Echolocation
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voices hearing you loud we're taking the sound back with us —Gerard Way, Maya the Psychic
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Do you recognize this line? 🎶
It’s from Gerard Way’s solo album, Hesitant Alien 👽 It’s a bit obscure, but also one of my favorites and I thought it went nicely enough with my little bat scene here for World Watercolor Month 🎨
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I don't know about you guys, but this feels both oddly familiar and out of left field at the same time. 😆 July is World Watercolor Month, and for the last 2-3 years (as long as I've been aware of the event) it seems I've always had some assortment of things keeping me from doing it properly (the 31 Day Prompt Challenge), this year being no different. Last year, it was actually just a lucky coincidence I had a backlog piece that worked to upload for the event, so this year, I wanted to make the effort to make something with watercolors specifically for this month, even if it wasn't particularly special. On that "even if it wasn't particularly special" bit, I think I'm straddling the line here. 😉 To make a long story short(er), I'm pretty sure I put too much pressure on myself after having just spent as much time and thought on Killjoys Never Die as I did, and am experiencing a slight burnout. 😅 I had a decent amount of time to dream up a watercolor piece, but I wasted most of my time trying to settle on an idea I was happy with that seemed reasonable for how long I had to make it. As you can see, I ultimately settled on a very basic moonlit sky with bat silhouettes and a cave border. But I did try to liven it up with that faux 3D ridging and some mini-magnets! 😃 (And I should say, the overall visual was partially inspired by a drawing a friend of mine recently shared with me.) After deciding something basic along these lines was my best bet and the only thing I actually felt like making, that's when the thought of adding the mini-magnets came up, considering I've been thinking about them more lately because of Drawn like a Magnet. And just because that's the kind of mood I was in, I decided to see if there were any song lyrics I thought fit with the rough "moon, bat, cave" image I had in mind. I tossed around a few others, but I think I made the right choice with these. As listed towards the top of the description, I picked a repeating line from a song on Gerard Way's solo album, Hesitant Alien, called "Maya the Psychic." (Gerard Way being the lead singer from My Chemical Romance and creator of Umbrella Academy if the name sounds familiar but you can't place him.) While the album has not attached itself to me the way 97% of MCR's discography has, it does still stick with me pretty strongly, this song being one of my top 3 from it. (The other two being How It's Going to Be and Brother, for those curious. And while we're at it, it was not a conscious thought for me to reference this album when I also posted an alien-related drawing earlier this week, just a coincidence. Maybe subconsciously influenced.) This lined seemed to fit pretty well with the bats, and therein lies the title. It's not a 1:1 analogy, of course, but since bats use echolocation to navigate, they do in a sense hear a sound and take it with them. Or, well, maybe not "take it with them," but they use that sound to figure out where they're going since they can't see as well as they'd need to otherwise. It makes sense in my head at least, so if this explanation doesn't help you...I'm sorry? 🤷♀️ Anyway, the 3D...whatever you call this red/blue thing, I'm not sure. It's that thing that happens with some 3D movies if you try to watch them without the 3D glasses. I called it "ridging" earlier because that seems fitting (and "3D effect" seems too generic), but if anyone knows what this is actually called, please let me know! But the idea for this came while I was just planning out how I exactly I was going to make the piece and ruminating on the lyrics I'd chosen. I've had a set of pearlescent acrylic paints made by Crayola (as part of their "Signature" series) sitting on the sidelines for a while, and the album artwork and some promotional pictures for Hesitant Alien seem to use this effect in one form or another. Beyond that, the idea just sort of...appeared. It would make things a bit more interesting, after all... Which, now that we're getting to the art itself, it was pretty straightforward. After a basic sketch, I transferred the main lines to some watercolor paper using a black Copic Multiliner, partially filling in the bats just in case I had a hard time filling them in later. At this stage, I was toying with the idea of using a black Posca Pen (as I've acquired one of those and a white one thanks to Clearance at one of the art stores near me) to properly fill in those areas, but having (hopefully) finally learned my lesson about how badly acrylic paint pens function over gouache, I wasn't sure what to expect of them over watercolor, gouache's sister. Then, I totally filled in the moon with a white gel pen--Specifically, my Gelly Roll, as most of the Gelly Roll pens are supposed to be waterproof (or at least water-resistant) and archival once dry. I'd never tried using the white as "mask" like this, but I figured I'd try and see what happened. Ironically, I do own a bottle of Masking Fluid as of now, but I've been too chicken to try it. 😅 Maybe I need to work in a "Masking Fuild Test" piece somewhere...But I digress. This wasn't a terrible idea; The white gel pen did basically disappear once I went over it with the paint, but just enough of an impression/slight tone difference in the paper was left I had a pretty easy time filling it back in (with the Uni-ball Signo this time since I wasn't concerned about water resistance) once the paint was dry. With that in mind, I now know a potential way to handle watercolor pieces in the future if I'd rather not risk getting graphite smudges everywhere but don't want bold pen lines. 😉 Awesome! Worth mentioning; I used two colors from the Handmade Modern Watercolor set, which I haven't used lately just because the Master's Touch set I have has proven so versatile for me. But for this piece, the Handmade Modern set had the two colors (slightly dull indigo and a pinky-purple) I wanted without having to do any extra mixing, so it won the day. If you zoom in on this piece and while it was drying, the paints look super grainy or something, but I can tell you in person that's not the case; Part of the problem you're seeing is the fact I took a photo of the piece to get the magnets in there, so it's exaggerating the texture. I think the other part of the problem is I think just how the Canson L'Aquarelle cold press paper behaves when it's wet, as that happened on the Master's Touch piece I linked above too, which kinda proved it's not the paint that's the problem. To that end, cold press watercolor does usually have a more prominent texture than hot-press anyway. Once my super quick wash of paint for the sky was done, I impatiently filled in as much of the cave border as I could with black paint, careful not to get too close to the lines so it wouldn't bleed into the parts I needed to be as not-black as possible. By the time I finished that, the whole thing was dry enough I could fill the rest of the space in! 😄 I'd considering splattering on the stars, but that takes so much extra set up and I was starting to run short on time, so I just dotted and drew them in with the gel pens instead. It's not as randomized, but it does work. Then I broke out the tiniest bit of those pearlescent paints and a very small brush. Most of the color placement was guesswork since I've never done this effect by hand before (there was one digital attempt I posted once but took down later because I don't like it enough to show it publicly anymore) and it's not perfect because painting tiny details is not my strong suit because tiny brushes seem to only be capable of painting half a line with me, but ultimately I think it worked out. If anything, I think the roughness adds a kind of filter-y feel, which is kinda nice. I did add a bit of the white pearlescent paint on the moon and the biggest stars. Funnily, the paint went down more yellow/silver, and then dried too blue-ish, so I had to dot on and smear some more white gel pen on top to make it work better with the final product. I don't understand the chemistry there, but...eh...? 🤷♀️ And then because I was feeling adventurous, I pulled out a bit of my blue PanPastel and some white chalk that I blended out to make the moon more glowy and try to add some very soft, subtle clouds back in. The clouds are maybe a bit too subtle, but I do think it was the right call. The last step before placing the magnets (which was very straightforward for once in my life, so I won't be going into great detail on it) was to polish off the black border & bats. And you know what? The black Posca Pen actually worked with very little fuss over the watercolor! 😱 The worst part was filling in the edge of the paper where I'd taped down the edges so it would hold still while I was doing the wash for the sky...Despite being washi tape, it tore up the paper when I freed it (I've got mixed success with that anyhow), leaving a pretty gross texture. Even so, that was still better than trying to use paint pens over gouache!! I suspect thicker layers of watercolor might've been a different story, or if I hadn't been using black on black, but it's still amazing to me how much more pleasant the experience was. Worth-nothing though; I did have to tone the black to actually be black digitally once I took the photo. I more or less saw that coming, so in theory, I could've left the black sections blank and filled then in digitally, but I prefer to go as far with the traditional piece as I can, even if it doesn't end up mattering for much. ...That's pretty much everything. I know my long description style doesn't make it seem so, but this was ultimately a pretty simple piece to make. I feel like I should do direct song quotes in a similar fashion with the mini-magnets more often. 😆 I don't know if I will though, since it feels a bit better to come up with either my own or at least build around an existing quote and not just use it as-is. It does work nicely for cases like this where I'm sort of struggling creatively and the background is more of the focus than usual. I am very happy with how it turned out though. It's simple but effective. 🙂 Now, I've got some art-related decisions to make for August and I clearly don't have much time for that, so I'll leave you Sparklers with a strong recommendation to check out Hesitant Alien and pondering of 3D-whatever bats. 😉
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Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings
Hesitant Alien Lyrics © Gerard Way
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