Everything you need for wash painting: Green tea, salt, pepper, and powerful psychotropic drugs (not mine, I swear).
It occurs to me that some (read: all one) of you might be interested in how the terrible, worthless ideas in my head become commensurately terrible, worthless drawings. Contrary to popular belief, I do not simply
abstract these irreverent (and irrelevant!) doodles from the luminiferous ether through sheer artistic
will. Rather, I abide by an archaic, totally haphazard process, one that is guaranteed to (1) produce a finished cartoon and (2) erode the remaining shreds of my already withered sanity. Without further ado:
Supplies!
The setup is simple: An inclined drawing board, porcelain palette, two round sable brushes, one wide, flat-head brush, a tube of artists' watercolor lampblack, bottle of [purloined] India ink, some masking tape (not pictured), some 80 gsm printer paper (for roughs & test strips), 210 gsm bristol board (for the final product), two cups of water, some pencils, and an eraser. I'd have used a light table had I not left mine back in Hyde Park. The total cost of all that whatnot? About $200 at most, which is nothing compared to photo gear or a digital tablet (to say nothing of the associated software).
Step 1: Conception/pencil rough
Every cartoon starts as an idea, plumbed from the dark depths of my morbid imagination, which I then translate into a rough doodle. "Roughs" can be very crude--the example you see above is considered very refined. Anyhow, I normally lay out various compositions in thumbnails first, but I skipped it this time because I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the final product to look.
Step 2: Refined sketch
Now that I've an idea of where things should roughly fall, I render a graphite sketch so as to lock down additional details. Here, I made a separate pass with colored pencil to pick out the figures that I want to include in the final. This step tends to get messy, but is necessary. Some cartoons require two or three sketches before inking.
I also used this opportunity to do a quick value-map for the final wash, which you can see in the thumbnail in the upper-right.
Step 3: Rough wash
Before I start inking, I do a preliminary wash pass to determine what values should appear in the final painting. It also provides me with an approximation of what things will look like on bristol board.
Step 4: Inking
Once that's done, I start transferring the sketch from step two onto bristol board. Ordinarily, I use a light table, which allows me to simply trace the sketch. Here, I had to eyeball everything, using a mechanical pencil for lighter marks that I can easily erase. In any event, this is when I lay down the lowest values (i.e. black fills), and is by far the most frustrating yet rewarding step, largely owing to the amount of detail work I have to do.
Inking's very, very important: Line thickness communicates weight, volume, and linear flow, and any SNAFU with India ink means starting over (I don't use correction liquid, which tends to look weird).
Step 5: Apply watercolor lampblack wash
Using the wash prepared in step three, I begin to "build" values, tier by tier, starting from the highest (hightlights short of white) down to the lowest (shadows short of black). This step tends to be considerably less nerve-wracking than inking, as wash is relatively easy to control if you're not doing fine gradients. Bristol board is preferred over lighter/less dense watercolor paper because it (1) warps less, (2) is smooth enough to allow the wash to travel unimpeded across its surface, and (3) has excellent absorbency properties.
Step 6: Post-process
Scanning is always more cost-effective than using a digital camera (unless you're shooting with some sort of insane macro setup), but I had to use my D90 for want of a proper scanner. I decreased the weight of the employer stand-in's left eye so as to emphasize his surprise/shock. The entire process took about, oh, two hours at most, from conception to finish. THE END.
