Walk through - Bala airbrush

Sorry, I fell a little inactive. I don't think I'll have a free bee this Monday. I got a little swamped with things, and Christmas is in full gear for us. I'm probably going to try to get a speed paint up this weekend too. I'm really focussing on the tutorials aspect of this blog, so please don't be too upset if I miss free bee's now and then. i don't do a lot of "doodle" type art, so I generally focus on one big thing at a time.

I thought I'd post a little walk through of a recent image of mine. I get lots of questions about how I use my airbrush, so I'll show you.

This image was of my Character from Conflagration, who is a green skinned jungle witch. I don't recall the actual colours I used for this, I am going to guess. I normally just grab whatever will work without considering what it is, so keeping track of colours on projects is a challenge for me.

The photos here are a bit yellowy, sorry about that! the final piece is at the bottom, and it's fairly true to real colours.

I always do a layout of my project first, and make some plans for colour placement, lighting, and maybe discover if i need to buy new colours, or make one up by mixing the Various ink.
In this instance i took the ink version, and printed it out in a layout in my blending card. I then practised the techniques and colours to use in the final image. You can see how I jotted the colours down here in my layouts.

Step 1: I inked my image in Copic Multiliners. i used xpress it Blending card.
I then layed in my lightest colour which is my main light source. This was probably YG11.

Here I laid in a base layer for the hair with some e43. I always colour hair in the direction it's hanging so to form the little clumps of hair, and add to the realism. Notice I left some areas blank or lightly coloured for highlights.

Here I've begun laying in more of her skin tone; BG93. I was sure to not go past my light areas, which I deliberately made larger than I wanted, to accommodate some blending. I've been careful to leave some coloured areas very light, or white where my secondary light source will be.

here I've continued enhancing the shadows of her skin, and blending in the light areas. I'll be adding BG96 here, as well as a home made colour which is is a mix of 5cc's BG93 and 7cc's of BG96 to make what I'm calling BG94. i mixed this into an empty various ink bottle, and then filled and empty sketch marker with it.

I've now blended in the lightest shadows and smoothed out her skin more, with the YG11, BG93.BG94 and BG96

Here I've taken E44 and started darkening up the shadows in here hair, and blending it with E43.

Adding E49 to darken up the shadows in her hair.

BG09 and BG72 were used to colour in the background spaces around her head, and then the dinal stage was taking BG53 and in the Copic airbrush, I just freehand went over the whole right side of the image to give that blue light glow in her jaw line. I lightly sprayed it else where on the image as well, to carry that colour through, and give more glow.

I added the red in the scar marks on her forehead, and scanned it, and I was done!

I hope you enjoyed this and it maybe inspired you to experiment with the Copic airbrush system. It's a really great tool for enhancing your images. I have the Copic ABS-1 and I hook it up to my Iwata Smart jet Compressor, but Copic also sells a compressor set that's really simple.