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Walkthrough of "Branded," one of my illustrations for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pallorsomnium's epic (94.2k!) Big Bang fic "Why We Fight"
BBC Merlin fanart
Medium: Graphite pencil on paper, smudgy stick, and grey stretchy eraser, photographed and white balanced using gimp.
Dimensions: approx 11x14 in
Rating: Gen, but read the warning
Warning: contains graphic depiction of methods used to mark slaves, specifically branding and collaring.
[ETA: I am a dummy when exhausted and should never have posted this at midnight local time. Many apologies to those who looked and couldn't see anything because I was too fogged to change the permissions on the images. It's fixed now. ~ 'Cello]
I am a traditional artist and until recently I rarely documented my process, but for whatever reason ended up taking a bunch of WIP shots of this piece (one of which ended up being part of a title page!)
Generally speaking, I find a piece of prose or verse that gives me a strong mental image and then try to find reference photos to go along with it; google is my friend, as is Merlinskeep. I may do a very rough sketch to clarify where a character is standing, etc, but it's usually only a thumbnail.
"Branded" started with this part of the story:
“Get Tom at once,” Arthur ordered the guards, but he did not look away from Merlin and his marred left cheekbone. Merlin was trapped in the prince’s stormy gaze, staring back with wide eyes.
For various reasons I decided to focus on Merlin and leave Arthur out of the picture entirely.
Once I found the set of references I wanted to use, I started with Merlin's face. In the photo below I've already filled in most of it by this point, but I started with his eyes and moved down from there. The eyes are my favorite part to draw, they're the door to the person's soul.
You can see the light tracings I have to place most of the rest of him, but he's missing the top of his head for a very particular reason.
I usually start with a HB or 2B pencil for the lighter lines and beginnings of shadings and move to the softer (darker) pencils as I need more contrast (I used my 9B to get the very darkest tones in his eyes and hair). The smudgy stick gets used to smooth pretty much everything, but I also use the graphite that gets stuck on it like a very light, blunt pencil for the most delicate shadings, especially under the eyes and the definition of the bridge of the nose and cheek. The pliable eraser gets molded into whatever shape I need to pick up extra pencil on areas I colored too much, highlights in hair, or edges that got smudged into mush.
In this scene, Merlin is described as having "hair grown irritatingly long" that is pulled back loosely. I had to figure out where to place the hairline as well as settle on a style of hair that wasn't too feminine. The top picture is my first try, and while the hair style was good something still just wasn't right. Lowering the hairline and putting in a balancing tendril of hair on the right side of his face made a huge difference. You can also see that at this point I had begun to fill in the shading on his neck, and that this version of Merlin is older and slightly even more gaunt than usual.
And here you see me procrastinating on collaring and branding Merlin. Basically I did everything else first. The background was done by shading with a fairly soft (4B) woodless pencil. Then I smudged it, wadded my gummy eraser up into a random shape, and used it like a painter would use a wadded up rag to remove extra paint in a random pattern. Then I went back and smudged in the column and banner shapes (using yet more reference shots of a particular hall). I left them blurry on purpose, as our focus is Merlin.
And then I had no more reason to delay on putting a collar around that lovely neck. I really had a hard time finding a decent reference photo of a person in the type of collar he's described as wearing, so I ended up being a model for myself by putting a mirror by the desk and wearing a leather belt around my neck so that I could see how to draw the arc.
Next I had to brand him. I found a lot of really gross images before I finally stumbled over one that was helpful. Thankfully I had already come up with version of the pendragon crest for the page breaks. After messing around with the crest using the perspective tool in gimp and a photo of the drawing, I was able to extrapolate the way the brand would change shape slightly if it were placed on his cheekbone. I also marked the collar with a version of the crest, and found a pattern to put on the banner in the background.
Finally, to get back the contrast I had lost by photographing the drawing, I used gimp to correct the white balance of the photo. There's a slightly grainy effect from the correction, but I felt it added to the mood of the piece.
And that's pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed seeing how I put this together, and if you've got any questions about it feel free to ask away!
A link to a bigger version of the final work can be found at my deviantArt account, or my LJ art masterpost along with the other pieces I made for the story.
pallorsomnium's epic (94.2k!) Big Bang fic "Why We Fight"BBC Merlin fanart
Medium: Graphite pencil on paper, smudgy stick, and grey stretchy eraser, photographed and white balanced using gimp.
Dimensions: approx 11x14 in
Rating: Gen, but read the warning
Warning: contains graphic depiction of methods used to mark slaves, specifically branding and collaring.
[ETA: I am a dummy when exhausted and should never have posted this at midnight local time. Many apologies to those who looked and couldn't see anything because I was too fogged to change the permissions on the images. It's fixed now. ~ 'Cello]
I am a traditional artist and until recently I rarely documented my process, but for whatever reason ended up taking a bunch of WIP shots of this piece (one of which ended up being part of a title page!)
Generally speaking, I find a piece of prose or verse that gives me a strong mental image and then try to find reference photos to go along with it; google is my friend, as is Merlinskeep. I may do a very rough sketch to clarify where a character is standing, etc, but it's usually only a thumbnail.
"Branded" started with this part of the story:
“Get Tom at once,” Arthur ordered the guards, but he did not look away from Merlin and his marred left cheekbone. Merlin was trapped in the prince’s stormy gaze, staring back with wide eyes.
For various reasons I decided to focus on Merlin and leave Arthur out of the picture entirely.
Once I found the set of references I wanted to use, I started with Merlin's face. In the photo below I've already filled in most of it by this point, but I started with his eyes and moved down from there. The eyes are my favorite part to draw, they're the door to the person's soul.
You can see the light tracings I have to place most of the rest of him, but he's missing the top of his head for a very particular reason.
I usually start with a HB or 2B pencil for the lighter lines and beginnings of shadings and move to the softer (darker) pencils as I need more contrast (I used my 9B to get the very darkest tones in his eyes and hair). The smudgy stick gets used to smooth pretty much everything, but I also use the graphite that gets stuck on it like a very light, blunt pencil for the most delicate shadings, especially under the eyes and the definition of the bridge of the nose and cheek. The pliable eraser gets molded into whatever shape I need to pick up extra pencil on areas I colored too much, highlights in hair, or edges that got smudged into mush.
In this scene, Merlin is described as having "hair grown irritatingly long" that is pulled back loosely. I had to figure out where to place the hairline as well as settle on a style of hair that wasn't too feminine. The top picture is my first try, and while the hair style was good something still just wasn't right. Lowering the hairline and putting in a balancing tendril of hair on the right side of his face made a huge difference. You can also see that at this point I had begun to fill in the shading on his neck, and that this version of Merlin is older and slightly even more gaunt than usual.
And here you see me procrastinating on collaring and branding Merlin. Basically I did everything else first. The background was done by shading with a fairly soft (4B) woodless pencil. Then I smudged it, wadded my gummy eraser up into a random shape, and used it like a painter would use a wadded up rag to remove extra paint in a random pattern. Then I went back and smudged in the column and banner shapes (using yet more reference shots of a particular hall). I left them blurry on purpose, as our focus is Merlin.
And then I had no more reason to delay on putting a collar around that lovely neck. I really had a hard time finding a decent reference photo of a person in the type of collar he's described as wearing, so I ended up being a model for myself by putting a mirror by the desk and wearing a leather belt around my neck so that I could see how to draw the arc.
Next I had to brand him. I found a lot of really gross images before I finally stumbled over one that was helpful. Thankfully I had already come up with version of the pendragon crest for the page breaks. After messing around with the crest using the perspective tool in gimp and a photo of the drawing, I was able to extrapolate the way the brand would change shape slightly if it were placed on his cheekbone. I also marked the collar with a version of the crest, and found a pattern to put on the banner in the background.
Finally, to get back the contrast I had lost by photographing the drawing, I used gimp to correct the white balance of the photo. There's a slightly grainy effect from the correction, but I felt it added to the mood of the piece.
And that's pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed seeing how I put this together, and if you've got any questions about it feel free to ask away!
A link to a bigger version of the final work can be found at my deviantArt account, or my LJ art masterpost along with the other pieces I made for the story.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 07:52 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 02:20 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 02:02 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 02:21 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 04:54 pm (UTC)From:It's interesting to see how you used a digital image editing program to your advantage. Really helped pushed those darks through.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 06:21 pm (UTC)From:I lack a scanner at home, so my only way to upload art is through photos, the quality of which is heavily influenced by the lighting conditions. Generally I try to take photos during the day using indirect bright light from a window, but even then you lose so much of the more subtle shading to that grey tone the paper picks up. Hence the white balance for this one. And I really liked the feel it gave the piece, grainy and a little raw.
But I don't always balance them. Notably, the photo of "Morgana Lisa" was taken under an incandescent light because I finished it after the sun had set, and there was this lovely soft warm yellow tone given to it that I decided to keep. It's still lovely when white balanced, but I wanted that soft, aged look.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 06:33 pm (UTC)From:If they didn't come out blurry they were usually curved from the lens trying to fit the whole piece in.
And then there's the ever important lighting!
That was really lucky with Morgana Lisa then! Those warm colors looked great with her!
no subject
Date: 2011-09-15 06:58 pm (UTC)From:I am lucky enough to have a digital camera with enough optional manual do-dads to tinker with. For "Branded" I set it to black and white, macro focus (since I'm always so close), and fiddled with the exposure a bit too. I try to get the camera as flat to the page as possible by lining up the edges and corners of the page with the edges of the view window, and I usually leave a little edge of not-paper that I can later crop, so I'm sure I got the whole piece.
And, yes, it was definitely lemonade from lemons with Morgana Lisa! :D
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 01:19 am (UTC)From:Again, lovely outstanding piece of art.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 01:48 am (UTC)From:And the background was really an accident. I wasn't really planning on doing one, but the way the light was falling really brought that hall to mind, so I went off to find the reference pics and then it just sort of came together. I like it when it does that! :D
Thanks for the lovely comment!
no subject
Date: 2011-09-22 01:09 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2011-09-22 01:43 am (UTC)From:And thank you! Of the two big drawings I did for that story, I think Branded is probably my favorite. I'm glad you liked it too! ^-^