Author: Shel Kahn
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Style Explorations – Landscape with Figures Study
Another photo study, but I took this one into Clip Studio after doing the first pass in procreate, which let me use the smarter selection tools to grab large areas and push-and-pull them more precisely. This piece is a return to the softer, chalky line and using it to add colour as well as clarity,…
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Style Exploration – Digital Paint with Dark Inked Lines
This was reffing a photo on pinterest; I wanted to refocus on how I want to handle stylizing figures. I am slowly starting to nail down a process – there’s a rough sketch, a rough colour, inks, and then selection-based painting. For this piece I did it 100% in procreate, which means using their slightly…
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Style Test – Lineless Film Study
Another film still study, this one from Snow White and the Huntsman. This piece was done in Clip Studio, with a selection tool approach and no lines, and a fair amount of smudging brushes to get those tile and brick lines to feel distinct but integrated. Clip Studio’s reference layer tools is so powerful for…
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Style exploration – reffing a film still
Playing around with painting with the selection tool as well as relying more on chunky colourful linework. Screenshot from Space Sweepers.
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Project DARK Card Art Retrospective
About a decade ago I had the privilege of painting a card deck of fantasy medieval fighters, thieves, assassins, and sorcerers for Will Hindmarch. He had pitched the card deck as both a play aid (the game he was developing at the time used a traditional poker deck) and a world building tool, filling the…
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Soft Pastel Materials
More than anything else I have worked with, soft pastels – by which I mean the dry, sometimes chalky ones, not the oily ones – really do create that stereotypical art studio chaos from which a beautiful painting emerges. Everything in my life is now a little dusty. I’ve got an air filter I run,…
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Golden Digger Wasp in Soft Pastel
A small study of my own photo of a golden digger wasp on some goldenrod flowers last summer! I primed the paper with some opaque white watercolour ground to add tooth, and honestly I think it helped a fair bit and allowed me to get a nice blend of soft and hard edges on this…
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Jey Pawlik Explains RSS!
One of my fav tech savvy cartoonists wrote up a huge post on what RSS is, how you can use it, how they’re using it in two different apps, and more! Jey’s a great explainer of complicated things, and if you’ve been noticing folks talking about RSS more these days, this is a great overview…
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chalk pastel dragon island WIP – now with more details!
it’s coming along! while I suspect there’s a limit to how much I can do this, I’ve learned that you can use a paper stump or similar to lift up quite a lot of the soft pastel and redraw – which is really letting me get away with changing things that I should have figured…