She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

Today I skibbled down the Seattle Aquarium to do some sketching with co-workers. I’ve got a membership and I might as well use it, right?

Thing about sketching in public that I forget is that you have a lot of people either not noticing you at all, and standing RIGHT BETWEEN you and the thing you are sketching OR you have people peering over your shoulder and asking questions. Also, it is hard to sketch when your subjects keep swimming around, and when small children insist on banging on the glass and disturbing them. All in all, it’s a bit tricky. One feels best off just getting basic shapes and form, or concentrating on one section of the animal rather than getting a full view.

The octopus in particular is very popular, so it’s probably best to take reference photos, and let it go.

Okay, I went a bit farther with this then I meant to. I was just gonna lay in the basic shapes and some colours. Instead, I ended up inking my initial sketch. Once I got started, I wanted to go further with the colouring, but I also wanted to have something that looked fairly cohesive, so I ended stopping here:

Reference is from my photos at the Seattle Aquarium. I took this particular shot during my brother’s visit earlier in April. I managed to get some fairly decent photos despite the flash and despite the fact that our camera’s lens needs cleaning. Well, decent enough for reference.

Here’s the in-progress shots. First, the sketch:

Then I put another layer on top of the sketch layer, and ink in a more refined version with more subtle details. The reddish-orange is the inks layer, the orange is the sketch layer beneath. I’m inking with a 3 and 5 solid round paintbrush at 45%.

And the finished inks:

The colouring was done in three different layers. The flats–the orange background. I later dropped its layer opacity to 66 percent. Then the shadows, painted roughly on with a fuzzy round brush, and then set to multiply with the layer opacity set to about 15 percent. And the highlights layer (100 percent opacity on the layer itself) but painted with brushes anywhere from 7-25% opacity.

I’ll probably revisit this in the future because I am really aching to try painting his awesome colouring, but for now, let’s call it a night.