Fuck Lisa Frank- Posca Painting (process WiPs included in description)

(But for real, I have no idea what to title this)…

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done a painting!

This is a posca pen painting on canvas, and definitely boasts those bright saturated colors this medium excels with! And boy, was this fun to make. This painting is for Jasiri, who is one awesome kitty cat! So, here’s an awesome kitty to join the painting I made for him a bit back! I feel like I’ve learned so much since that piece, and I can’t wait to send this off to live across the ocean!

I’m going to jam this post with a bunch of work in progress shots as well as discuss my techniques used so if you wanna learn from my learning process or just like to see WiP shots of art, I’ll be going over all of that below!

I’m so glad to be able to share this all with you guys!

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To start, this project took me around a month of on and off work. I absolutely hit a few “walls” and took a break from the piece. I feel like the time to sleep on ideas and how I felt about the piece greatly helped it in the long run. I’ll go over various steps by posting wip pics and discussing each step below the image. So, let’s go on a journey…

The rough sketch phase! I’ve always considered myself an artist who’s strengths lie with dry media/linework. I love the rawness and emotion I was able to get in the sketch. While I feel I lost a lot of what this sketch had, my end piece is good for other reasons and I am overall very happy with how it turned out at the end!

Sketch phases in paintings are best just for initial compositions and ideas, for me, they change a lot after paint is applied.

Initial blocking! This stage is all about applying initial paint, and not losing the sketch too much. Here I established the shading and the base color palette. I did make a mistake here. I should have started with the background. It’s easiest to work in layers with opaque paint mediums as its harder to change things after more is placed.

Here I added more detailing in the shading and smoothed it out a good bit. Again, I wish I did background blocking in first and I also wish I erased some of the graphite before I got to this point. Posca pens are water based and don’t really play nice with pencils. They make a bit of a muddy mess.

More layering for depth and more outlining. I also finally erased a lot since I was battling graphite bleed. I started feeling as though I lost some of the shape I intended for the face and it was looking.. almost like a high school sports mascot mural due to the stylization. From here I did a LOT of correcting. And I failed to take WiPs while I was focused in doing so.

Holy changes! I added more shadow into this at this point and restructured a lot of the face. I feel like I got a lot more of the “wild” I was seeking to capture here after I made the changes to structure. I also felt more confident in the colors I was using to create better depth. I also started working with a technique I had never tried with this medium before. Posca pens are a water based paint pen. And, I realized I could take advantage of that while I realized the pens I had were severely limiting the shading and detail I could add to this because of being limited to the pigment in the pens themselves. I got my paint brushes out and some water! I diluted some Posca ink and did some mixing of colors to create some in between stages. Remember, art is all about breaking rules! This was one of the best things I did in this process!!

The first pass on background colors as well as the first wall I hit in the creation of this. I.. really did not like what I was working with here. The base Posca pens had me far too limited on what I could do with this background and I felt backed into a corner after feeling so good about the big cat.

While I tried to figure out what to do with the background and how I was going to do it, I worked on refining more on the cat, and I realized I did have some fun elements I could play with! I had some fine line metallic poscas I haven’t been able to use much! So I decided the sun and the cat’s eyes should be GOLD. I feel it definitely came together in the final of this work and I’m so glad I took the leap on it! I also decided to try shading the foliage with a green metallic posca I have, which ended up growing on me also! The best thing about paint is that you can always cover things up in time.

Finally! A breakthrough!! I used the same technique I used on the cat with water to dilute the purple and add a little blue which I washed over the whole background and it really added so much back to this image. I felt EMPOWERED and I ended up making a ton of progress this night! I loved using paintbrushes with the posca paint!

MORE!!

I went on a kick with adding detail and changing things. I adjusted more colors on the cat, added detail to the tree and added way more foliage! I had another night of really focusing on this work and I went WILD. I made the sun larger and actually circular and I also changed some of the outlining from purple to a blue to add more depth here and it really made it POP more!

And now, for the part I was really waiting for… the SPOTS!! I wanted this to be a spotty cat from the start and I was holding off adding any til I was happy with the shading and detailing below them. I finally made it!!

Refining, cleaning and adding detail was all I focused in on with this part of the image. I felt like I was getting close to completing this but I knew it wasn’t quite there yet. I decided to give it a day or two to see what I wanted to add.

Time helps!!

And here we are at the final! I added more shading to the background with dark blue/purple washes and I did some minor detail additions. I also painted the canvas edges a dark blue to match the darkest outlining. This is ready to hang up or be framed!

There it is! My process and journey with the creation of this colorful spotty cat! Thank you all for checking out this post and thank you all for your support here. I’m glad to be posting more again and I’m glad to be creating! Traditional mediums are very fun for me and I feel like I’m improving with them all the time!

-G