View Single Post
  #20  
Old 08-27-2008, 11:48 PM
KatherinePlumer's Avatar
KatherinePlumer KatherinePlumer is offline
Platinum
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Oak Run, California
Posts: 233
Default Re: Katherine's Contest Submission (Scrimshaw woo hoo!)

Well, ha ha, I had mistakenly thought I had "just a little" more work to do. Good thing I did not attempt to stay up and finish or I would have still been up in the morning. You know how these things go, I'm sure. I darkened the bears, inked it, tidied it up, scanned it really nice, emailed it off to the friend who had the idea for it in the first place, sat back and looked at it.... and just wasn't sure. And then my friend emailed back with some suggestions, one of which was exactly what was bothering me about it anyway. Sometimes you really need a fresh set of eyes to look at things, or at least I know I do. I stare at my stuff all day and can easily overlook what's obvious to others.

Here's when I thought I was finished. I was going to just skip to the very final last image but I think it's important to explain why I made some changes, so here's how it looked around lunchtime today:



And then I picked up my scrim tool again, and with a few breaks here and there, called it done many hours later. What I did:

1) that cloud, it was just so bland. So I darkened the sky again and kinda fiddled with the outline of the cloud a bit.

2) the willowy trees by the lake were too pale. The surface of the water should be more pale than the trees, so I added a fair amount of gray tone to the trees. I worried incessantly the whole time I was doing all this, rather terrified I was going to make it too dark.... I also darkened the pine trees a smidge and tweaked a few things on the bears.

But when I inked it and wiped it clean, OMG how that foreground tree pops out! Woo! Love it!

So NOW I am done. :whoo: :whoo: :whoo: And just because I've always wanted to use this smilie: I'm taking it to the frame shop tomorrow morning. In two weeks it'll have a frame on it. I'll post a pic of that when it's done just for kicks, but that may be beyond the scope of the tutorial thingy. So for now, here it is (not yet titled, I'm still thinking, I'll post a pic in the main forum when I get that figured out...soon):



In conclusion, well it's been fun! As I said I'm going to miss posting work in progress on the forum, so head on over to the blog to see more. This piece marks one year that I have been doing scrim. I'm really really happy with how it came out. I'm submitting it as a sample of my work to a show that takes place in Jackson Hole next September. I won't find out til March 09 if I'm in, so please cross your fingers for me! In the mean time I'll be taking it to an art show next month too along with some other scrim and of course lots of drawings.

Micarta is okay. It's not as nice as ivory or corian but it's okay. I do prefer a whiter surface though. I am SO glad I did not do this in color!

That's all folks! Got questions? Fire away!

-Katherine

ps- it's now titled "The Lookouts"