Riley: Icon
I have been using the same profile picture as my online identity for close to 25 years. This little guy is called “The Lakeside Ghost”. He’s from an icon set called Ravenswood Revisited by Dave Brasgalla. I adopted him at a time when my primary creative outlet was skinning Windows.
These last few years, it’s been getting increasingly strange that my online identity was badged by something I didn’t make myself. So I set out to craft my own profile picture.
This is a drawing/painting (those lines are getting increasingly blurry) of Riley, my beloved greyhound, looking forward to getting out and sniffing the world, his all-time favorite thing in the world.
I’ve been working on this for a few months, trying out different approaches. You may have noticed me previewing a fully painted version of it for the last week of Kimodameshi. The painting tools in Artstudio Pro are outstanding, but I have not yet mastered them, so my results are often muddier than desired. I didn’t like that version.
In my restlessness one night, my head started turning over the fantastic portrait work of an artist I admire on Cara named Veravi. She works in physical media, layering colored pencils over alcohol markers. Check out this masterpiece of Tilda Swinton, for example. See how the markers provide base color coverage and the pencils give contour, definition, hue and value variation. She is bold and confident in both her color and linework, and her portraits sing with talent.
I decided to try my hand at that kind of approach. I made a light watercolor wash, then started amplifying it with a bunch of colored pencil marks on top. Things were starting to feel reasonably good, but far short of her pieces. Then, something almost magical happened.
While working on these paint layers, I had hidden the background blue field, so I was just working against a plain white background. My plain white marks were barely distinguishable from the background, and so I may have applied a lighter touch than I would have otherwise. When I turned the blue field layer back on, parts of it shone through areas I hadn’t applied pigment (or full pigment: the watercolor layer is not full opacity). Suddenly the whole work popped!
Riley came to life on the screen for me. The light bloomed on his nose the way I wanted. His face stands out from his body. His ear went from looking like an afterthought to natural. The texturing with all those pencil marks made him almost tactile.
I love this painting! I am proud to make it my new online handle, and I am excited to do more with this technique.
Medium: Digital
App: Artstudio Pro
Tools: Colored pencil, watercolor