Mixed Media Monsters
The mixed media course on 21 Draw launched a little over a month ago now. It’s their first mixed media course which was enough to make me want to give it a try. And it focused on strange creatures so it had a lot going for it in my eyes. It ended up being one of the more detailed courses I’ve taken so far.
The course is hosted by Eva Toorenent, an artist with a very unique approach to mixing watercolours with digital colouring. I’ve never done any serious watercolour practice before so I was excited at the possibility of learning a new medium.
Inspiration
The first assignment of the course was 2 questions. I find these things rather cheesy and would usually skip them, but as I said in my previous blog post, doing these courses is my attempt to slow down and do the work.
Question 1: What gets you excited/happy? What can you talk about for hours? (5 sentences)
This is a kind of ironic one because I recently told my girlfriend “I don’t feel joy” and I kind of mean it but in a way that I just don’t get super excited about things. I can feel joy or happiness in the moment, I look forward to things in the future, but I rarely feel really excited about it.
The biggest one is probably playing D&D. It’s a solid combo of creativity, fast thinking and social time. It’s probably also one of the few things I could talk about for hours.
I have a lot of practice talking about myself thanks to over 100 hours of therapy but I can’t say that that’s a topic that I’m excited about. I also get very excited to eat take-out but couldn’t talk about that for hours unless we’re looking for recommendations.
It’s funny because I do love to read, watch tv, play video games, and just consume media in general but I don’t go out of my way to talk about it for more than a few minutes. I’ve always been a big Solo Enjoyer.
Question 2: What do you do to get inspired? (5 things)
- Read blogs / adventures written by other DMs (D&D)
- Stare out the window (in hopes of seeing animals)
- Listen to podcasts
- Look at my previous projects
- Talk about ideas with other people
Question 3: 3 artists that inspire your work I quickly knew this wasn’t a question I was prepared to answer. Which made me wonder if maybe it’s a reason why I feel all over the place with style. I don’t have any artists I follow really closely or ones I’ve done a deep dive on their methods. But I do have a Twitter list with 100 artists whose art I like. I can’t say they all inspire my art. So it took a long time to find some answers to this:
Fran used to run #drowgust over on Twitter every year, it was one of the first art month challenges that I managed to complete. They draw an endless amount of drow (and so was I a few years ago) and I really loved their greyscale approach to traditional pieces. They are probably a big reason why I own so many grey markers.
Drawfee is a show that’s been around online for ages but I only started watching it last year. They are digital art focused, which is often how I work. They mostly draw characters or silly scenes, which is basically where I want to get comfortable with my drawings. But since they do speedraws every now and then you can watch their process, hear about how they troubleshoot an image and see them push their own artistic boundaries. Watching their episodes every week is definitely one of the big reasons why I made this year an art focused year.
- ???
Honestly couldn’t come up with anyone else. Back in the days of DeviantArt and blogs it was much easier to follow artists and learn about their process. I’m not a huge fan of historical artists so I’m not off reading about the progression of the Old Masters. A decent take away from this question is that I probably want to find some time to do research on artists, see who has good YouTube content, see if anyone is blogging about their work. Learn more about other people's approaches to find new directions to take my own practice.
Inspiration and reference material
Like most of the courses this one tasks you with creating a moodboard and even a playlist. Since the mood boards were focused on one for real animals and one for monsters I spent some time building these up with images I like. I didn’t bother to make a playlist as I find this very time consuming and not super helpful to my own process.
It was around this point that I realised how many different assignments there were going to be in this course. There was a blob challenge, which I did. But she says don’t even bother to do this unless you know you are then going to work on a larger piece after. And in my case, I almost never have that much time on my hands to spend 20 minutes doing a blob challenge. Followed by a requested five pages of sketches to get ideas down. Then on top of that, choosing 3-5 and giving those characters a story related phrase to say.
I understand that this is a course very closely following a particular artist's approach to their work but at this point the course was losing focus for me. Wasn’t jiving with the process. I wanted to get to the technical takeaways. I know this comes a lot from my own impatience, but it’s also clear that these are approaches for people who can spend 2-5 hours doing creative projects. I don’t have that kind of time so I need to find my own approach.
Warm-up
I did the blob challenge twice. The first time when I had limited time and the second time on a rare quiet morning. I still really do enjoy this challenge, even though I often feel head empty when I first see the shapes. I'm usually pretty pleased with one of them by the end of it.
Then I went to my Pinterest boards and started sketching. At first I would take one idea from each monster while scrolling. Other times I would attempt to reacted a whole creature if it felt like a good challenge. Then I stared to take single pieces and try to build up something larger just using my own ideas. Then I just drew some jellyfish.
I chose the moth guy to be the piece of this course. Simple enough that I felt confident I could recreate it in a new sketch. But before that I had to drop 150$ on watercolour supplies. Just had too.
I had tried using the Aquarelle Watercolour Pencils I already owned but found I still struggled with understanding the right way to use these. I probably could have looked up some tutorials online but other then a new sketchbook I hadn't bought any new art materials since started these classes 6 months ago. Felt like a reasonable time to put some money into the hobby, especially if it was going to help motivate me in a course.
Final project
Moth guy, who I started to call Mothmon because I felt he had Digimon design energy, got researched and then painted. Snapped a photo and then brought the painting into Procreate.
It's here that Eva's mix media technique really starts to shine. She's all about doing small adjustments and touch ups or additions that blend in with the existing piece. With the goal of making everything look like it could still be a traditional art piece. And choosing when to push past that line with some stronger digital techniques.
This is a very slow process, and I worked very zoomed in on the screen to try to keep the touchups subtle. But once I zoomed out and did a before and after comparison I started to feel pretty happy about how everything was coming together.
Post course extracurriculars
I put a few hours into touching up Mothmon before decided to call it quits on the piece. The most time I've put into a work for a while. Since I was still riding the excitement of a new art supply purchase I returned to the new watercolours the next weekend to keep practicing how to use them.
Maybe it was because this course was still fresh in my mind, but I stumbled across an illustrator who I found wildly inspiring just after finishing the Mothmon piece. Josephine__Draws on Instagram. They do gorgeous monochrome pieces, mostly focused on animals, bones, and shells. They work with very strong lines while mixing in watercolour elements. The kind of stuff that makes me want to pick up a pencil and draw whenever I see it.
They sadly don't have much of an online presence beyond their Instagram page so I'm going to have to survive on their short looping videos.