Jabba is Tons of Fun

Finished up a commission piece of Jabba the Hutt tonight. I have to tell you, Jabba the Hutt is so much fun to draw and paint. I know he's gross but he got so many different textures and colors, it's just fun. 

I don;t want to call thsi a break through piece because it looks pretty uniform to my recent work, but it was a break through for me personally to let go of the Markers. For the last year I've been doing work almost exclusively in colored markers and pencils. I love the colores and what I am able to do with the markers, but at teh same time they are very rigid and don't leave a lot of possibilities to experiment with out ruining my pens, well, at least I don;t know of any yet.

The thing is The markers are a must for sketch cards as they don;t buckle the cards, but for bigger stuff I have been really wanting to use REAL paint again, and play with the wet media. So for Jabba I went for it. 

I broke out the WATER COLORS, and started puddling bold colors instead of trying to match the photo tones in my reference. Relearned a lot of things like patients, and knowing when to layer more color to get different effects. 

I used to work EXCLUSIVELY with watercolor for many years, but I found that I was limited when I need to do things that only acrylic could do, so I started using acrylic a bit, but got frustrated and stopped.  But I love acrylic, and I'm hoping that venturing BACK into watercolor will lead me back to doing acrylic again.

The other thing I enjoyed about this Jabba piece was working bigger. This piece is only 9 X 12 but compared to the little 2.5 X 3.5 sketchcards, it felt like I was painting on the great wall of China. I love sketch cards, but when I do TOO many of them I start feeling like I'm drawing in a little tiny room. Working bigger lets my limbs and joints move around more which makes it more relaxing and fun for me.

Let me know what you think of this EXPERIMENT.

I'm gonna start doing a lot more!

Randy