The Great Book Seminar Saga Part IV: Week Nine

The Great Book Seminar Saga
Part IV: Week Nine

... in which Lisa may have done something halfway decent and Viktor is okay with ugly students...

So week nine.

Pat and Gant were entirely right when they suggested I work in pen. This week I traded in my lovely little micron, however, for a shmancy dip pen and swapped my black ink for a fantastic nut brown. I wanted to see if it might give my line work a bit more warmth and character.

And then I dove right in.

I picked out a couple of the sketches and compositions that I'd already rendered four or five times and attempted to render them this way. I decided not to do too much shading with the ink lines themselves, but dropped in a brown wash of the same ink, painting in deeper values for the shadows. (Alas alack, I don't have in-process images for these particular pieces, but the next Book Seminar Saga post will have the whole deal - from sketches to the final render...)

Wonder of wonders, I was actually vaguely - dare I say - happy wiht the way the line and wash looked. And because I was being all experimenty, I didn't stop there, but began dropping in some simple spots of color right over the washes. Ooooh... aaahhh... line AND color! Exciting things!

As I hinted in the last part of the saga, I was somewhat pleased with the results. Amazingly enough it all seemed to work together, so I rendered a couple of my other small spot illustrations and subsequently settle don this of a way of working for this particular project.

For serious style WOAH!

So presenting, week nine:

This was the first image I rendered this way. Lots of line, brown wash, light color. It's not quite done yet. I still want to go in and add some blue to the water.Don't worry, I promise I'll show you aaaaaall the pretty pictures when they're finished. ;)

Another you may recognize. I'm not totally convinced by this one.
I may render it again... or play with the sketch further. And last but most definitely not least... I actually think this is the strongest image thus far.
The lines work and the spot of red and blue sit well in the image. Probably the only one that is actually "done" thus far.

So week nine. I arrived at class with these three and a fourth image painted as well as two reworked sketches (that I intend to paint this week) and two new sketches for the project. As you well know, each week, I've come to class with something pretty different. At our crit this past Thursday, Viktor turned to my work with a, "So what do we have this week?" Viktor has been somewhat, hmm, not exasperated exactly, but perhaps less than enthused by my inability to settle on a way of working. This having-a-way-of-working business is a very big deal... as I said, for serious style woah.

Anywho, I got some good feedback on the images and have quite a bit of work ahead of me for week ten, and according to Viktor, pleeeenty of time to do it in. Before we left on Thursday, Viktor looked around the room and said, "You all are looking lovely. Clearly, you're all getting your beauty sleep. So now this is week nine, and we have six weeks left in the semester. You do the math. Figure out how many images you have and how many you need to make. You have six weeks. Figure it out. What I recommend is sleeping less, get less beauty sleep. I can deal with an ugly class if you bring me more work. Six weeks with no sleep, you can do. Two months, and you start to get sick, but six weeks? It's doable. Sleep less, work more. See you next week."

Thank you Viktor.

Well look at that, you're all caught up on my book project. Now that we're all updated with the seminar saga, I will post some of the other things I've been up to, but of course keeping you abreast of all Viktor drama with periodic updates. So my dear readers, stay tuned, who knows what Part V, our next installment, will bring?