Art Interview with Acid
Below please find the art portion of our interview with Acid. To read the fanfic interview with Acid and her writing partner, Sinick, click here.

Acid can be found on livejournal here and at IJ ac1d6urn. Much of her art can be found here. Be sure and check out her comic series MWPP. And don't miss my personal favorite, her Snape/Harry comic: Toil and Trouble.


Aubrem: Acid, you are one of those rare creatures in fandom, wildly talented at both writing and art. Please tell us about your art background. Have you always drawn? What art training have you had?

Acid: Thank you! I guess I just want to try everything in life while there's an opportunity. Training? Well. 'None, officially' and 'my whole life' would probably summarize it. I took some courses in high school and college. Though even then my math and programming courses outweighed the art. But as far back as I remember I always liked to draw and even though I didn't get a chance to study professionally, I am constantly learning on my own, by example or reading the available literature or simply practice. Oddly enough, I keep picking up various techniques from strange places. A lot of my digital coloring techniques come from dealing with the raytracing algorithms in a computer graphics class as well as various Internet tutorials and the usual trial-and-error routine.

Aubrem: Can you talk a bit about the various media you use?

Acid: I tend try everything I can just to see if I can use a certain technique. I do a lot of mixed media work and in digital art's case, combine several programs to draw something.

In traditional art (No need to call me Sir, Professor, Snape and Harry) I combine a lot of materials at once (anything to get the intensity and brightness of the colors I need.) Usually I end up using color paper, ink, markers, watercolors, or acrylics to define the base colors of the image and afterwards use color pencils, ink, oil pastels, and whiteout for texturing and detail. Usually the materials for base colors produce dark and saturated tones, and the materials I use for texturing and detail afterwards produce very light, almost transparent tones on top of the base.

The trick to using various media like this in one painting is to remember what has to be used last and what the certain media is good for. Lighter oil pastels over a dark base color (acrylics, ink or markers) provide nice texturing for stone walls or grass, but trying to add anything else over the layer of oil pastels is nearly impossible, nothing sticks to them but whiteout. Lighter or darker hues of color pencils over saturated marker tones can define lights and shadows of the object well, but try using pencils to define base colors and markers to color in the shadows
and it'll turn out either very blurry or very messy.

When I paint digitally (Take My Hand, Morsmordre, Expecto Patronum, Silence), I usually end up curled up in a comfortable chair with the laptop and a huge digital tablet over the right armrest blocking half of my keyboard space. It's a very relaxing working atmosphere. The pen for the tablet has a mind of its own, so usually every drawing session begins with me digging through everything in the room, trying to track down where I left it last time. It's always in some obvious place I forget to check. For something that I use more often than I use actual pens or pencils, it has a way of disappearing when I need it most.

My main painting program is OpenCanvas. I have at least three versions of it installed, but usually use a free clone of OpenCanvas 2.2 which was distributed over the web as a demo by Deleter CGIllust (you can still download it from their website: CGILLust). OpenCanvas is great for the oil painting effects and can produce very bright, shiny color. Its layer modes provide a lot of control over the lighting schemes.

A lot of digital images lack texturing because it's easy to produce an area of very flat and spotless color on the computer, while simulating the irregular watercolor or bumpy canvas texture is much harder. I use another free program called Project Dogwaffle to add more textures to the final image. It is not as bulky (and not to mention as expensive) as Painter and its collection of organic brushes is really nice.

Photoshop and ImageReady are the final couple of programs that I use to adjust contrast and saturation to the completed picture and add border effects. Since the picture is almost done, most of the techniques I use at this point are similar to photo editing.

Other programs in my CG collection include ArtRage (nice brushes, needs better canvas size/zoom controls), Corel Painter (too many tools, haven't found the ones I like yet), some 3D rendering software, Bryce (landscapes), Poser (anatomy/poses reference), Flash (for vector graphics and inking outlines, if needed), Pixia (one of the free CG packages from the web), and so on.

Now, it might sound funny after this long list of software, but tools really do not matter (except maybe in the digital tablet vs. the mouse argument because the precision really does help a lot). This is coming from someone who used enlarged mode of MS Paint for pixel art for two years before switching to oekaki-like web applets and only afterwards trying out other digital painting programs.

Uhm, now that I bored everyone to death, I guess it's a good place to stop.

Aubrem: Not in the least boring! I'm kind of boggling at the amount of practice and experimentation that must have gone into developing your mixed media techniques and figuring out how best to combine the computer programs. I've noticed you do a lot of light effects - sort of dark background and then the subjects picked out in light. Is that dependent on the media you use? Your comic Toil and Trouble isn't always done that way so much though - it's more dark drawing and shading on light background. How do you decide how to do a picture? And how do you figure out to design the composition?

Acid: Ah yes, the light effects are much easier to do digitally, because computer screens (as opposed to actual paint on canvas) are naturally shiny. I can simulate those to some extent with traditional media by using light yellow pencils or oil pastels.

Usually I try out several color schemes for the picture before deciding which one fits the mood best. Darker, colder colors, like purple, blue, or green, work well with skintones, so I use these a lot for portrait backgrounds. Toil and Trouble is an exception because it uses a lot of uncolored sketches to begin with, so I often end up with darker outlines on beige or light-brown backgrounds. The color combinations I use most often would probably be red and green - they contrast well, visually as well as symbolically in this fandom - as well as yellow and purple, the natural light and shadow colors.

For composition, I tend to start with very simple shapes: curves, circles, or lines. The composition of Lessons Learned, for example is based on a couple of diagonal lines. This technique really helps if you want to express some sort of movement from one side of the image to another. Then there are the usual composition tricks, like the rule of thirds and such.


Aubrem: I didn't know about the Rule of Thirds, that's fascinating. I need to read up on art composition - interesting stuff. Now, I want to ask you about the thing I'm so excited about - the new snarry_reader layout! When we decided it was time for a new layout and asked you if you might do some art for it I never expected anything so spectacular - it's gorgeous! I love every element of it. How did you create it?

Acid: The layout was fun to make. You contacted me on my day off, so it was great timing. I was able to start on the drawing in the morning and finish it overnight. The night before I saw the email, I drew a quick sketch I was never planning to use again. It served as the idea for the layout on the next day.

Let me do a quick walkthrough of how I went from the sketch to the final version of the picture.

Outline

Outline sketch.

The composition techniques taught me a lot in a process of designing the layout at the sketch level. Mostly they deal with the focal points and the leading lines which have to be established early on when you begin the drawing.

In the initial sketch I was experimenting with the dynamic movement. It's really important to keep track of it in the image, especially when you're drawing anything that involves an action: someone casting a spell in a duel, jumping, running, kissing and so on. With the action scenes you aren't just responsible for showing one moment in time, but also have to suggest what happened just before and what will happen afterwards. Without the suggested movement you'll get two posed mannequins and absolutely nothing happening in the picture.

Drawing a kiss is really a lot like drawing dynamic fight scene in comic books with the character getting punched in the face; you get the same sort of action (Harry) and reaction (Snape) concentrated around and leading into a single focal point: the punch itself or in this case the kiss. Once you figure out the pattern of that kind of movement, the direction and the curve of it, everything else in the picture bends and follows those two or three initially sketched leading lines. For example, Harry's shoulder, neck, and chin form one of the suggested lines: he’s moving forward. His hand and the curve of Snape's back and hair, is another: Snape is reacting. Those two lines curve and lead the eye right to the focal point: their mouths.

Once the leading lines and the focal point are established, everything else is just a matter of adding detail. I don't erase anything unless I absolutely have to, even in the initial sketch, I turn down the opacity of the sketch layer down to 25% to 50% and redraw the lines I’d like to keep on a new layer while zooming in more and more into the drawing each time. Sometimes it takes several layers to ink the drawing completely. If I want to add a new object to the drawing, I have to zoom all the way out so I can see how it will affect the entire picture. Only then, when I make sure it looks all right, do I zoom back in and add detail.

For example, at some point I was trying to draw the curtain and the window at Spinner's End. Halfway through it I realised that the edge of the curtain with its suggested additional movement line led the eye away from the original focal point, so I replaced it with something less distracting, just a window with the row of potion bottles smoothing out the corner edge.

I wasn't planning on drawing the second half of the layout at all, but I was beginning to realise that the image wasn't narrow enough for the header. I decided to color it first and see how it looked.

Right panel Coloring.

My digital coloring technique is pretty simple. I make use of layers and layer modes and break down the coloring process into three steps: drawing the colors, the shadows, and the highlights. Each set is drawn on its own separate layer with the mode set to either Add (highlights) or Multiply (shadows or colors) so the color overlays the outline instead of blocking it. The flat colors are just what they are, the actual colors of the objects. Harry's shirt is red, Snape's robes are brown, there's green stuff in the potion bottles (except for that one stray cheerfully symbolic red), the chunk of the wall behind Snape is blue-green (it took me forever to figure out the correct hue until I gave in and used the exact opposite of brown on the color wheel to contrast Snape's hair and robes). Harry's hair is not black, but a very dark purple. There are light skintones and dark saturated colors everywhere, but note the lack of absolute white or black. That's because there are no truly black or white objects, even the parchment behind Harry, the lightest object there, is not quite white.

The next step is the shadows. They are drawn on a separate layer with the blend mode set to Multiply. (You can do this in any program that supports layers and layer modes: Photoshop, Painter. I use OpenCanvas.) What the Multiply mode does is overlay the colors of a layer (in this case purple) on top of the previous layers. It's a lot like painting with the purple watercolor over a previously colored piece. Purple adds onto whatever color is below and produces a different hue and shade.

Shadows are always drawn with purple, since it's the opposite of yellow (the color of natural light). The hue of purple changes from blue to magenta just as the hue of light in the picture can range from orange to a very light green, but it is recommended to use a single hue for the image or the lighting will look inconsistent. When painting shadows, you have to keep track of the light source in the picture and the direction the light falls, and assign the shadows to the objects accordingly.

After the shadows, the same is done with the highlights. All highlights are also drawn on a separate layer with the mode set to Add (in OpenCanvas) and Lighten or Screen (in Photoshop). The Add mode is similar to shining some light on the picture in the areas painted with color (in this case yellow). Think of it as setting up a lot of multicoloured flashlights to shine on certain areas of the picture. The highlights are all painted on this Add mode layer according to the light source and the positions of shadows. Just as with shadows the highlight color has to be a single hue, preferably the exact opposite of the shadow hue. However, there are exceptions with the shiny objects that reflect light or transparent objects that let the light pass through it: the glow around them takes on the color of the object itself, such as with the potion bottles.

At the end there are four layers, each affecting the ones below it. From bottom to top, they are: outline, color, shadows, and highlights. With the purple shadows on the Multiply layer and the yellow highlights on the Add layer the flat colors come to life and change into a wide variety of hues. And what's more, it's possible to tweak the opacities and the colors for each layer without changing the rest of the layers. So, for example, if I want to change the background color from brown to green, I can replace one flat area of color with another on the color layer without having to repaint the shadows or the highlights all over again: the old ones will affect the new color just the same. It saves a lot of time.

With the highlights and the shadows complete, the drawing is mostly done at this point but usually I add more detailed highlights on another 'light' layer with a very small brush or a pencil, such as hair or clothes outlines, as well as very small round highlights on the shiny objects. Sharp edges (the book) are also outlined that way.

Left panel coloring.

After I finished the first part of the drawing, I realised that it needed another side. I recycled the original outline and left Snape's figure in it, removing Harry's, and changing a few things around. Pretty much everything else (the background, the layout) stayed the same. It's fascinating how the mood of the same drawing changed after I removed one person and changed the color scheme. I went through the same process of painting colors, lights, and shadows in the second part and then put both of the images together at the end. There were a couple of additions such as textures and a border but mostly that was it.

Final result


Below are some links to screenshots of the bottles to give you an idea of the size of the original drawing. It was around 6000 pixels across when I joined both parts. This is also the zoom level I use in order to paint the details (click on each image to see the actual size, approximately 800x600).

The outline


Colors + Outline

Shadows + Outline

See the following pictures: Shadows + Colors + Outline, Highlights over black background with inverted outline (otherwise the layer doesn't show up on white), Outline + Color + Highlights, Outline + Color + Shadows + Highlights, a screenshot of the bottles on the other side, and the final image after all the texture and color manipulations in Photoshop and Project Dogwaffle here.

Aubrem: Wow, that's quite a tutorial. Very, very interesting. Let me link now to a lovely mixed media tutorial you did last year in case anyone has missed it: here ETA: Picture links broken. Find them here.

I think that's about all I can ask of you for this interview. : ) I want to thank you again for the gorgeous layout along with this fascinating tutorial. This interview has been very interesting - my new knowledge helps me appreciate the art all the more. I look forward to both new art and new stories from you in the future.

Acid: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about all things artistic. I don’t get a chance to do it often to this extent. Hope I didn’t bore everyone with my color theories and there’ll definitely be more of both, art and stories.

* * *
To read a Fanfic Writing Interview with both Acid and Sinick, click here

Broken Links altered 2nd May 2008