The Year of The Rabbit

Final painting

This image started with 2 thoughts:

• draw a romantic image for Lunar New Year,
• experiment with tall, vertical image. 

On my sketchbook, I made this note:

• Rabbit!
• Heavier lineworks.
• Color with markers?

These are the possible themes I thought I would like to explore. With those notes, I started drawing a few exploration thumbnails. I drew a rabbit flying down among clouds (see 1). I probably thought the clouds could be rendered with heavier line works. I then explored placement of the rabbit relative to the moon (see 2). Next, I added a trail of clouds, roughly "S" shaped (see 3).

Exploration thumbnails

At this point, I decided on 1:2 size ratio—that is, the height of the image is twice the width.

Learning from previous mistake, I sketched another idea (see 4) just to convince myself that I really wanted to go with the initial idea. Once convinced, I drew the rough composition (see 5). 

Second round of thumbnails

When transferring this thumbnail to large paper, I found it difficult to finalize the shape of the cloud trail. I wanted to have some characteristics of Chinese paintings, but I also wanted the lines to look appealing.

I introduced 2 new elements to sweeten the image: peach blossom petals and butterflies. I chose these elements because they are common in Lunar New Year imagery. I also hoped that they would strengthen the feeling of Chinese painting.

Pencil of the final image

Next comes inking. I was really worried about inking long curvy lines. The drawing is just slightly smaller than A3 size, larger than my usual drawings. I decided to stick to drawing pens and concentrated on drawing long strokes with shoulder as pivot. The first few lines were nerve-wracking! Soon I grew confident with this process and actually felt sorry when all the clouds were inked.

Inked final image

I started coloring with color thumbnails. I painted these in sequence, left to right.

• First I painted object colors. The sky is blue; the moon is pale yellow; rabbit is grey. The exception is clouds. They are pink because I wanted a romantic feeling.
• Next I painted with the idea of glowing rabbit. I liked the contrast; but I found the feeling not romantic.
• Then I painted with the idea of romantic. This is subjective, so this scheme is probably the most difficult to understand. The sky is pink; the moon is pale white; the clouds rabbit is orange and the clouds are orange-pink.

At this point, I compared the 3 schemes and made notes to myself. I left the painting and returned to it the next day. I painted the final scheme, the one on extreme right. This is my choices of combining ideas I found from the previous 3 schemes.

Color thumbnails

While painting, I added cherry branches to break up the space and add depth. To enhance the feeling of Chinese painting, I drew a "DennyIskArt" seal instead of my usual signature.

I am happy with the final image. To me it feels like a romantic Chinese painting for the Year of the Rabbit :)

Chicky Dressed Up for Halloween

I painted Chicky dressed up for Halloween.

I drew this 2 years ago (see evidence). I pushed myself to color it so I had at least one product for my online store.

I experimented with flat cell shading. It dramatically cut painting time. On the other hand, I cannot help feeling I overcomplicated the style by introducing 3 shades and rim lighting for the hat.

I am working on the Dragon Ball x Avengers painting in a similar style. Please look forward to it.

Pine Cone Mountain

I designed this drawing as a Christmas greeting image. As we will see below, it is a lesson of planning and letting go for me.

Process

I began with the idea of winter holiday. After some thoughts, I came up with two requirements:

1. a set that immediately conveys "winter holiday" to the audience and
2. Maggie and Faito are in the drawing.

My solution was to give them a magical place that they visit in their adventure. The place will have snow to give the winter feel. Conveying the idea of holiday was harder.

Thumbnails I drew for planning

I drew the first thumbnail with the idea of showing Faito being so happy and excited. I reinforced this with a Christmas tree in the second (yes, there is a creature head at the top of the tree that we may or may not see in the future--I have not made up my mind) and third thumbnails.

At this point I felt that I need to research more ideas for Christmas holiday symbols. (I usually researched ideas using Pinterest. You can see the images I collected in this "Ornaments" board.) One idea I liked was using a pine cone as a Christmas tree.

Pine cones are small, though. How do I explain a giant pine cone tree? Well, why not make it even larger? A Pine Cone Mountain! And so I arrived at the final idea.

As I drew the huge pine cone in the foreground, I realized that it may not be immediately recognizable as a pine cone because most of its parts were out of frame. In the final image, I added a pine cone in the background as a visual hint. I also added giant Christmas ornaments to reinforce the holiday theme.

So far so good. Except it was already Christmas when I started coloring. Pressed for time, I neglected planning for colors and values. I simply tried out color combinations and went on coloring. The result was quite far from what I wanted.

Lesson 1: never skip color and value planning.

I finished coloring just in time for the new year 2017:

Happy new year, everyone :) Wish you all a good 2017. #newyear #holiday #drawing #illustration #colorpencil #adventure #dennyisk #pinecones

A post shared by Denny Iskandar (@dennyiskart) on Jan 2, 2017 at 7:00am PST

I could have let it go and moved on, but I did not. I thought I could fix the color and values digitally, so I put in more hours to edit the image. The further I worked on it, the more I realized that I was spending time unwisely. In the end, I simply made the background lighter and added simple gradients.

So, lesson 2: let go a finished drawing.

Time is better spent planning for the next piece and working on the next piece.

As always, let me know your thoughts and comments.

Welcoming the Year of the Rooster

Happy Lunar New Year!

The last two months saw three major holidays packed close to each other. Lunar new year is the last one. I want to draw something nice as a greeting, so I spent longer than usual on this piece.

Designing was surprisingly easy. I knew the rooster would feature prominently because the new year is the year of the rooster. Seeing stylized, abstracted imagery of rooster gave me the idea of a fiery, perhaps imaginary rooster in the background with Maggie and Faito floating in the foreground.

Coloring was more difficult. I still need to practice more with color pencils to control values. I deliberately chose non-traditional Chinese New Year colors (that is, not red). Fortunately, it is easy to find such color schemes in Singapore. (See these examples for an idea.) So I thought of including pink, yellow, and green.
During execution, I was caught in my fascination with the pleasant sequence of red, orange, yellow, lime green, and green. This sequence fills most of the rooster. However, roosters usually have dark tail feathers. My solution was ending the sequence with cyan, sky blue, and blue. I admit the result is perhaps too much, but I think I kept them in some degree of harmony.

(Ah, on hindsight, perhaps Faito's clothes should have been closer to blue.)

Let me know if you enjoy finding out how I worked. Please don't hesitate to tell me what you want to know more so I can include it in future posts.