Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #12
This week I finished two different “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” prints. Numbers eleven and twelve. This is notable because they’ve been sitting around for a few weeks with the basic coloring done on them but they were still unfinished. I couldn’t seem to get them done.
I came up with this series of prints last year and before these two I had ten of them done. They all consist of a drawing of a woman with the phrase “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” written somewhere on them. It’s usually there a few times because I use the type as a design element and build it into the drawing.
I make these prints the same way I usually make prints. I start by looking through one of my inkbooks for a small drawing I can use, blow it up digitally to 6×9 inches, print it out in blue line on a 6×9 inch piece of paper, make a pencil drawing over the blue line, scan in the pencil drawing, blow that drawing up to 10×15 inches, print the blue line drawing out on 11×17 inch paper, ink over the blue line drawing, scan in the ink drawing, and finally color that ink drawing on the computer in either Photoshop or Illustrator.
I was fine with these two up until the color part. Coloring on the computer is a completely different process than coloring with actual physical tools like paint or markers. Instead of standing at my drawing table or easel and picking and using all my physical tools I’m standing at my computer and picking virtual tools. I’m in a different head space using virtual tools.
Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love #11
Often I have a preference for which method I want to work on at the time. I keep a bunch of projects going all at once so that I always have something that I feel like doing. If I feel like digital then I’m ready to go. If I feel like physical I’ve got some of that underway too. That way I don’t have any “Blocks” and can go in whatever direction suits me.
That’s why it was strange when, a couple of weeks ago, I went to color these two prints and I couldn’t finish them. I thought I was in the mood for finishing them but somewhere in the process I hated the color that was coming out.
The starting point of my digital coloring process is usually the same. I start with my color swatches. These are digital samples of colors that are put into a visual color palette. They are equivalent to tubes of paint. I have a swatch palette of about forty colors that I always start with. These are my basic colors and I always know exactly how they are going to look when they print. It’s like starting with the same forty tubes of paint. You can use them straight from the tube but you can always mix them too. I usually start straight from the tube.
I start my coloring process by laying down all the base colors. I don’t use gradients, add patterns, or do anything fancy at this stage. I just try to figure out what parts should be blue and what parts should be red. Plus I have multiple shades of each color so I figure out what sections should be light, dark, and medium blue. There is a lot of changing of colors at this point but digital makes that easy. Much easier than if I was trying to change colors using paint.
After getting the basic colors down I add shading to the color. With this “Dreamt” series I’ve been using dark shapes of color over the basic color to add depth and interest. This is where the most creative work is done and what pulls the piece together to be finished. This is what I wasn’t able to do. This is where I got stuck.
I’m not sure why I got stuck at this point with these two prints but I did. Maybe on some level I didn’t feel like working on the computer and when I went to finish them I didn’t like what I was doing. I think that rather than finish number eleven I went on and did the basic coloring of number twelve. Then I was stuck on two of them.
It was the basic color that I didn’t like. I used my same basic color swatches that I’ve been using for decades but they looked boring to me all of a sudden. I tried moving forward with the shading but I couldn’t. That looked boring to me too. The color on the whole piece wasn’t working.
I tried changing things up and using a new technique (at least new to me). I tried a technique where you sample color from an old movie poster or some such and use those colors for your piece. I found a few old posters online to sample and it was okay. It was different than my usual color but not that different. I grew bored of that technique and put my digital pen down and moved on to other stuff. I had had enough.
Cut to a couple of weeks later and I decide to finish up these two pieces. I change a little bit of the basic color and got to work on the finished colors. I add in shading and textures and things went fine. It all took a while though. I think I worked for a day and a half on finishing the two pieces but it all went smoothly. I’m not even sure what I didn’t like about the color the first go around. I certainly changed things this second time around but I didn’t have that frustrating sense that all the color was boring. I don’t know what that even was.
One thing I haven’t done with these two was to make the all blue versions of them. I think the dissatisfaction with the coloring of these was building over time. With the first ten I made full color versions but I also made all blue versions. For some reason I wasn’t satisfied with the full color ones so I made all blue ones to, sort of, cheat my sense of satisfaction.
I thought the simpler all blue ones looked cool in a way the color ones didn’t. But monochrome wears out its welcome with me pretty quickly. So I didn’t want them to only have a monochrome version. That was an alternate to full color version.
With numbers eleven and twelve I ended up so satisfied with the full color versions I completely forgot about the all blue ones that I was making in the series. That’s a strange turn of events because there was a time I thought they’d never be finished because I was so bored with the color. The process of making art can be a strange thing.