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Old 08-13-2008, 12:11 AM
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KatherinePlumer KatherinePlumer is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Oak Run, California
Posts: 233
Default Re: Katherine's Contest Submission (Scrimshaw woo hoo!)

Alrighty, today we have a tutorial within a tutorial. I said I'd explain a little more about the inking and building up of dark tones. This seems strange for me to be posting up my work in progress in *this* much detail. I've been putting work in progress pics out for the world to see for years but now I feel like I'm letting you in on my secrets. Don't everyone go out and start doing scrimshaw okay? Leave some for me, ha ha.

Size is so relative isn't it. I spend gobs of time today working on this little area that's, oh, about the size of my fingernail, and it seems HUGE. And then I switch projects and work on a 12x18 inch horse drawing and think "hmm, this is kind of small." Anyway...

Okay, so here I've scrimmed (incised, dotted, stippled, whatever you want to call it) the bear's haunches, but have not yet inked it. It's much easier to see under the scope, this is just scanned. Not to mention this micarta has this flecky/grainy coloration, so trying to actually see what I'm doing on it is, um, challenging...



My aim was not to make this dark enough, just to get a somewhat uniformish dark tone on there. So I inked and... eww, ugly, blech! Don't worry, that's how it goes. Now if I was doing a light area, or something detailed, or with more gradation, I'd obviously be more careful, but since this is going to be so dark, it's all good, and this is exactly how I figured it would look.



Okay, so then I work into it more and try to even out the tone a little (just adding more dots!), and have more of a gradation toward black in the shadow areas. Ink it again, and... that's a lot better!



But now what I need to do is REALLY push the shadows all the way to black, and put a little fur texture in there too. Dot dot (repeat endlessly), ink it, and... yay! Got it. The area along the bear's belly and side will end up being darker, I'll be blending into that as I go. And since I know someone will ask, yes I did manage to somehow get some scratches on there [casts accusing look at fingernail]. That won't be a problem considering the location (DARK), but I need to be careful.



So this is how it looks at the end of today: