Mr Gough in Winterland

This post will be about a painting I'm working on.

So far I have this scribble

So this above drawing was based on an earlier sketch that I unearthed while I've been moving house

I had been doing a few sketches in photoshop trying to plan out the image but nothing really felt that great. Like the Mr Gough world that exists in my head so it was great to come across this image.

Here are some of the earlier photoshop sketches. You'll notice the fishing monster was the one thing I was happy with.

The second one I was almost ok with. Having a Mr Gough floating in ice. I did like the tree zombies I created but I couldn't work them into the new image.

Oh I should give a little backstory. Mr Gough was a small little comic that was born in my sketch book. I really liked it and I ended up making an animated short with him. The short won quite a few awards so he's stayed a favourite character of mine. He usually makes cameos in my other films as well.

I added in the little orange monster from the short on top of the round trees. No Monkeybears though

So I tweaked and changed that original drawing in photoshop but it's going to become a painting so this is how I'm transferring the image onto the canvas.

After printing the image I attached one of the sides to the canvas turned the image over and covered the back with black charcoal

I then folded over the paper over the canvas

Then using a blunt pencil I traced over the lines

This hurts my hand as I have to draw without leaning on the page. When I finish (I haven't yet) tracing all the lines I can fold back the paper and see the image has been transferred. Here's what it looks like so far

I'll spray that with some fixative to hold the charcoal and then it will be time to begin the under painting (at least I think that's what I'm doing)

Ok so here's the finished transfer

Which is pretty close to the original drawing. The paper buckled a bit and moved some of the drawing around but nothing too drastic.

So now I'm beginning to tone the image. Because it's winter I'm using blue tone for my under paint. Actually I'm not sure if this is really "under painting" much like when a client asks if we could "storyboard" the idea when he really means brainstorm the idea or calling a corporate video a documentary (my favourite term misuse).

I'm trying to work really light and that means using more turps than oil paint. I noticed that some of the transfered areas aren't dark enough for me to see details (such as the tree behind the rock on the right) and I'll need to let the oils dry a bit and maybe pencil the lines a bit darker.

Will oils you have to build up the paint a bit otherwise you'll have the white of the canvas showing through and that looks crappy. This canvas I'm using is a bit iffy as well. Some areas were hard and it was repelling the paint a bit.

Anyway still a heap of stuff to do. I'm also trying to jump between this, some writing and some flash work. This tree I've been slowly working on for a week or so now (I get distracted too easily these days)

Here's the final painting. It took awhile to get teh colours I wanted and there's probably a few colour's I'd like to photoshop change haha but that's the fun of non digtal art. The rawness of it all