Airbrushing workshop

I attended a 3 hour introductory workshop to airbrushing at Swinton's.

I brought my Iwata HP -CH airbrush and got to try a few others like the black Aztec above.

Here is a photo of the notes I took during the demonstrations.

We began with getting the proper flow and creating some dots and lines using the dual action feature on the airbrush.

Then we worked on dagger strokes and playing with the distance and flow of the paint in the airbrush.

We then worked on blending two colours. The paper was a bit unforgiving though.

So I moved onto card stock, I did a blend from bottom to top of yellow.

I blended to red and then topped it off with blue at the top.

I decided to dabble in a bit of the opaque white.

I made two cheesy 80'2 style tests, but my dagger strokes on the palm trees definitely needed more practice. I also vignetted the larger of the two test panels.

Here is the instructor Vince showing another participant how dagger strokes are done.

Here is his demonstration board. He made it look easier than it really is. 8+ years of experience does that.

I did some more practice and experimentation.

The final demo was on the use of stencils, we made space scenes with cut out circles.

Here is the start of my space scene. I like the star burst made with 4 taped together business cards as a stencil.  I sprayed the corner of one of the cards at an angle and held it close to the surface to create the star pattern.

Did some different patterning with the example stencils. We finished up the workshop with  dismantling the airbrush and proper clean up.

Shiva begins

to come to life

I used the center line to place the Shiva figure on the big black canvas, sketching it in with black charcoal. I always rub my face and look like a coal miner during intense drawing sessions, it's kinda funny.

I'm having troubles placing the drum hand, it's still not resolved but I'm going to sit on it and see how the other stuff develops compositionally and allow it to unfold. creativity should be a risk. Artists need to take them, otherwise it would be paint by numbers.

In the next session, I whipped out the airbrush. I blocked in with red the general location and shape of the background flame. I am painting the red first which represents the flames that are furthest away. As I continue, I will paint lighter and lighter colors layered on top.

On the floor is the little compressor and some black and white reference photos. This is my first time really using an airbrush (another risk). I like it but it does take some practice.  I still might be faster by hand but I really want to get this fire to look real rather than graphical.

I revisited some blacks to help create some depth and allowed it to drip to add some interest and texture. This paint is supposed to be dry if not heat set, so I am going to wait a day to ensure it is at least dry enough to continue painting the layers.

Flame shields

It was nice and sunny. I got up early and got outside and in the sun to get to work cutting my flame shields for my upcoming series.

I used a vellum product that was new to me called OPALUX. I bought a 19X 24", 110lb translucent sheet. I needed something that could be easily wiped clean if need be so I selected a type of velum. I also needed something that was stiff enough to stand up on its own to act as a stencil or masking object when airbrushing in my flames.

Above you can see the shapes I made and how they fit together. This material is quite nice to draw on and cut fairly well.  However, I would prefer a thicker material that holds it shape better. I also found the opalux to be too brittle, it chips and cracks too easily, making little imperfections in some of the curves. I do not recommend opalux for this purpose, in future will NOT used for creating stencils or shields. But that is how you figure things out, you try them and see if they work. I still think watercolor paper is much better suited for the task.

I taped the shields back together with some thick masking tape. This worked great to keep them together but also added rigidity to my shields. I  cut out some of the little detailed flame elements. When not in use they will be taped over, so now I have three shields that can be separated into six to make a wide variety of shapes for when I paint my flame backgrounds.

And I did it all in the sun on my stoop while having breakfast in the sunlight, a great way to start some art today ;)

Here are some examples form google of how the finished work is supposed to look!

Then out came the trusty watercolour paper. I found a site online that offered a variety of other examples of templates for more variety of flame shield.  Get them here at : www.chuckbauman.com 

With all these I'll have a huge variety of things I can do, I am so excited to get started. Alas, I have to wait for about two weeks as I am taking a two week, full-time traditional portraits in oils course. In the evenings I have martial arts and salsa class and on the week-end I am doing an animation lock down and lilac fest. Busy bunny =B