ArtOrder B&W Vampires

Done for the weekly sketch contest over at ArtOrder. This weeks theme was as you can guess, a pen and ink image of two D&D vampires..

It's much too early in the morn for too much exposition, so I'll keep it short and sweet.. Maybe I'll add some colorful exposition after I arise.

OKAY... Got some sleep, and so far I'm starting off this week on a great foot.. Only good new trickling in right now..

How about some insight on this piece.. I feel like talking about it because it was a pretty long journey from conception to finish.. Time-wise I only took a day from idea to finish, but I went to a lot of different places creatively to get to the end goal.

I started with visions of Franklin Booth and Charles Dana Gibson, and even a little Heirich Kley. I knew that I wanted it to look real and very tangible, but from the beginning I knew I wouldn't be able to get a lotof good ref, even if shot some- which I did..

The thing with armor is that no matter what ref you shoot, you won't see most of th body and you're always making up stuff with armour, so you're aways creating without a safety net.

I thought about getting some scratchboard so I could do this right, but I didn't want to have to learn a new technique when the subject was already kicking my but.. So I started with just straight pen and ink .. And at first I started doing the "comic think" just tracing the outlines and adding shadows.. But I reminded myself that didn't want any outlines, and to just paint the shadows with the black.

Note that I did do a prelim thumbnail, but veeeeeery rough, of the shadow play.. While it didn't help with details, it helped me balance the distribution of light and dark.. I tried to match it with the thumbnail, because I could make out the thmbnail fairly easily, and I knew if the final matched, the composition would at least be taken care of.

At a point I was finished laying down the black, but I was very disappointed with the picture at this stage.. So i grabbed some Titanium White acrylic and started re-establishing some positive, white, areas.. The picture felt better, but the white was just too white.. So then i went back over it with some black lines, but much more delicate than before. BTW, painting on the acrylic white was easier than painting on the paper..

And for the rest of the illustration process I went back and forth between white and black.. sometimes painting over an area two or three times..

I made a mistake and overlooked the size specifications in the original assignment, so I had to add some background to the top and bottom.

Well. That's that.. hope this might help you if you try this technique.. I'm very interested in trying out scratchboard now.. But I have to say this process was pretty fun and organic.. I'd just like to find a more opaque paint other than acrylic.. I had to put down two or three layers to really cover up the black ink.( if anyone has some ideas, hit me up.)