Lanterns

Last week was a light week for me as I waited on approvals and scripts to come in, so I decided to work on a little something that's been sitting in my sketchbook for a while now...


This is where the image started, as a quick black and white digital sketch that I did a few months ago. I revised this to add more creatures and detail into the image, because I wanted the feel of a very crowded back street.


This is the finished ink with tone added in Photoshop. I prefer to ink by hand. Besides the fact that I enjoy the feel of the brush, there are a lot of effects in hand inking (like dry brush and rough washes) that do nice things when I flatten the blacks. I also really like having a physical copy of something.

This was inked with a combination of Winsor Newton Series 7 Watercolor brushes (Size 0 and 2 for the noodley bits) and Chinese painting brushes (for the broader, quicker strokes).

The final art is scanned in (this one was 15" x 22", so I had to scan it in 6 parts and Auto align it in Photoshop), the blacks are flattened and tidied up in some spots (where the scanner was a little dirty), and then I color in tons of flat layers overlapping to give a sense of depth. Some gradients and line coloring happened in this as well.


And here it is (again)...the final version.