Work in Progress - Painting Update

Hi peeps, 

Last week was tough for a bunch of reasons so I didn't manage as much progress on the paintings as I was hoping, but here are shots of them so far. 

I inked about as much of The Beach as I needed to ink before I start painting :

I did a couple more layers one The Forest (all these titles are placeholders by the way, they will probably change by the time I am done with each piece) :

Most of the work I did related to this painting was on my iPad this week, as I still need to figure out some details regarding the colour scheme and lighting, which I am doing digitally first.
I will upload a small timelapse of the Procreate sketch tomorrow.

And finally, the piece I managed the most progress with was my Stranger things fanart. 

The tricky element to this composition was figuring out a way to avoid painting over the characters when painting the background.
I have had such hit and miss experiences with masking fluid, especially on large areas, that I didn't want to risk it, so I instead cut out the shape of the characters in tape.
I had to trace my outline on tracing paper first, then I stuck some tape on a sheet of plastic, then taped that to the tracing paper and cut the outline with a scalpel.
I then removed the plastic the tape was stuck to, but only over the outer edges of the shapes, so that I didn't have to stick the whole shape over the painting, only the edges but the inside of the characters was also protected.
Does that make sense?

I did use masking fluid for the more fiddly bits such as the ribbons near Vecna's face, and to clean up edges around the tape shape that may not synch up perfectly with my drawing underneath.

It took absolutely ages to set it up, but overall, this solution worked a treat.
I had to be very careful when removing the whole thing once I was done with the background, as the tape I used was very sticky and was at high risk of tearing my paper surface. I used a hairdryer to soften the tape glue and managed to very slowly and carefully remove it all, leaving me with a rather successful clean shape against my background!

I was initially going to make the background red, to match the set Vecna is in in the show when trying to capture Max, but decided against it in the end, as I much prefer the post-apocalyptic look of the smoke. It also echoes the smoky landscape of the last shot of season 4. 

Here is my progress so far!

There is still much to be done, but it is crawling forward slowly...:)

That's it for this update!

I will share the little Procreate timelapse of The Forest with you tomorrow, and I will also have a post showing you my design for the 2023 calendar later this week, so stay tuned! 

Thank you as always for being here,
Sending you my love,
M