Ask the artist: scarletscarlet
Hallo, I'm scarletscarlet, though I drop the second "scarlet" for informal occasions. Thank you to oxoniensis for asking me to do December's "ask the artist" post - I'm a little nervous about it, but excited!
I tried to think about what I could talk about more specifically in this post, and kept coming up blank; I don't feel like I can offer much of a "here is how I do a cool thing!" post, because I am still learning. And, my goodness me, the learning curve is ENORMOUS when you go from being kind of lazy about book characters to trying to make people look like they do in a live-action fandom.
But then I thought, well, perhaps some of that learning and mistake-making is interesting! So, before I get to link to things of mine I like, here are a couple of things that have NOT worked, and how they ended up in a place where I was happy with them.
And they are both to do with the Reverse Big Bang, even. lies_unfurl was so patient with me!
I was lucky enough that salty_catfish was able to send me feedback on the initial sketch AND on the coloured version, because the former had a few composition and Dean's-face issues, and the latter... well. Here is the version I first sent, with an "I think this might be finished!" kind of note:
And here is how it looked when I sent it in to the mods as a prompt:
So, the main issues from the first one BASICALLY came down to laziness, and a lack of thought, and salty_catfish was awesome enough to not pull punches about it: the repetitive texture on Dean's skin, and on the leaves; the bland grass, done mostly with a basic photoshop brush, indicating nothing of the wildness I wanted; that the fairies didn't have proper wings, just wing-shapes; that the colour was a bit naff, with that bland yellowy-green grass; that the values were all screwy, with some things too dark and some things too bright; Dean's hair; a lack of interesting texture throughout.
"Fixing" it actually only took an evening of concentrated work, and led me to think that a lot of the time, my problem is stopping too early with pictures; calling something done when it is, in fact, merely coloured in.
The grass: going from using a "grass brush" to drawing the stuff in, eye-dropping from a green palette of light-to-dark and just using a hard round brush with the opacity jitter set right up high, which gave it an interesting texture of its own. Dean's shadow is also a lot rougher, less like a bland shape sitting on top of the grass and more like, you know, a shadow.
The colour: a lot more purple (I love purple shading, maybe a little too much), a lot cooler, a lot more even across, which made Dean himself the pale focus of the image rather than a pale thing on a pale thing. Shading the leaves and toadstools to give them more shape, covering them up more with grass.
Details: Giving the toadstools spots, even; can't believe I was going to send in a fairy ring without spotty toadstools, wtf. Getting an actual reference for an insect wing for the fairies.
The second failure-to-better involved redrawing the idea completely, and trying to shake it out of my head; I decided the best way to do that was to try a completely different approach.
So, this is where I started, with a picture of Oberon's hall, which I was going to make out of trees, la:
And it wasn't totally working for me. I suspect part of that is choosing that hideous green as a base. What IS that? I also checked the details of the story and realised that if I wanted nudie Dean in the shot, I could not have RoboSam. I wanted nudie Dean. But I thought, no, this will get better if I just stick with it.
But it didn't, and I did a lot more before I gave up:
LOOK AT THAT MESS. It's just... crap everywhere. It's like I found some ugly shoes or something and decided to try to salvage them by covering them with glitter and then bedazzling them and then setting one of them on fire and then putting out that fire by getting a cat to throw up on it.
There's no focus; everything is too bright or sharp or overly-detailed, so your eye doesn't GO anywhere. There's no drama to it, no tension... it sucks ALL of the balls in the universe.
So I started from scratch. I wanted to stay behind Dean, but also to make it more interesting. And, because I'd gone so horribly wrong with the colour, I thought I might try taking colour out of the equation entirely, and drew it in greyscale first, then coloured that after. That let me concentrate on the shape of the image and the story of it. Lo, a wild gif appears:
Now, this isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination (and note, even, that it's not THAT different in some ways - the wrap of the tree around the right hand side, for example), and there were some screwups in there - like Dean's tiny feet, he is a dainty flower okay? or like flattening the layers on top before I'd got the ground texture right, argh - but it is a LOT better.
You can see me changing my mind about things, like the shape of the leaves, or how to show Castiel's destructive power, but dodging the colour at first let me think about stuff like how best to position the figures, what I wanted to show; things like Dean being a passive figure at that point in the story, so he's sort of incidental to the action, but Castiel's wing-shadow wraps around him, and the other shapes contain him; that the main conflict here is between Castiel and Oberon, so even though Oberon's not looking at Castiel but at the beginning of the destruction (thereby, I hope, drawing *your* eye to it as well), there is a direct line between the two characters in the shape of the leaves, the way their bodies are angled etc.
Also the angle itself is just a bit more interesting, I guess.
God, I hope no one fell asleep wading through that. If you want to look at it all together, this is the masterpost for it, for The Stolen Man (it will all make more sense if you read the most excellent story that lies_unfurl wrote.
Being flighty, my favourite things are usually the most recent, eg the art for ghostyouknow27's Shark! (and there could be a whole post ALONE on how interesting it is to collaborate on projects like this, and what it does to the process of drawing something when you're tying it to an existing narrative rather than trying to create one of your own for the picture, I'm sure, so I'll... not):
I reckon this kamikazeremix picture of the boys as kids might actually be my hands-down favourite of anything I've ever done, SPN or otherwise:
It was one of those things where everything worked, the first time around.
And this one, a sketch of Sam and Dean from minchout's Silk!Sam verse - I'm really happy about Sam's face in it, because the happy little secret smile makes *me* smile:
If you want to see more, the best thing is to check out the tags on my journal, but a LOT of the Harry Potter art is down right now, because I had a momentary erk about all the porny stuff I drew back then and yanked it; some of it will go back up later. Pretty much the journal is a little messy right now, but if I waited to post until I had a chance to clean up the thumbs and masterlist, I'd be posting in January :-/.
If anyone's still here; is there anything you'd like to know?
I tried to think about what I could talk about more specifically in this post, and kept coming up blank; I don't feel like I can offer much of a "here is how I do a cool thing!" post, because I am still learning. And, my goodness me, the learning curve is ENORMOUS when you go from being kind of lazy about book characters to trying to make people look like they do in a live-action fandom.
But then I thought, well, perhaps some of that learning and mistake-making is interesting! So, before I get to link to things of mine I like, here are a couple of things that have NOT worked, and how they ended up in a place where I was happy with them.
And they are both to do with the Reverse Big Bang, even. lies_unfurl was so patient with me!
I was lucky enough that salty_catfish was able to send me feedback on the initial sketch AND on the coloured version, because the former had a few composition and Dean's-face issues, and the latter... well. Here is the version I first sent, with an "I think this might be finished!" kind of note:
And here is how it looked when I sent it in to the mods as a prompt:
So, the main issues from the first one BASICALLY came down to laziness, and a lack of thought, and salty_catfish was awesome enough to not pull punches about it: the repetitive texture on Dean's skin, and on the leaves; the bland grass, done mostly with a basic photoshop brush, indicating nothing of the wildness I wanted; that the fairies didn't have proper wings, just wing-shapes; that the colour was a bit naff, with that bland yellowy-green grass; that the values were all screwy, with some things too dark and some things too bright; Dean's hair; a lack of interesting texture throughout.
"Fixing" it actually only took an evening of concentrated work, and led me to think that a lot of the time, my problem is stopping too early with pictures; calling something done when it is, in fact, merely coloured in.
The grass: going from using a "grass brush" to drawing the stuff in, eye-dropping from a green palette of light-to-dark and just using a hard round brush with the opacity jitter set right up high, which gave it an interesting texture of its own. Dean's shadow is also a lot rougher, less like a bland shape sitting on top of the grass and more like, you know, a shadow.
The colour: a lot more purple (I love purple shading, maybe a little too much), a lot cooler, a lot more even across, which made Dean himself the pale focus of the image rather than a pale thing on a pale thing. Shading the leaves and toadstools to give them more shape, covering them up more with grass.
Details: Giving the toadstools spots, even; can't believe I was going to send in a fairy ring without spotty toadstools, wtf. Getting an actual reference for an insect wing for the fairies.
The second failure-to-better involved redrawing the idea completely, and trying to shake it out of my head; I decided the best way to do that was to try a completely different approach.
So, this is where I started, with a picture of Oberon's hall, which I was going to make out of trees, la:
And it wasn't totally working for me. I suspect part of that is choosing that hideous green as a base. What IS that? I also checked the details of the story and realised that if I wanted nudie Dean in the shot, I could not have RoboSam. I wanted nudie Dean. But I thought, no, this will get better if I just stick with it.
But it didn't, and I did a lot more before I gave up:
LOOK AT THAT MESS. It's just... crap everywhere. It's like I found some ugly shoes or something and decided to try to salvage them by covering them with glitter and then bedazzling them and then setting one of them on fire and then putting out that fire by getting a cat to throw up on it.
There's no focus; everything is too bright or sharp or overly-detailed, so your eye doesn't GO anywhere. There's no drama to it, no tension... it sucks ALL of the balls in the universe.
So I started from scratch. I wanted to stay behind Dean, but also to make it more interesting. And, because I'd gone so horribly wrong with the colour, I thought I might try taking colour out of the equation entirely, and drew it in greyscale first, then coloured that after. That let me concentrate on the shape of the image and the story of it. Lo, a wild gif appears:
Now, this isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination (and note, even, that it's not THAT different in some ways - the wrap of the tree around the right hand side, for example), and there were some screwups in there - like Dean's tiny feet, he is a dainty flower okay? or like flattening the layers on top before I'd got the ground texture right, argh - but it is a LOT better.
You can see me changing my mind about things, like the shape of the leaves, or how to show Castiel's destructive power, but dodging the colour at first let me think about stuff like how best to position the figures, what I wanted to show; things like Dean being a passive figure at that point in the story, so he's sort of incidental to the action, but Castiel's wing-shadow wraps around him, and the other shapes contain him; that the main conflict here is between Castiel and Oberon, so even though Oberon's not looking at Castiel but at the beginning of the destruction (thereby, I hope, drawing *your* eye to it as well), there is a direct line between the two characters in the shape of the leaves, the way their bodies are angled etc.
Also the angle itself is just a bit more interesting, I guess.
God, I hope no one fell asleep wading through that. If you want to look at it all together, this is the masterpost for it, for The Stolen Man (it will all make more sense if you read the most excellent story that lies_unfurl wrote.
Being flighty, my favourite things are usually the most recent, eg the art for ghostyouknow27's Shark! (and there could be a whole post ALONE on how interesting it is to collaborate on projects like this, and what it does to the process of drawing something when you're tying it to an existing narrative rather than trying to create one of your own for the picture, I'm sure, so I'll... not):
I reckon this kamikazeremix picture of the boys as kids might actually be my hands-down favourite of anything I've ever done, SPN or otherwise:
It was one of those things where everything worked, the first time around.
And this one, a sketch of Sam and Dean from minchout's Silk!Sam verse - I'm really happy about Sam's face in it, because the happy little secret smile makes *me* smile:
If you want to see more, the best thing is to check out the tags on my journal, but a LOT of the Harry Potter art is down right now, because I had a momentary erk about all the porny stuff I drew back then and yanked it; some of it will go back up later. Pretty much the journal is a little messy right now, but if I waited to post until I had a chance to clean up the thumbs and masterlist, I'd be posting in January :-/.
If anyone's still here; is there anything you'd like to know?