Icons - part two

One of the projects I've been working on lately has been a big ol' pile of icons. Meaning: Lots and Lots. More literally: A gajillion.

It's been fun, I'm getting some good practice doing things start to finish digitally, since no time to bother with sketching on paper and scanning and all that nonsense.

Quick process: rough sketch on one layer, once that's kinda worked out, I drop the opacity pretty low, then on another layer do a rough tracing. Under that sorta nice line drawing, I block in colors, some quick shading. I might do a little coloring to the line layer, and then I merge it all. Then I clean it up and add details, working on it more like I used to paint with acrylics. Haven't been using any fancy brushes or anything, just the defualt psd ones at varying levels of size and opacity. I did have to reset my Wacom tablet to a firmer pen tip setting though, to get a little more control over thick and thins.

The cats and girl probably took me about an hour and a half each start to finish (at 600x600 dpi) which is still a bit too long. (Duck I think was under an hour.) I'm spending a bit too much time fussing with the details. I'm hoping to get these things down to a half hour/45 minutes max. This week I'm supposedly going to get a nice demo on working in Painter, so we'll see how that goes. Kinda excited about it.

Icons - part one

Who knew when I took a break from working Saturday to go junkin' with my junkin' pal Bill, that I would discover I could absolutely not live another day without a 19th century Russian Orthodox Icon. Well. It happened.

I don't know much about it, just that it is called a Mary Mother of God of Iver, the region it's from in the former Republic of Georgia. The dark box around it is called a Kiot, which was used to hold the icons when the priests would carry them around.

Deciding to make an orthodox day of it, on the way out of town, I took Bill to see the "Virgin of Guadalupe" tree. Sorry to report that we could not see the Virgin Mary in the tree knot. Didn't look like much of anything to me. It must have changed over the years, cause it currently looks nothing like this picture.

Anyway, a fine day had. My icon now happily hangs in my studio next to a Mexican marionette bought across the alley from the Alamo.