Zugarian Queens- The Process

I've never written about my painting process before, so this may fail horribly. It may not. Let's dive in, shall we?

I used:
Liquitex acrylic paints
Liquitex Matte Medium
a bunch of inexpensive square brushes
Tracing paper
Transfer paper
Blue tape (note- do no use on the surface of any actual painting. It will rip off the paint!)
Carved piece of wood (jelutong) coated in gesso



1. I copied my designs onto tracing paper. You can see I ended up changing one of the panels- this is why sketching and pre-planning are good things, kids. Sometimes you get it horribly wrong. Best if you fuck up BEFORE paint your final piece.

2. I loosely cut out the traces and tape them onto the back of the transfer paper. Back meaning "the side not covered in graphite".

3. Then I cut the tracing paper and the transfer paper closer to the shape of the panel. As you can see in photo #2, I drew the panel shape onto the tracing paper. Anyways, once you cut it out, tape the sucker to its corresponding panel.

4. This is to better illustrate why I do all this- the thin tracing/transfer paper can take on the shape of the shape of the wood with minimal wrinkling. In addition, the drawings turn out much nicer than if I freehanded it directly on the wood. I did that with Sisters- it worked, but we can all agree the later wood pieces showed a much higher level of drawing.

5. Repeat #4 on all sides. Go over the drawings with a darker pencil if needed. Now, pour out a little matte medium, and brush on a thin coat all over the drawings. I'm serious. This will keep you lines intact and prevent the graphite from mixing with your colors. It will get a little muddied up, but don't worry. No one will be able to see it in the final piece.

6. After the drawing is dry, pour out a good amount of matte medium and some black paint. Mix the two until you get a nice transparent gray. Use it to block in your lighting! A quick grayscale painting is a great help in mixing your colors. You already have the tones down, so you just need to match them!. Don't get too fussy over the details- again, no one is going to see this bit.

7. Start paintin'. I always do the background first- it's loose, and I can go over lines. I can cover up any mistakes later. Here, I did it in grayscale, then went over it with yellow-tinted matte medium to warm it up.

8. I get a little more detailed as I go on, but not much. Since I'm planning on doing most of the detail work with lines, I keep the actual painting slightly underfinished.
I should mention here that I've used semitransparent colors here for some of the shadow colors. Each one was creating with the matte medium. When I'm painting in acrylic, I never, ever, ever create transparent color by just adding water to the paint. This in the path to grainy-ness and frustration. Use a medium.

Finally, add in the linework- I used a brush pen here when my liner brush decided to get buggy on me. Bastard.

Hopefully, this was helpful! I really need to do a proper write-up on painting technique (especially gouache, given that it's my, you know, GO-TO MEDIUM). Maybe when I have some spare time....
...yeah right.