Scratch Board

Here's a cool little thing to do that's relatively inexpensive;  Scratchboard.  It comes in many colours, with just as many under-colours, but I really prefer black with white/silver underneath.

It is basically a white poster board that is painted over with black, and you use a little dry fountain-pen type tool to scratch away the black and reveal the lighter colour underneath.  I'm sure there is a PROPER way to do it, but I basically use cross hatching, like a pen and it's incredibly repetitive and very soothing.

It`s a bit hard on teh brain at first, as you`re drawing backwards from what you`re used to.  The more you draw, the whiter it gets, which SHOULDN`T be a difficult concept to wrap your brain around, but after years of making things darker and darker, it really is quite odd.  I also find it very challenging to not be able to sketch out the basic outlines first, because with scratchboard, there is no erasing!  This was my first attempt at RDJ, and meh, not very happy with it.

Here`s the second, which was better, but still not great.  Actually, I kind of lied above.  You CAN sort of erase small mistakes by using a black pen over them, but it doesn`t have the same sheen and texture that the original finsh does, so it`s really more like concealing than erasing.

Oh Bill Murray, I love you so!  It also is a challenge to find a good reference shot.  Even moreso than usual, a picture with a lot of texture and contrast seems to be best suited for this medium.  Scratchboard paper comes in both multi-packs of small sheets and single poster board sized large sheets, and only about five bucks or so per large sheet.  Most of these pics were done on about a quarter or third of a sheet.  I like to draw big. ;)

Beads, Beads, They're Good For Your Heart

Seed beads.  I got a little idea in my little head, and decided that I wanted to do some portraits with seed beads.  So I went and bought a bead loom and thread, watched some videos on Youtube and made this:

Sadly, the loom was quite narrow, only 23 beads across, so I made it in two sections and them sewed them together.  My reference picture wasn't great, either.  I basically took my pastel drawing of Bernard (from Megamind) and put it through a pixellating filter, then counted across the squares to match the beads.  I also had beads of different opacities, and that didn't help much either.  But I was close!

So I went out and bought beads that were all the same opacity, and I also invested in a computer program that makes cross stitch patterns.  OMG, so damn helpful!  But my loom was still too narrow (and bendy and stretchy) so it still had to be in two pieces.

So I went online and ordered a bigger bead loom!  There are larger ones than this, but I didn't want to hurt my brain too much.  This one is around 120 beads across, almost 100 beads larger than my cheap, crappy original one.

Still using the cross stitch pattern maker, I took a screen shot of Snape from movie 7 and made it monochrome blue.  I also had to tweak it quite a bit.  Seed beads are not square (unlike cross stitches) so the original image has to be stretched waaaay out so that it ends up halfway normal when you're done.  This one is still a bit too tall and skinny.

Here's a better picture of that one, off of the loom.  I'm not quite sure what to do with the finished product.  Sew it on a sweater?  Make a little purse out of it?  I dunno!  For me, it's more in the making than the having.

And finally, with this one I branched out into skin tones.  I had a lot of trouble photographing this one.  The dark beads are quite shiny, and they kept reflecting too much light.  It's actually VERY photo-realistic in real life.

I have big plans for my next bead project.  BIG plans. :D  8mm beads, making a figure that will be about five feet tall.  I'll let you know how it turns out!