Hand Painted Zine, Part 3
This month I've been thinking a lot about architectural features due to another project I'm working on (more on that later) so I decided to draw a weird castle.
It is very much inspired by the cover I drew for the Imaginary Furniture zine from 2021. It looks quite similar because I followed the same process but I remade it from scratch, here is a side by side comparison
The attached video shows the making of the sketch in Procreate, which i printed and used it to make the hand painted watercolor.
Process:
I used an isometric drawing guide to rough out the shapes.
And in order to add more detail I made the drawing guide smaller by 50% each time:
When I was happy with the overall shape of the castle I reduced the drawing guide again and created the flowing blocks following the grid:
I like to break the pattern a little bit adding some free flowing decorations that follow the grid without creating 3D looking objects:
At this point I made a black and white version and printed so I could transfer it to watercolor paper using a light box, it looks so serious 😂
And after that, a few hours of watercolor painting. I kept the palette relatively minimal and made the different shades of the castle with mostly multiple layers of the same color (Winsor and Newton Payne's Gray). The GIF preview below is a bit grainy so here is a 1 minute edit of the whole process.
Here is the final image, it doesn't have as many eyes 👀 but I like that it's more handmade, it also has some texture added with colored pencils:
Other Updates:
I mentioned at the beginning that I've been thinking a lot about architectural features, and that's because I took a commission to make a few kinetic pieces. I'm generally reluctant to accept commissions but the idea with this one was loose enough and sounded fun. The idea was to make Architectural Monsters somewhat inspired by this previous piece I had made:
I finished the first one and I'm pretty happy with it, the wood is stained with watercolors and I added a few decorations with a technique I've been learning called chip carving:
And here is the brassy glory of the mechanical assembly on the back:
And one last thing, the geometric watercolors I mentioned last month are now available for purchase on the Giant Robot website.
Be well!
Federico.