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Ricefish — :c
#dragon #red #watercolour
Published: 2019-04-19 01:44:14 +0000 UTC; Views: 3266; Favourites: 453; Downloads: 21
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Man, it's been a long time since I painted something not tiny! Really out of practice so figured I'd try redrawing something from my gallery. Had to change my painting style to something a bit more solid looking when I was at college (tutors didn't approve of me using graphite details or white outlines with watercolour, argh) so I was trying to pull back a bit and sorta ended up between painting styles, it was interesting to work on but pretty weird! I figured some stuff out that should make the next thing a looot easier to do. At least I hope so!Watercolour, coloured pencil, white gel pen...oh yeah, it was my first time using Fabriano watercolour paper too...I made sure to find out which side was the most textured so I could avoid it (hate seeing paper texture in my own stuff, love it in other peoples work) aaand accidentally used that side without noticing until the lineart was finished :'D
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Comments: 66
So glad to see you back! I really admire your artstyle so much! I hope life is treating you well, keep on doing you!!!
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Ahh thank you, I hope life treats you well too!
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Heeey, thank you! I have an updated sketch for you, I'll show you at the weekend!
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DUDE. This is friggin' incredible. Absolutely love the style and colors, this is art goals right here.
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Wow! The colors are so magnificent and alive! The detail is amazing. You have to sit and look at this piece in order to take in all the details. I love the deep reds on the dragon and the peacock feathers as well. Stunning work!
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Good lord, it's so lovely to see your work again. I honestly like both versions of this piece for different reasons - the other was whispy and magical as if it were made from clouds and this one is so vibrant like the rainbow cutting through said clouds. Basically your work is a beautious sky <3
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Haha ahhhh man, thanks! That's a lovely way of putting it!
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Heh, funny. Your teachers didn't like the things that make your art so unique and beautiful. The very things that attracted me to your gallery in the first place.
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The subtle details in the background go so nicely with the wonderful colors in the main body. It's always so wonderful to see work from you. <3
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So!! I've been comparing the two pieces side by side to think about things you have improved on/things that I miss about the original piece or your old painting style!! Here it goes!!
1. You have gotten so much better at using vibrant colors!! Look at the colors of the head and the sky!!!! However, I'd love to see more vibrant colors pulled out towards the tail and on the fish to keep it consistent; it really does almost feel like two different paintings. Maybe that was intentional as a blend of the two styles or show the graduating from one style to the other, but I'd love to see the two married a bit better.
2. Screw those tutors; the one thing I loved MOST about your pieces was the use of a lot of white highlights that are sort of dramatic!! You still used it on like, half the piece (especiallly around the dragon and on the stars, but I'd love to see it pulled up again on the scales and other lines to make things really pop!!
3. I feel your drawing of feathers and fur are a lot more simplified, and I have mixed feelings on that too!! On one hand, the way you make it POP out is so FABULOUS (Especialy on those magenta neck scales DAMN) but on the other hand the stupid amount of swirly details and lines you added to every scale in your style before is one of the things that I loved the most about your work because I would find so many things to look at wherever I stared!! You still have a LITTLE of that (Never let go of the swirlies it's so you!!) but I DO miss all the excess lmao.
4. I also miss the speech bubble. It was little pieces like that that made your pieces a little more surreal and mixed media feeling. (Like I LOVED the frog with the speech bubble in one of your old pieces, and also the ghosts painted on newspaper. But I've got a weakness and it's called mixed media)
5. I gotta say the darker outlines really does help though! As nice and organic as the graphite lines are, the areas that I feel are the most polished are the ones that are darker!! (like around the fish and the dragon's head)
SO TL;DR-- you've gotten a lot better about use of color and making things pop with the darker lines and brighter highlights, I miss all the dramatic white outlines and stupid amounts of detail and the silly speech bubble, and overall I am excited at where you go in the future!!!!
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Ahhh dude, this is SUCH a helpful comment, thank you!
I did cut back the layers at the tail end with the intention of having everything in the yellow/white area look less realised than everything in the blue sky area, but the distinction definitely isn't clear enough to make it look intentional! Even when it works as a stylistic thing it's something some people find irritating, I think...when I've tried it before people usually tell me they "look forward to seeing it finished", haha :'D
I feel like there's more in the way of white lining in the newer one (I could be looking at it wrong, though!), but a hell of a lot more of a lack of contrast between the figure and the BG, scaled up details, and softer (and less) lines that take the pop out of it, maybe. I think maybe the more muted colours and heavier graphite shading in the original make the white look better, too?
I absolutely share your mixed feelings about the simplification! It's definitely a result of trying to make my stuff more "marketable"...my tutor thought I should focus on kids books...but as much as I like simplified styles I've always been into OTT psychedelic fantasy paintings that had waaaay too much going on (Patrick Woodroffe mesmerised me as a kid!) so I'm super conflicted!
Stylistic choices aside, the original being on smooth hard paper and having a SERIOUS foundation of detailed graphite pencil work vs the new being on soft heavy paper with very limited use of graphite really makes a difference...that's a holdover from college, I wasn't supposed to combine watercolour with graphite at all or even use outlines really ahhh whhhhy :'D The darker lines you mention are literally the only areas (well, head/feathers closest to head/fish/foreground arm) where I used HB pencil, so your comment reeaally clarifies things there! The rest of him is coloured lines (but it's pretty hard to tell) and some light 2H. The original was mostly HB but it's a really washed out and tiny scan because I had a seriously weird like, fish bowl monitor back then haha.
I think I might have an overall sort of...super flat style? That looks more "right" when I let myself rely more on line work to hold things together?
Ohh yes, I freakin love when people put stickers on their art and layer things and that kinda stuff! Using speech bubbles and little boxes and things evokes that...but I was told speech bubbles in particular were a tacky trend and not to do it ahhhhh, it's hard to shake off the conditioning!
I'm definitely gonna try playing with the original a bit more with your comment in mind!
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Wonderful picture *^*
The detailing is just fascinating!
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Your watercolor style is just SO YUMMY! Please do more! <3 <3 <3
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I have missed your artwork so much, I felt a wholesome pang in my chest the moment I saw this thumbnail in my notifications!
Beautiful, your watercolour work is always so inspiring! ♥
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I'm honoured that you feel that way! I hope you're doing okay, too~
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Tutors can have their opinions...but at the end, draw with whatever you feel comfortable with.
It definitively shows improvement from the first one!! I particularly love the new horns.
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I congratulate you. This is the best I saw in the day. Awesome! go through my profile if you want, I would like a teacher like you to know my humble drawings and photographs.
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God I love all of the detail in this ahhhh :V and the colours are amazing too, I just adore the texture in the sky 
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Ah man, this looks lush! I love how much detail you put into your work, his feathery parts look so plush!
I can totally empathise on tutors and teachers being like 'If i see graphite on your watercolours I will murder you to high heavens' pretty sure it's an art teacher thing, 'cause I've never heard anyone else complain about it!
I will figure out the mystery of how you get that effect in the sky one of these days!
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Thank you~!
Ahh yeah! There were people on my course drawing in comic and cartoon styles too but because you're a "painter" you gotta follow the "painting rules"? Man :'D
I don't even feel like a painter, I feel like, I dunno...I do mixed media drawings? The drawing part is super important, I want things to look like drawings, like something kids would do...but I've noticed that if you say you paint people take you 1000% more seriously whether or not they've even seen what you do hahaa.
Art teachers always want you to "go bigger" or loosen up and go all Quentin Blake regardless of what you're actually trying to go for, too! Why the heck would an illustrator NEED to work with an A1 canvas??? I remember one of the tutors talking about how important size can be in making an impression when you're walking into a room to look at a painting and I'm just...this is...an illustration course...and I'm specialising in books...
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I know I think more than half of the art teachers I've had, just didn't quite understand the separation between painting and illustration?
Just regular non art people like the work regardless of what it's called, but show it to a teacher they will hiss and say it's wrong??
I'd had some questionable advice from art teachers at the best of times 'It doesn't matter how good you are at drawing,
if you can't WRITE about artwork, you're not going to have a career of any kind in art' like, how does that make sense for art??
Ah man, Quentin Blake and just any artists that paints bottles or still life. Man, if i worked at A1 normally, it'd take me a year for 1 painting alone, and I'd be sick of my life haha!
Unless they were expecting you to paint for A1 sized books haha! Although if i was dong a big fantasy tome I guess i wouldn't mind as much! ;D
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What the HECK I've never been told anything quite that stupid! With me it was mostly just being told over and over that quantity is more important than quality and size matters haha. Damn! (Also, accusingly: "I can tell you like the anime. I can just picture you sat in your room surrounded by stacks of Japanese comics"...like...okay that's weird...lady do you know how much manga costs) I can totally see how an art teacher would say that about writing though, since being able to bullshit about art is the only thing that gives half of them their authority. My course leader's stuff was literally charcoal squiggles, but he was getting his doctorate in art hahahaa ha. He looooved writing philosophical essays about art and most of our lectures were about modern art and understanding it's context and shit and I'm talkin straight up, bollocks art installation projects like...a broken wooden chair in a perfectly square white room or whatever. Argh flashbacks :'D I'll never forget reading this beautiful artists statement that was so grand I couldn't wait to see the art they were talking about...and it was literally just wooden posts painted different colours, I felt so cheated :'D
Oh man yeah, the only illustrator we got to meet was somebody who's advice was to keep your inspirations as limited as possible to keep things simple (every single book cover she did was just like, the same flat colour, stiffly posed chick on a flat colour pink or purple background so I guess she took her own advice...)...and then she made fun of picture book authors for being introverted geeks that are bad at mixing at literary parties! Like why is it that everyone we're supposed to be listening to seems to not actually be into art at all.
Same! It'd take me the whole 3yr course to figure out how to scale up to A1! They think forcing you to go big will make you loosen up instead of just providing infinite detail space for an obsessive :'D
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I KNOW RIGHT?? having a bigger canvas does not always mean it's gonna be better!
I remember doing those giant characoal drawings where you had to draw super loose
and wiggly lines everywhere and kept thinking, this is kind of a waste of paper??
Half of them just ended up looking awful, whilst the teacher/tutor was like 'ah yes, that looks super nice!
well done!' Like really are you seeing the same thing i'm seeing on this page?! art teachers are nuts man,
you do get the odd cool teacher who knows how much shite this is to do and they just kind of be honest and go:
'yeah, i know its all crap but my higher ups kind of have say in this thing, so just try your best?'
Man, no wonder i struggled to do all the writing parts on my courses! There was so much you just had to make up:
'ah yes I choose this colour because it represents love, and passion and those things are central to the theme of such and such'
the reality is i just choose that colour cause it looked cool man, art teachers look too much into stuff like that!
Ready the artists statements on others peoples work was just gold. I remember this one girl had like a 3 paragraph statement about her
final piece and it was literally three squares on this giant canvas. That's it. she got an A for her assignment.
Nuts man, i'm sure it was totally rigged though, cause the guy who ran the course just LOVED stuff like that.
Dude That's just NUTS, but then I'm totally not surprised her stuff was so plain and from the sounds of it, super boring!
I know! I think i only had 2 tutors in the whole of college that were super cool and they were husband and wife, and
they were just fully into all the drawing stuff and would just kind of pass you if you just write something!but those are the best people! D:
usually way more entertaining than plain backgrounds haha! I absolutely hated anything bigger than A3 and I'm still the same :'D
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YEAH we did those! Does everybody do those in first year? We called them mark making exercises haha. I found it kinda weird that everybody was supposed to have foundation skills before starting but clearly most of the class...didn't...which would be fine except most of the class...didn't have any consistent interest in art or craft either? And aside from "mark making" and some seriously brief and basic composition exercises the tutors didn't really teach anything except how to like, "run wild with your creativity" (I'm sure you can imagine)...somebody's project was literally a papier mache volcano. One of our assignments was to come up with a Victorian character based on a name we picked from a class trip to a graveyard and then dress up as them (no...) and sculpt the food that they would eat out of pastry (y'know like in kids activity books where you paint the pastry with poster paint?) it was cute but...illustration courses, man :'D
I wouldn't even write a statement for my final or go to the degree show ahhh, I was a bad student! I didn't write the dissertation either so...I only got an ordinary degree, which is teeeechnically a pass but is like, the most loser-ly thing you can pass with? I'm petty sure it's just a nice way of saying you failed at the last hurdle haha.
Ahhh those tutors sound great! The head guy on mine once said to me that I was good because I'd drawn a fox in a bed pulling the covers up to his chin and he was like, "you could fit all the people in the UK who could draw a character interacting with it's environment like that in one bus" and I was just like...uhhhh...how can a course leader be so clueless. Guess that's the impression you get when you run an illustration course for people that don't draw hahaa daaamn.
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Yeah, I figured a lot of people who didn't seem to have any interest in art only took it cause
they thought it'd be easy and then they get you to do all this like really experimental stuff!
Everyone kind of freaks out and has absolute break downs. I know one girl in my class got so
panicked she basically threw her art and materials on the floor and was just like 'LATER' and
never came back and went off to do like IT?? I think that's why a lot of people get put off of art
in the first place is from the art teachers constant criticism on certain types of art.
Ah dude, that sounds kind of fun but also just the biggest hassle!? Like dressing up as someone
dead just seems really weird to begin with! but I guess painting food would have it's benefits,
especially if you could eat while you worked haha!
MAN, i am the worst at writing, I think half of my dissertation for my final year was my half sleep
talk about whatever the subject was, concept art is think but it was so totally confusing and the
last course i did was just so terrible that there was literally no one of the 'creative industries' course
that did illustration, it was like 3 months later that they brought the awesome tutor in to at least help
those of us who did anything remotely illustration based! it was a total mess of a course!
I never went to the final shows for anything I pretty much figured 'I've seen all my class's work
and there's not really anyone who would drive like 2 hours to see my work so why bother? haha!
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Fantastical. Three cheers for traditional art!!! S.
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Woah it looks fantastic! I sure missed your watercolour mix pieces <3
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This artwork looks impressive!! O_o I like the many colors and details!
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My love for your art will never cease. Another gorgeous piece~!
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