Turkey character: vector painting

In the beginning there was a traditional sketch inked with a staedtler pigment liner. While I was watching a course about lineart done with Inkscape over at Skillshare I had the idea of using the scanned ink sketch for doing a lineart drawing in Inkscape. I hadn't used Inkscape for quite some time so it took me some time to refresh my knowledge of this software.

I then saved two versions of the drawing - one as a lineart drawing and the other one you can see here.

 

Going wild with colours and stabilo pens

Stabilo 68 pens can be found anywhere you can buy office stuff. They are considered kids' stuff - the paint can be easily washed out of childrens' clothes and is said to be absolutely not harmful. However these felt pens can be used like watercolour brush pens (they even can be bought with brushes now!). They are dyebased, but a little mark is enough to go for a long way if you wet them with a brush. 

 

Green pumpkins

Here it was my goal to mix various shades of green using fir green and chartreuse. Fir green is an ecoline liquid watercolour made by Royal Talens, and Chartreuse belongs to the colorex line of liquid watercolours, made by Pebeo.

 

Shades of Red

This time I tried to get various shades of red by adding wee bits of black to vermillion. In some spots you can see the pure vermillion - other spots are almost black, and some other spots have a reddish brown colour. In three spots you can see what happens if the brush is loaded with more water. It was so much fun to play with paints and water!

 

Liquid watercolours: shades of blue

I set myself the challenge to use only one colour - in this case it is called "Night" and get several shades of this colour by adding white to it. The liquid watercolours I am using are called "Colorex" and are made by the French company "Pebeo". 

I know of course that true watercolour artists are not using White - they are thinning down the paint in order to lighten it. However I do not consider myself a watercolourist, just someone who likes to play with mediums. For contrast I used some orange-yellowish alcoholbased markers. 

I left the background white and saved the scanned file as a png - thus having the possibility to delete the background and add one in a colour I might think fitting. 

 

Markers and Underpainting

Alcoholbased markers are not opaque. So you can get nice shades and even several hues by underpainting, using complementary colours or greys. 

 

Castle on the Rocks

Germany is a country full of old castles, most of them in ruins, and most of them standing on some high rocks. Imagine how difficult it was to get all the bricks and stones up on the hill! 

The photo belongs to my collection of diaslides which slowly is transforming into a collection of digital files.

 

Harbour with light effect

  I use Gimp for image editing. Gimp is the open source alternative to photoshop, and - like photoshop - has got lots of filters. One group of filters are light effect filters. So far I haven't used them, but I did it with this particular photo because I thought it could do with a bit of additional something...