Food for thought
Submission for "ImagenPalabra 5" Illustration showroom. Currently on display in Bogotá, Colombia.
Working with the showroom's theme "memory", I thought about creatures cooking media with pasta and carrots... I thought it was a fun, complex thing to do, so I did it :D... Now, here's the final image and some details (you can scroll down to check the explained process). Check out the event coverage here, and the event's main page here.
The image
The Details
I nice boiling pot of tape&egg spaghetti soup
The Process
After a couple of hours of sketching isolated cooking pots and bunny-cats, I did a full-page ink drawing as a guide for the digital painting. Similar to other projects where I make use of ink drawings, I had a rather vague idea of the positioning of elements that I wanted to see, and then drew with pen "on the fly", with no preliminary sketch of the composition. Later on, I'll tweak some elements with paint, since my objective is always to have no outlines in the final image.
I make what I call a "warm underpainting". I just throw some high-chroma reds and some yellow. Its a very "primitive" stage of value, color and rythm. I also establish a limited palette of the colors I'm going to work with.
Ok, so maybe it was a way-too-limited palette, so I expand the colors and... WOW that's a big jump from the last image.
I like to give a try to the "rendering" in the image's "center of interest" at the start. I'll go back to it later. First, it's usefull for me to go around the painting establishing silhouettes and trial-and-error shading stuff.
From this point on it's basically "finishing" part after part until the painting is complete. Inevitably, I get bored or frustrated of the part Im painting so I go to another one and finish the one I was doing later. I think this helps keep your eyes "fresh". I move the color palette around in a separate layer so it's close to the work area, for color picking.
And then you keep painting...
In the process, you'll throw away some parts of the line work entirely, and make new ones directly with the paint. The digital painting process shows you a new vision of the composition that the ink drawing might not have been able to.
A good subtle tweaking of levels can go a long way, and you can wiggle it at the end If you like.
See? I regretted the levels adjustment. In this step I finally solve the main pot and a lot of the details all around. I also fix some size and positioning issues from the background and solve the atmosferic perspective accordingly
In the final step (which would be the finalized image at the top of the post) I solve the "vapors", nudge some objects to a nice position and retweak the levels for printing.
