During the winter of 2024, in the lead up to Christmas, I managed to click with Procreate after a walking through a good training course on Udemy. I’ve not finished it yet, but it taught me how to build a picture up using Layers and merging my additions. It’s a great way to paint without committing until you’re absolutely sure it looks good.
The Process
One other mistake I was making with Procreate, was trying to be too photo realistic, using brushes with metal textures and getting lost trying to perfect the light and shadow. My paper and watercolour versions of these guns are obviously doodles or illustrations, so I took the approach of being little more detached and settle in the same illustrative mode. I made some better choices on the pen types too. A pastel crayon for the shading and a rough pencil for line-work, both giving more obvious papery impressions.
I’ve taken the originals in most cases and traced over the top of them, so they are quite similar but the colours seem more vivid and the ability to provide a striking background colour really makes them pop.
NFT Musings
I was hoping these would be suitable for minting as NFTs, and I still might get round to that. However, I have since learned a little more about methods of creating more appealing and collectible NFTs. The obvious barrier to these being they don’t easily fit in the square format that is also loved by Instagram. I’ll have to do some more research and look into artwork that’s been sold on the blockchain that doesn’t fit the square format. Anyway, it’s food for thought and I still haven’t got to fully understand the whole Cypto/NFT scene, it looks like it could still be a bit costly up-front.
If you look at opensea.io, almost the enire market seems geared toward these collections, almost like Baseball Trading Cards. You can of course sell anything as an NFT, but I don’t yet have the gravitas of being a named or renowned artist.
Anyway, enough for now, hope you enjoy them. Click on the image to load them in Flickr and makes some kind comments and follow me there too!
