Side Quest: Collage as an "Base Underpainting" in Digital Painting
I've always so inspired by Art with Em on Youtube that I thought, I'd love to have my own collage art but not necessarily copying exactly what is Em doing.
I love working with designing shadows, so I searched on Pinterest if there is a more collage approach similar to bas relief sculpture and there is!
Also, this is a good opportunity to use all of my unused acrylic painting and heavy weight pads!
Here are the picture documentations of the collage art!
This is my first time ever doing collage art, so I'm quite nervous about the result! So after a lot of experimenting with shapes, and how much I can push the "shadow shapes" created by the arrangement of the paper stacked on top of each other, I'm quite happy with this RAW version of the collage below!
It does get me thinking, I can only push so far in the collage stage without ruining the whole original piece. So I thought, if it still counts as "Collage art" if it's being touched-up with Digital Painting?
Well the answer is, if it's handmade by our own human hands, does it matter? Mix-media doesn't mean it's less of an art or technique!
So this is how it looks after it is being touched up with digital painting!
The way I am approaching this is very similar to photobashing, but using my own painted textures collaged together, then cleaned it up afterwards! It really helps when you are able to do a bit of photobashing. The only difference is that, I used my own brushstrokes to create the stylized and unique transition. So I am not as precious as if I was doing the actual realistic photobashing piece.
This is basically a fan-art of Rukiora (character played by Shirota Mitsuki), from the otome game "JackJeanne"! I really was inspired by the color choice and the story of the game overall. I even owned the artbook for my own reference too!!
Also, Shirota's birthday is coming up so I thought it would be good time to make a birthday fanart!
So where do I take the collage-mix media technique?
Well, I'm so looking forward to integrating collage into my digital painting workflow. Nowadays, yes it is so tempting to find the most efficient way to color/determine colors in illustration. I do not like to create very smooth shading/coloring if it doesn't make huge difference when the illustration being looked from afar, but I love love love collaging as a base "underpainting"
I'd love to include the collage-mixmedia technique for this Original Creature TCG card Illustration!
That's all for my sidequest blog post, I hope you like this format of a blogpost where I'm not only posting big project, but also side quest exploration stage!