Another project

Wow, this one was painful to do. Mostly because I wasn't used to drawing animals and I more or less missed out on what I wanted to do in the end. This project also lasted forever to do and it was one of those things where you just did not want to touch.

But yeah, the project for this was to create a fake poster for any zoo and I decided to do the Singapore Zoo just for the (rather cliché, now that I think about it) idea to do something chinese ink painting based:

I thought of making this seem more friendly for the kids, but I decided to go for something more majestic. I mean, Chinese paintings do have that graceful majesty…right? Ah….

Wellll, I found a lot of problems with this while learning on the way. One was that I had no idea how I was going to create a cohesive color scheme with so many colored animals. I struggled with that like being dumped in a pit of pythons and being both terrified in dealing with my reptilian foes while also wrangling with them to control them from biting me in the butt:

Two was that I figured out that wow, photoshop brushes for Chinese inking are kinda terrible. So I used Painter for more or less the first time and though it worked fine, my tablet kind of didn't like me too much since I couldn't get the brush sensitivity as much as I wanted. Woe is me.

The third, and major problem, was that I figured out that traditional ink painting was never intended to be in color. If anything, ink painting was supposed to convey well enough in black, white, and grays since the ink work would describe the scene. Color was sparse and just a sort of meh-addition to the work. Agggh. But I had to have color so I ended up using decidedly un-Chinese ink painting colors.

(The bottom is the last illustration.)

In the end, the illustration, I think, kind of ended up something distinctly not Chinese ink drawing-like, but somewhere in the afterthought of "oh, so that's where you got the idea from." Basically, wow, what a weird style, but okay. Haha.

The good parts is that I did get to learn how to draw animals somewhat and I experimented with gradients again. Gradients saved my life. Hahaha. I was able to create that color reflection to make it attempt to have that Chinese ink color faded technique. Another good part was that I got to learn a bit with Painter and found pleasantly that it wasn't such a temperamental program as I initially thought, though relearning commands was a bit klonky. Also, I love drawing lines. I got to have fun all over the place with the different lineart I got to do. It felt cathartic to do something mindless.

All in all, I wanted to flip a table with this annoying business and I was just relieved I finished it in time for the crit. Looking at the bright side be damned.