Cryptic Cards Week 32: 3 of Hearts
This week its 3 Ctenucha brunnea-shaped tiger moths. I took step-by-step photos of painting these delightful arctiine critters. So here’s how I paint mothcards, and the only other advice I can give is; remember I’m painting on A4 but the final card will be the size of a normal playing card. If you put too much detail on really small moths, it might get lost.
1: Consult the (book) heap - now I’ve said that I have the theme tune to fraggle rock stuck in head. I have heaps of books for species inspiration, and also ogle the feeds of people like @sinobug and Art Anker.
2: Sketch it up and fill in - doodle some moths on a paper version of the card with print area overlaid, to decide where to put your moths. Cut out some suit symbols if you need to check where you’re moving symbols to. Print the card without overlay onto Bristol card. Draw your moths in pencil, go over in paint, erase the pencil, then start filling in with your mothy background colour. I premix colours in acryl gouache and store them in those weekly medicine container thingies. They’re all basically cream and dilutions there of with a weeeeency bit of brown/yellow and either black or red depending on suit. Use your cut out symbol to add hearts back in. Don’t forget to go over the veins on the wings :)
3: Paint a shitload of hairs - This week I used a #1 brush I’d cut down, but I have a bunch of weeny brushes from 00 & 2/0 down to 0000 (Windsor & Newton do one in the Cotman range) to paint hairs with. Whether you start from darker edges to lighter middle or vice versa is up to you, I guess I usually go dark to light and then go back over any highlights. I mix up new shades on the backing paper of my board as I go. Because I’m too idle to mix everything in a pot or palette.
4: Paint a shitload more hairs - sorry, but most of the painting time is made up of painting a total shitload of moth fluff. Fill in the eyes, and then paint the hairs around the eyes.
5: Start adding shading to the wings - once you’ve finished all the hairy bodies and legs, work out where you want to put light and shadow on the moth wings. I make water dilutions of my stored colours to e.g. make edges darker, or highlight areas.
6: Put some shadow under the moths - decide which direction the light is coming from and use layers of very dilute black paint to put shadows under the moths (and also any darker areas of body that fell under the wings etc)
Above is a picture of my set up with diluted paints in tubs, and my card taped up with low-tack masking tape. Probably should have taken this before I started but didn’t think of that. Doh.
7: Scan and digitally edit - scan the moth into your preferred digital arty software. I remove all the background of cards and leave only the moths and shadows from one layer, and have the printers template and print area overlay in separate layers. This ensure the card under the moths is exactly as per the print template, and I can nudge the moths around if I need to, to make sure none of it is outside the print margins.
That’s it! Most of the time is spent wondering where the fuck to twiddle around the suit symbols to (this here is the first card where I’ve moved all the symbols I think), and painting a shitload of hairs. :)
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