It always looks better on paper...

strickn:

Phase 3 complete of my octopus stencil. Follow #octowip to see all the phases I’ve completed.

This phase:
With the composite image complete, I knocked out the background color on the iPad using Brushes & my Boxwave stylus. Instead of spending a lot of time color correcting, I added a white layer at about 40% opacity above the base image. I later traded the white for the pink color in the palette.

When I knock out the color, I like to do the “outline” first. This provides hard edges for the drawing, and let’s me add some form suggestions that would be hard to insert later. Once that was done, I selected some octo-like colors from the base image. Straying too far from the palette of the source image can make it very difficult to follow the contours. That’s mostly because you have to pull from the light source of the base image. A color you are following may abruptly end, but since you are basically posterizing the image manually, you have to rely on the natural shading to ensure that you are creating realistic forms.

I started with the darkest color I had, and went through and built out all the dark areas. I draw these equally with pencil and eraser. That allows me to get tight corners and lines with variable thickness. In order to make this technique work better, I drop the opacity on the layer I am working to about 80%. This way I will see places where I need to trim off section overlapping with the base knock out.

I then went successively through the colors until I had five total layers, each with its own contour drawing. 

Next phase:
The next stage will actually be a slight refinement of each of the separate layers to ensure that I have “nice” shapes to deal with. After that, the next phase that I will document, I will lay out the drawings in vector form on Omnigraffle, lay out registers for each layer, and export as an EPS to slice up a cnc router.