Night of the Living Dead

They're Coming to Get You, Barbra!

Watercolor, Traditional vs Digital

I decided to tackle an old unfinished watercolor, this time in the program ArtRage, which is second perhaps only to Corel Paint for simulating traditional mediums like pencil, oil and watercolor.  Below is my original unfinished work (from Night of the Living Dead) which was rendered in watercolor and pen+ink and black pencil. I was unsatisfied with the blue-green color mixture that I had chosen to paint it with and so I elected to stop and scan the painting into Photoshop to tweak the colors and levels until I got this vivid mix of blood red and magenta. That made me want to repaint it properly in the new colors but I never got around to it until now.

Working in real watercolor can be challenging, to say the least. There are no editable layers and no undo button and less latitude to correct inevitable errors even compared to lots of other traditional media. On the other hand, this environment of unpredictability breeds a lot of happy accidents resulting in unique effects. So these very same errors are part of the allure of watercolor in the first place. Only in recent years have the tools to digitally replicate this interesting tactile randomness been available in programs like Paint and ArtRage. Okay, so here's my attempt to redo the painting in ArtRage:

Again, this is unfinished and the colors and levels were tweaked in Photoshop. Obviously there are a great many distinct differences between the two paintings. For me this was just sort of proof-of-concept tinkering, anyway. I know that if I were determined to, I could come a lot closer to replicating the traditional watercolor painting, which I only referenced toward the end of the repainting. If I go forward with this repainting, I might even choose completely different colors. But I think I'll move on....

Ben

Dwayne Jones as Ben in Night of the Living Dead.

Floored

Morning After of the Living Dead

Shoe

The Dead Inside

The Leader

Safer in the Basement

Barbra went bye bye

Personally, I was always curious about the fact that Barbra was only catatonic when a ghoul wasn't coming after her. I don't think it works that way. It was nice that Tom Savini eliminated this distraction from his remake, at least.

Meet Harry Cooper

That's the late Karl Hardman as the skulking, abrasive little crank Harry Cooper from NOTLD. I picked this one out as a just a little practice piece but the watercolor tool in ArtRage Studio Pro turned out to be so freaking awesome that I decided to let it happen. I had to clean it up in Photoshop but I figure that's okay. I'll be using this program all of the time.

Night Flight

Night of the Living Red

I've been getting ready to get back into the analog method of painting, recently, and here's my first try at watercolor (well, my first try in like 20 years). I love watercolor! Stuff happens with watercolor that you can't quite arrive at digitally. It's hard to compete with the undo button, though and I made a mistake with this one that lead me to stop before I would have. Not too shabby for an abortive effort, though. The painting is actually a blue-green. Everything was going okey until I threw the green in, though. So I scanned it and tweaked the color and settled on a nice juicy red. Anyway, I'll definitely be working with watercolors a lot more, now, even if I end up finishing on the computer. And I'll stay away from green.

Barbra in the Headlights

This is Barbara from Night of the Living Dead, and if you didn't recognize it shame on you! I'm pleased with how it turned out and I'll probably be doing more art like this in the future. I think I'll forget calling it "pause art" every time-I think you get the idea. I figured I might as well go to colored paper and colored pencils (well, black white and gray pencils, in this case). It will take longer I reckon, but it's worth it.