SDC Faux Cel Painting

The power may have been out for 5 days, but no way was I gonna let that deter me! I hand-drew like there was no tomorrow! XD
Granted I was hoping to submit this on Thursday when I made this, but alas... DA's stupid new submission screen didn't play well with my smartphone.

In any event, here it is and requires a lot of explaining. ^^

For the longest time I've been incredibly sceptical of my hand-drawn artwork, mainly because of its shoddy nature and the issue I had with an unsteady hand creating ugly wobbly lines. In fact, I've spent nearly a decade trying to work around this perceived deficiency by embracing technological solutions to compensate for my alleged suckiness.
Truth be told, though, I grew up with hand-drawing and in school i certainly did nothing but hand-draw, many wonderous and remarkable things, perhaps not all beautiful, but some amazingly thorough and detailed despite my lack of formal training. Eventually something happened which made me lose faith in it and ultimately do very badly in it, like a kind of self-imposed artist block.

In fact, it's not the first time... lately I've had a terrible time doing MLP vector drawings for the same reason. My body and talents just seem to refuse to cooperate when doing something I inherently don't want to do... and I don't really LIKE doing MLP art to be perfectly honest.

Last weekend something amazing happened... an epiphany moment so to speak, where suddenly it occurred to me that what I really wanted to do was try hand-drawing again. Of MY things... not MLP or anime or any of the other interests that usurped themselves into my creative pastimes. And that's precisely what I wanted to do, and as if by a stroke of dark luck the hurricane gave me an excuse to start that "now" rather than ephemeral "later" that was bound to get pushed-aside to some later day.

And I did it, and I finally remembered stuff I had forgotten long ago. And yes, I LOVED it. ^^

Not only did I love the nostalgia, but I loved being able to use all that I had learned in digital drawing to improve my earlier perceived handicaps. And of course I no longer had to worry about screen sizes or power, it was just a paper and pencil at its most basic.

True, there was no undo and no layers. Or was there...?

Erasers are the original "undo", after all. That was easy to adopt. But layers? Layers being so useless, how could I live without them in the world of 2D penciled artwork?

Well... that's where they great experiment came in. I didn't study the japanese animation industry for my health, I learned quite a bit about it. I certainly learned about the cel painting process, and I've always wanted to try and see if that could be possible for home-based, hand-based artwork of exceptional quality and clarity and dynamic potential.

I'll post a followup picture with the different components, but the above pictures of CC and DD are actually compose of FOUR separate types of sheets....

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1) a primary pencil sketch drawn on regular 24lb printer paper, nothing special (and not currently visible in the picture)

2) a transparency sheet where I quickly and easily inked in the lineart over the paper sketch. I didn't have half-way decent markers until Friday (where I bought some as "emergency supplies"), but I made due with a semi-fine permanent marker. The added bonus was that my "undo" using this method was possible with a mere tissue, and certainly a helluva-lot cleaner than an eraser! I had a few seconds after drawing to erase the error with one clean swipe, but even dried I could still rub it completely off with several persistent wipes. ^^

3) a second transparency sheet which I placed underneath the first lineart sheet, then reversed both of them so I could cleanly and safely paint on the opposite side, right behind the lineart! Granted I had no paint and the markers I had were not permanent (mostly Crayola ones and some highlighters), so it was a fragile mess and I definitely did not have the right colours for poor DD. Still, it was only a test,... the fact that this was a completely separate "layer" meant that I could always just toss this and paint with better markers at some future date. ^^

4) a bright white 110lb cardstock sheet of paper for the backing -- no fancy backlights needed here, just a strong sturdy underlying layer that was bright enough to make the colours on the transparency sheet truly shine! ^^

In theory, I could also colour on the cardstock directly too, but then the ability to colour behind the lineart would be lost... plus I would also lose out on the possibility of using a third transparency sheet for a shade map (something I want to try out later). ^^

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And the end result, while not perfect, was definitely a lot more than I could have ever asked for and thus I'm super excited! ^^

The power was restored before I could try out the new markers, but there's still one image I have to "cel paint", and I plan to do this legitimately by hand to experiment with some more. I like to say I can hedge my bets in both the digital AND non-digital worlds now!