THE SIMPSONS NEWS

These last two weeks working on the revisions of THE SIMPSONS episode 500 have been very productive.  By Friday, I had finished my assignments for Act 1 and 2 and had started on Act 3.  I finished that part by Tuesday and was given the Couch Gag to work on, which I ended up finishing on Wednesday. I was then assigned some of Act 4 to work on.  We’ve been flying through our work.  Feels good to be on time and not be under the gun.  It’d be great to have the rest of  the season be this relaxed.  I doubt it will be though.

ART

Okay so, I’ve been playing around with the gouache, testing out what I want the final piece to look like and how best to approach working with them.  It’s mostly just how I personally WANT to work with them.  Gouache is very versatile and you can take many different approaches to using them.

First thing I did since last time was take the original first pass I did and messed around with it a bit by adding some gray and white. I also finessed the edges a bit more:

I liked it a bit more and it gave me some ideas as to how I might want to approach the painting.

I then tried another test. What I did was, I made myself a dark gray tone instead of deluding the black with water to get a dark gray tone and  I just painted it in:

It worked okay but I didn’t like the way it looked in the end.  The problem was that, in the face, I was putting black down and THEN adding the gray after.  This wasn’t really working. On the other hand, in the background, I put the gray down and then painted black over it.  This made me think that I might want to do that in the face.

So I did.  I put down the gray tone and then painted black over it. I also did more of an ink wash effect with the background:

I liked the  way it felt to do it this way but I made the mistake of only putting the gray over the exact places I was going to paint black,  This made it more difficult for me to get the dark gray tone to be in other areas it needed to be. It was basically the same problem I had with my second attempt. I also didn’t like the way the background ended up looking.

So I finally got smart and decided to paint more in the fashion that I was taught to paint in the one painting class that I took years ago.  I painted ALL the dark gray areas (even the areas that weren’t going to be painted black) on the face and then added black in the shadow patterns where they needed to go:

This seemed to work much better although I really need to make her head squarer. When I round out her face it doesn’t look right. I also attempted as best as I could, to change up the edges on my tones.  The painting was bit small so it was tricky to do.   Meanwhile, having made one more attempt at painting the background with an ink wash style, confirmed that I didn’t want to use that style for the final look.

None of these roughs are beautiful but they all helped me get to the point where I feel more comfortable with the paints.

I’m going to need to show Paul these roughs before I commit to anything final, in case he can give me some pointers on how to improve my painting.

For more comic and stories written by me, CLICK HERE.

If you like what you read, please consider signing up to my rss feed.

Comments are appreciated as well.

I also have a store. Click Here and check it out.

If you would like to have a text ad on my site, click on the red BUY LINKS button under the Archives list.

And while you’re at it, please Digg me too.

Writing this blog is almost a part time job for me. Tips are most welcome.