Tales from 1,001 Nights - Through The Mountains

Hey there! Another piece in the bag! The Ifrit and the Fisherman are treking through the mountains to reach the secret pool with the funky fish. The Ifrit is quite a few paces ahead of the Fisherman; so he's waiting for the little guy to catch up.

 I really enjoyed creating this one. It changed loooads throughout the drawing process and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Thanks for stopping by :)

God bless.

Benj

Goals and Targets...or just rough guidelines.

Ah yes, the start of another calendar year! Maybe I should set some goals? I always found it odd how we wait until the start of a new calendar year to set ourselves our big goals, why not June 2011 until June 2012 for example? I'm going to follow suit anyway because I have done next to nothing this Christmas break (MINECRAFT, DARN YOU!!) and hope to up my 'doing'.

I have some personal goals that may be to complex to share but in terms of learning I really want to jump on picking up Japanese again. I loved doing it in college and I miss it so much! But in terms of learning, I really want to focus on drawing the human figure and learning how to paint digitally...simple enough, maybe?

Watch this space, this is going to happen!

Also, Whisper of The Heart is officially my favourite Studio Ghibli film. I must have watched it about five or six times over the past few weeks, so good! I highly recommend it if you love stories driven by their characters...I'm not going to do it justice, just watch it!

Aquatint print

So finally I have scanned in one of my prints from aquatinting. I don't like it as much as the original image because it looks like my face has been steamrollered but for a first attempt I'm quite satisfied.

The Aquatinting process
So, 'What is aquatinting?' I hear you ask...well maybe not but I'm going to tell you anyway. It's an intaglio printing process where different levels of tone are created by exposing areas of the plate to nitric acid for different periods of time. You begin by paintng in the white areas with straw hat varnish and then exposing the plate to the acid for a duration of time, it's confusing because I had to paint black varnish on the 'to be' white areas! Anyway, you work your way through the shades of grey until you reach a very dark grey/black and then ink it up and print, voila!
So, lets move on now that I've bored you enough!

The Love of Seven Dolls - illustration project
I'm working on illustrating Paul Gallico's The Love of Seven Dolls for my main illustration module at the moment, have I already mentioned this? I'm hoping to use aquatinting to produce my final book illustrations and for the front cover...well I don't actually know yet but it'll work itself out.

So that's that for now. Thanks.

God bless,

Benjamin