THE DRAWING BOARD - Daily updates
June 1st, 2009
Masks
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I had a question about masks the other day and I realized that I’ve never really talked about them. I do mask different parts of a card when I paint but its pretty basic. For Superman I cut three mask. One for the red cape and tights, one for the blue parts of his costume and one for the face and hands.
I don't use frisket for my masks, I usually just print out three of four copies of the drawing and then cut them up and tape them down as I need them. This is a trick I learned from a fellow artist, Sean Tiffany. I’ve mentioned him before here on the blog and I’m sure it wont be the last time, since were friends, but Sean basically taught me how to paint with and airbrush.
Its kind of a funny story, back when I was trying to learn how to paint. Sean showed me an article about the movie poster artist Drew Struzan, and his technique of using airbrush and colored pencils. I really liked the idea and thought it might be a good fit for me, since I’ve always felt that I could draw better than I could paint.
I went out and bought an airbrush but the thing was completely alien to me, I couldn’t figure out which end was which. Back in the day Sean was an awesome colorist, he’d worked for Marvel and a bunch of stuff. Everything he did was airbrush (now he colors on the computer and it still awesome) So I called him up, went over to his house and over the course of an hour or so he showed me how to do it. (I owe him big for that. I’ve always looked back at that moment as a big turning point in my work)
The funny part is the next week I met Sean at his house for lunch. He took me into his studio and had all these circles and triangles drew out, and frisket ready. He was going to go on and teach me how to really paint. All I wanted to know was how to get the thing hooked up to the compressor and how to get the paint to shoot out. So I think we just blew it off and went to lunch, I was such a horrible student. For the longest time I would just shoot one color over a whole piece and the go back and fix everything with the pencils. I should of paid attention to the guy, I probably would of got where I was going a Hell of a lot quicker.
See you tommorrow
Jeff
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