Dr Manhattan: Who Watches the Watchkids? in watercolor!

On an aside - watercolor blocks are the best (in my opinion) thing to work on, when doing watercolors. I learned how to watercolor back in college and it was a miserable job. You had to find a board to lie a soaking sheet of watercolor paper down on (and we always worked big, so we had to use a giant, hard to carry, board), then you wet these gummy strips of paper to glue the edges of the watercolor paper down to the board. And finally you had to staple or pushpin the areas that looked like they needed help staying down. All of this work went into just getting a piece of paper ready to work on (to prevent bowing and warping). It was ridiculous. So anyway - watercolor blocks are sheets of paper that are tape bound together. You work on the topmost sheet - and you have to cut it out (I use a palette knife, it's been the easiest to cut the tape without being too sharp and cutting into the paper) - and then you can start working on the next sheet. Because all of the sheets of paper are taped together, they never bow or warp. It's the greatest. The only problem is that they don't come in terribly big sizes....

I spent about 2 hours at the bookstore cleaning up the lines and then starting my color (I use Dr. Ph. Martin's watercolors, because they're the best. You don't have to work too hard, if at all, to make the colors vibrant (which is a problem I've had in the past with other watercolor brands). It took, about, another hour or so at home (later that night) to finish up the color.



This was the first of the Watchmen characters I painted. I was sitting in the Barnes and Noble in Glendale and was flipping through the 'art of' the Watchmen book when it struck me that I would really like to do my version of these characters. Lacking a computer to do a digital color job, I did a couple of thumbnails of Dr Manhattan (the first one was too stiff). Based on the second thumbnail I redrew it on my watercolor block (that I always keep with me).


I had previously scanned in this painting a few weeks ago. I hated the way the colors translated. It was so washed out and desaturated. I rescanned it this morning at work, and it turned out quite nice - the colors are a lot closer to my original painting. So, of course, I thought I'd post it.

Illustration Friday: Opinion - Lil' Roarshach

I finished my lil' Roarshach painting yesterday, but I wasn't happy with it. There was something missing from it, and other things that were just off. In my opinion (see, this is how it fits into the IF) I needed to make some changes. There were too many light sources (in the original painting) in the alleyway. There needed to be more of a defined shadow under the garbage can. And the words "Who watches the watchkids" needed to stand out more...I did the words in three different colors (previously) and didn't like any of them...well, I liked them okay, but they weren't working out as well. I toned down the texture on them (because that was one of the biggest problems in making them readable) and I think the piece works a little bit better. And it always bugged me that the buildings in the background didn't have any lights in them.

I also put it up on my blog at a bigger size (the original size of the piece is 9x12 and when I posted it last time I shrunk it down to 7 inches). So...I really like how it turned out - I feel that it's a stronger piece now.