Hello My Dear Friends!
Recently, during those warm days of winter (here in Warsaw, at least), I was having an impression of an imminent spring. The warm, energizing wind and a blooming hyacinth on my desk made me daydream about the aura of spring. I put some of this lively energy into the artwork below.
As you can see, this postcard from Shiny Forest is colourful. I'm not sure if that's an Easter Bunny on the right, but he certainly has something to do with the spring vibes :) This art is also a kind of a breakthrough for me, as it's something relatively new on my blog. As I said in one of my recent posts, I got lots of inspiration from many befriended artists here on Steemit, and I really wanted to try out some new things myself. And that's why I I combined watercolor with stippling :)
I must say, it was quite a time-consuming process to finish this piece. The addition of colour required me to proceed with caution while stippling, as the whole drawing could easily end up being awful and tacky if I overdid it with some special effects. I was also doing such piece for the very first time, so I had to stop a lot and think about what would be a good strategy for my next steps. Hopefully you'll like the final effect of my struggle :)
Watercolor, pen and ink on paper, 30 x 40 cm
The rabbit was loosely based on some very old and intriguing photo I've found in Grandma's photo album:
Photo of a photo made with my Samsung Galaxy :)
This photo has a lot of magic and mystery in it, I love it! It reminds me a bit of my favourite illustrator, Sam Weber, and his dark, nocturnal pieces.
And now, without any further ado, here's the list of materials while working on this art and the step by step explanation of the progress. Enjoy, My Friends!
MATERIALS:
- Cold press, 300 g/m2 watercolor paper- unfortunately I cannot give you any more specific info about it, because I lost the block cover a long time ago;
- Sharp pencil;
- White Nights watercolours;
- Masking fluid;
- A 241 pure squirrel Restaurohouse brush - big and flat;
- A 24 Pure Squirrel Kolibri brush- medium size;
- Pen;
- 0.1 and 0.3 markers.
Materials used. Photo taken with my Samsung Galaxy and overshadowed by my body
Sidenote: on the left you can see a forest in a jar project of mine. They're quite a big fad now in Poland, and I needed to have one myself. They're essentially forest plants- moss, poison ivy, fern and others, placed in some elegant fashion in a jar big enough to contain them :)
PROGRESS STEP BY STEP:
First thing in my case is always a sketch, and a quite an accurate one, so that putting watercolour on it won't produce any doubts as to where to put which colour.
TIP 1: I use a sharp pencil and I try to sketch delicately, so that the lines won't be very visible after I put some watercolor on it. I've drawn with soft and dark pencils before, they didn't go well with watercolor, besides, I wanted to give this art some distinct pen outlines- another reason to keep it clean.
What I did afterwards, was basically:
- I put a masking liquid on both stars, on three little balls of light, and on rabbit's eye, to keep those places white and uncovered by watercolor. It's always a tricky, messy step for me;
- I wet the whole paper by spraying water on it (I use a little refillable spray bottle);
- And I put first layer of colour with a big flat brush. I make some big global strokes. The colours are mixed indigo and green on the background, and mixed sepia and neutral black on the trees.
After the paper dried, I was able to get rid of the masking liquid. That's also a tricky process, I had many cases of paper torn at this stage. We're not very much compatible, me and the masking liquid, I guess. After I managed to not destroy the whole piece by my fight with oh so rebellious mask, I could put another layer of paint on objects, like plants and rabbit. This time I didn't wet the paper and I used more pigment (emerald green, indigo, green, yellow green and neutral black), and in effect the colours are more vivid.
TIP 2: If you're impatient like I am, it's good to use a hair dryer to make paper dry faster.
And then, after all paint dried, I created black outlines with a pen. It's always my initial step in shading.
I started with scattered stippling, to be able to assess the general look of this combination and what to do next with it.
I went full for the sky first. I wanted to obtain an effect of whirling, by changing the direction of the dotted lines and spaces between them often. I also did some minor shading to the plants.
This art required a lot of work and time to get it's final form. I was deepening shading by adding more and more dots and lines and sort of building up the darkness. It was a very gradual process.
When my shading got bold enough, I could go onto the next stage and add the dark outlines in the background, to create some depth. I wanted my art to have a bit distorted perspective (I'm into it), and I wanted the plant in the background to support this impression.
I repeated this stage with the rest of the drawing. I added some dense stippling around the dark outlines, so that it would look more natural and... smooth :)
The last element that needed some polishing was Mr Rabbit, who had to be stippled with a series of very fine dots. And then I was finally finished :)
The GIF shows the progression of my artwork. There are more steps incorporated in this animation than I described above, because I like my GIFs to be very detailed :)
How do you like this new experimental trend of mine, guys? Do you like this combination of painting and drawing?
I have some more new ideas and projects to come, which makes me very happy.
Steemit is wonderful at giving me powerful boosts of motivation to try new things and learn skills, and I'm very grateful for that. Thank you guys for sharing your ideas and inspiring me to action!
It's very cool of you to stop by! I hope you enjoyed this post, please let me know what you think! And as always...
That photo is wonderfully creepy.
I've always loved stippling (done well), myself. It's nice seeing a look inside the process.
Thanks for the great tutorial! It turned out nicely.
Thanks @intspekt :)
So good! I love the textures in the shading.
Thank you @erb! I've seen your spherical book project, it really means a lot to receive support from a pro artist like yourself! Made me smile :) And yeah, I've been thoroughly exploring different textures obtained with stippling. Before there was an era of linocuts :) We' ll see what technique will be next.
Thanks again friend!
Love,
Klaudia
Very good information I will share information to my blog
Hi @saifulsabri, thank you for your kind support! All the best, Klaudia
Equally I beg your support as well @shinyforest
I see you're quite new to Steemit. It's best to post quality content @saifulsabri. Asking for upvotes etc. may get you in trouble.
I will post a part of my welcoming message for you with tips:
I wish I was told several things when I was new here, like you are now. My experience is, that:
Good luck!
Thanks for his good information tips
whoa, love that dreamy style of yours. Great work there. Surprising to see the change when textures were added.
Thank you @kimzwarch, yeah, I was curious myself how will the final effect look, it wasn't so easy to predict I must tell you. I'm very glad you liked it! All the best,
Klaudia
Most welcome.
Ehm....that was a crazy transformation? Love it!
Haha, right? I'm surprised myself ;) Thank you for your kind support, @cryptonik! :)
See you around Steemit!
All the best,
Klaudia
I love what you did with watercolors! I will need to try this technique myself :)
Thank you @marinaart :D
Excellent work. I love the stippling.
Thank you @christianyocte, I appreciate your kind words. I'm crazy about stippling, it's my stippling era now ;)
Love your style! This is very artistic and dreamy! I really like how you treat the sky and ground with the dots and lines <3 It gives a strange and surreal touch to the finished picture <3
upvotes
Hi @veryspider, the love is mutual! Soo glad that we've found each other on Steemit. Approval of such a talented pro like yourself is something that really makes me believe in myself. Thank you :) and yeah, I love how stippling can produce all these unexpected effects, I'm still exploring this technique.
See you around Steemit, my friend :)
All the best,
Klaudia
What a beautiful post! thx for shared :D
Hi @basileonardo! Welcome to Steemit. Thank you for your kind words.
I see you're an artist yourself.
You know, when I joined Steemit I didn't know much what to do and how to success.
I will post my welcoming message on your blog. It has tips for you :)
All the best,
Klaudia
I already saw it, thanks again :D
I love taking a walk through your magical forest 😁
Absolutely love this! The amount of time it must've taken for all these layers, all the stippling, was totally worth it. I'm a fan of watercolor and pen/drawing combined, and you've done it here in a new and exciting way.
Thank you @offbeatbroad, yeah, you're right, it was time consuming... but I'm happy I did it. Do you have any post here on Steemit where you combine these two techniques? I'd love to see it. I've seen your fantastic and lively sketches, so I can only imagine how your watercolours could look like ;)
Thank you! I haven't done a lot, but generally at least do some outlining with pen. Here are a couple of watercolors with some pen added in.
Here's a Christmas card I made for my mom this year, and a painting of my piratess.
Thanks so much for the links! Those pieces are beautiful! Christmas card is quaint and cute, and piratess is very 3D and polished! Nice!
Thanks very much! 😊
You work is becoming richer and richer in every aspect..Love how this story of yours is growing..Looked at the stamp of paper but couldn't recognize the mark. Great work @shinyforest, and it would be so nice to see your work published in some book :)
Wow, thank you @jungwatercolor, so sweet of you to show support. It always makes me very happy when a pro artist like yourself give me words of encouragement. And it's very cool of you to notice my progress!
Love,
Klaudia
@shinyforest, from the moment i saw your work I felt in love with it and it makes me happy to see how that work is growing :)
I love your work, but seing the animated bit is always so exciting. I love the colour story and your use of pointilism in the surround is on point (pun intended). Amazing, as usual.
I think that those GIFs will finally push me to the artistic vlogging (and that's the plan), as with time they are becoming to feel unsufficient. Thank you so much.
Firstly, I loooove the colour! Really, I would have never guessed, that your art would be so good with a little added colour, because your works in black and white are already beautiful. And the colour itself, this darkish and muted green is very fitting for this mysterious forest scene.
And secondly, I love the rabbit. I don’t Know if you did it on purpose, but the arrangement of the plants and the rabbit reminds me of old still life, with the rabbit as a symbol for fertility, hunt, and spring...or perhaps my imagination runs to wild.
You created a scene, were everything could happen, the world seems to hold its breath.
Love it!
I know the theme that you refer to, @neumannsalva, yet I wasn't consciously inspired by it... But it often is in my case that my inspirations come unconsciously from the mix of things I saw. If I liked something (and very often, if I didn't like something!) I put it away, forget about it and it tends to resurface in my art later on. So... I never really enjoyed creating still life, and here we are with a piece where the arrangement reminds of one. Haha hilarious :) You know, I got back to art after a long period of time, and perhaps my works reflects somehow the process of my artistic reeducation. Now it's a stage of still life, and then maybe people, and next some live action hah. I'm very grateful for your comment, you always invite an interesting discussion and I've found out something interesting about myself and my art that wasn't very obvious to me before. Cool!
Love,
Klaudia
I not only appreciate your art, but also your lovely answers 😍 I think you have such a unique style which is full of allusions. For me this is a quality characteristic, because in this way your art never gets boring, there are always deeper layers to discover. And this special mixture of cuteness and darkness appeals very much to me.
and by the way, look what I did to my thumb with masking fluid :-D I rubbed so hard I got a blister
Auch + haha :P I'm so sorry, but I also feel your pain, my hands are always massacrated in ways like this! I attended once a watercolour workshop and the artists there got rid of masking fluid using eraser, I tried it several times with caution and it helped a bit. But I must say, the masking fluid has a soul of a killer haha.
absolutely!!! killer fluid! Killing paper and fingers 😆
Doing art is dangerous 😁
This is so cool. A litte bit of darkness, mystery and simplicity in lines and colours. Love it!
Thank you @planet-rium, means a lot to hear words of support from such a talented artist as yourself. I love your work and I'm glad that Steemit connected us!
All the best,
Klaudia :)
Ohh, thank U very much :)
I wish U great ideas and so on - I will be watching U.
Very cool!!!!
Thanks @naditinkoff! :)))
Oh, so stippling is what the dot thingy is called. Cool!
I love the photo. It's so unnecessarily creepy :P
I think the color looks very nice!
Right? it's only a rabbit in a field, but all this darkness, industrial surroundings and inexplicability of his presence there... hehe. Reminds me of a Limbo game, too (which I loooove). I learnt a new English word today: 'foreboding'. But I'm not sure if it necessarily applies here :)
Cool to hear from you, @caleblailmusik ;)
Foreboding definitely works here ;)
And oh my gosh, I love Limbo!! Have you played Inside by the same developers?
Yep. These games have changed and inspired me forever :)
I just wish there were more of them! I blew through those two in just a few sittings.
Wow! This is beautiful Klaudia. I feel so bad for having come across this now or else it would have been in the first issue of my magazine. Lovely work! I love postcards and of all the domestic animals, rabbits are my favorite so I really liked this postcard and how adorable and fascinating is your gif. Resteeming it for more exposure.
Thank you @sharoonyasir, that's very kind of you, I appreciate your support. I'm happy you liked it!
And as I said, you make fantastic effort with your magazine, I'm keeping my fingers crossed so that will work out great for both you and the included artists!
All the best,
Klaudia