Goblin Shoppe

Our second assignment in my Acrylic Techniques class was for us to use a method in which we had to use different temperatures of warm and cool as a sort of layer in gouache underneath the actual painting. I had a sketch of a little goblin sitting in his shop from earlier, so I decided to use that for my final painting:

I don't know what the text says in his sign, but I wanted to make it look choppy, as if he had carved it onto the sign himself. As far as the technique goes, I chose to use a warmer orange gouache layer in the figure as well as in the lamp, and a swampier green layer for the rest.

And yes, that is a hydralisk skull from Starcraft in the background. This goblin is basically Jim Raynor, he's laid back, he's smoking, he fights zerg. And other humans apparently. Actually what I had in mind was more of a medieval fantasy setting for this one, instead of my usual machinery and techy jargon. He has four arms in the final simply because I couldn't decide on the positioning of how his two arms should go.

A classmate gave me good advice in the crit for this one: he said to get a clear focus in a painting with a limited light source like this, turn off the lights and hold a lit match or lighter up to where you want the light source to be in the painting. Then turn the lights on and paint it how you saw it with the lights off. I don't know, I had a tough time with this painting, mostly because of that colored under layer of gouache. I'm not the biggest fan of it, usually I like layers of transparent colors with a stronger line to pull it all together, but in this case I just couldn't get my colors together well enough. No matter how many layers I had put on top of the gouache, I kept seeing that swamp gouache-green peak through like a sketchy creeper in the bushes. Yep, that's it; gouache is a stalker. But not from Starcraft. (oh come on Chris, is anyone going to get that??)

All images and designs © Chris Loge 2010. All rights reserved.