Jellyfish in Atlantis: Experimented with Paint Thinner for Blending

Today I chose to color a spread from the book Atlantis by White Sar Publishers. I was attracted to the foreground-background digital layout of the jellyfish illustration and thought I could play around with the larger details up close while leaving the more distant images blurred.

I chose to use Polychromos pencils of Faber-Castell so I could go easy and soft, especially with the background. None of the wax bloom from wax pencils for now.

I bought Atlantis in Fully Booked for PhP 519.00

I started as usual with a faint background color as base, Light Cobalt Turquoise 9201-154**. For the parts of the jellyfish that I wished to leave white for highlights I shaded them with Luminance white colored pencil. The Koh-I-Noor eraser always came in handy from the start not only whenever I'd go beyond the lines but also when I decided to incorporate bubbles in my work. I didn't want them pencil drawn so I waited until I was able to color the entire background with the light blue to erase the outlines and create bubble shapes.

Koh-I-Noor pencil eraser, Polychromos Light Cobalt Turquoise, Luminance white

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Towards the afternoon I already was putting in the second, darker layer of the background. For the first time ever I tried using as a blender a paintbrush cleaner fluid (that's what it says on the bottle, Cleaner), it's actually a paint thinner which is a solvent. Its odor is quite strong so I kept it away when I wasn't using it. Interestingly the wet parts also on the reverse side of the page dried out fast and more importantly without any trace. The parts where I brushed over the thinner seemed to come together ok but not as dramatically as I had expected. I now realize why, in the past tutorial videos I'd seen, the artists would layer almost 20 times on an image with pencils and thinner, it's because the quality of the blended image cannot yet be achieved with just one coating of thinner.

I bought this from National Bookstore Megamall, the only stock left. It cost PhP100.00

Php 100.00 for this 75 ml bottle

Tomorrow I'll be picking up from here.

For the bubble shapes I erased the outline using Koh-I-Noor pencil eraser and colored it with Caran d'Ache Luminance white.

One of my photo references is this image from www.deviantart.com.