Gencest Bang art post for Sprinkles888

[amberdreams]

This year's Gencest Bang some of us ended up as teams instead of pairs, and I was very happy to get to work with one of my fave authors and also my fandom friend, and all round talented good egg, Quickreaver.

Links to their works will come very soon.

This is my contribution.

Watercolour over a pencil sketch.

Process :
Cobbled together a bunch of references, managed to make Sam's head ginormous even when the sketch didn't look too bad, watercoloured using M Graham in a limited palette of Lemon Yellow, Indian Yellow, Quinacridone Rust, Hookers Green, Ultramarine Blue and Napthol Red.
Pencil sketch looked like this


Scanned watercolour came out like this - very washed out

Which meant I had to digitally mess about with it to give the colours the right saturation. The scanner is very good at leaching out colour, but this time it also lost a lot of the pencil marks too. Basically I added two multiplied layers, then erased some parts. One of the added layers (for the sake of the pencil) was from a photo I took which wasn't quite the same angle as the flat scan, which gave a slight distortion. I kept the distortion on the mirror, because I thought that made for an interesting effect.

It's weird looking at the pencil and the painted versions now, because in adding the colour I totally lost that sharpness I had in the drawing of Sam's face. Makes me want to go back in with the paint to try and do something about it.

Comments

[tsuki-no-bara.livejournal.com]

...but it's sam with his shirt off, and this is never a bad thing. :D i'm super curious about the fic now!

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Glad your interest is piqued! Everyone's been having a Lot going on in real life so I'm hoping the rest of the team will be able to post soon.

[slurpyart.livejournal.com]

Love the clean pencil sketch , all those back muscles 💪 and the colours are beautiful I like the brick work and the built up tones of his body , amazing work and yes getting watercolours to look as good when you digitise is just a pain , I resent having to touch it up on Procreate because if I wanted to use the app I would have started it that way 🤦 but I don’t know if there is a way around that , I usually photograph them in all different lights all over the house and garden ! But great job on all of it , lucky us we get to see both sides of those glorious muscles 😍

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Aw thanks — and I know I should have tried photographing this one instead of scanning but... time and inconvenience ruled.