, in other words. Comments and suggestions for improvements are very welcome.

This doesn't have a title yet. Also, there will be a prologue, but I'll draw that after I've done this episode :).

Click the thumbnails for a larger (and readable) view.

To be continued...

An idea in development: Gawain and Ragnell

Take 1:



Take 2:



Take 3:



Take 4:



... and counting :).

So far, I like the fourth one best, but I'm not happy with how Gawain's legs look, plus I think Ragnell should reach out a bit more - right now it almost looks as though Gawain is holding her hand against her will. On to the next attempt...

This is for a contest at deviantART. All concrit is appreciated!

More Kundry ("l'Orgueilleuse de Logres")

Two years ago now, a friend who took pity on me and my colour conundrums gave me a set of Tombow markers. I think that they are like Copic markers: the ink dissolves in water, and so you can mix the colours. My friend said that the markers would teach me about colour use. Unfortunately, I seem to need some teaching about the use of Tombow markers too :D. I like drawing with them because they have brush-shaped tips; it's like drawing with a brush and paint/ink without having to worry about refills. But the tints are as strong as those of felt tips, and I haven't quite figured out yet how to get pretty results with them. Often enough, I end up using them on a whim, during quick pictures that I haven't given a lot of thought - just to add a dab of colour. The picture of Kundry below was made (as you can see) in a Moleskine sketch booklet. The Moleskine paper doesn't seem too fond of pencils or colour pencils, probably partly because I don't press my pencils hard enough. But now that I have dicovered ballpoint pens, I find I'm using them all the time. I liked this drawing of Kundry, and decided to have a go at it with my Tombow markers.

The best thing about the Tombows, apart from the brush tip, is of course the fact that you can mix the colours with water. Only, my Moleskine's paper doesn't absorb water very well (not to say, hardly at all). Despite that, I did add some water, just to soften a few strokes and add some highlights. And despite the uncharacteristically strong colours, I really like how this picture came out. If all my sketches were like this... ;-)

A less spontaneous Kundry, pencilled and then inked on Fabriano watercolour paper. I was surprised at how well my Staedtler pens worked on this paper, despite the fact that it was less smooth than I hoped it would be. The result is a bit Art-Nouveauish, but I enjoyed adding all the detail to the hair.

With added watercolour paint. It's always very difficult for me to assess whether I captured the colours well in the scan; my own computer has a very dark monitor, and the computer to which our scanner is attached has a much brighter one. This looked fine on the "scan computer", but looks far too dark on mine :/.

Have I already mentioned that I like Kundry? ;P