Saturday, February 25, 2012

2/25/11: Badge Experiment no. 1 // Fog Machine


Silence was brave enough to be a guinea pig for a new badge idea I had. I thought that it may be a way to have more fun with my ink and acrylic and pen stuff I've been doing lately.
Avi has mutliple ears...I like drawing characters like that a lot. I've also been way into symbols and sigils a lot lately since that's been my reading in my spare time, so...naturally my brain went, PENTAGRAM AVI :O plus the ears....positioning them was fun!

This started with purple--a small amount. Then I drew the face in with white gel pen and added all the features, the lettering, and the circle outside the figure. Then I added acrylic paint--halo blue gold, dries greenish-blue, looks gold if you tilt it. Then I added india ink, more gel pen over all the areas that got smudged from the paint, and then a different gel pen that adds gloss, over certain areas. Over all the empty areas left in the circle, I added some iridescent medium and then dusted it over the eyes. It's got a really gorgeous blue tinge that looks very nice over the purple.

It didn't take very long--a little over an hour--but I'm thinking with these there may be more of a material cost than time cost for the badge itself. Plus if I screwed up I'd have to start over since there's LITERALLY no sketch in this process. It doesn't show up at all and erasing makes the ink or whatever look funny.
All the materials I use on these come in small quantities and cost quite a bit. The ink is expensive, the iridescent medium is expensive, and the paint--at least, the metallics and other fancy paints--cost a bit too.
I run through india ink very quickly and once I start using others more frequently, I'll run through those too.
This leaves me with no idea of how to price these for a commission.

But at least now I know they WORK!  They curl a little and will need time to flatten so they laminate properly.  I didn't add a lot of paint of course...I know I can't add too much ink or else the paper buckles and gets wavy...but I don't know about a layer of acrylic. This was applied with a small brush. If I did something like this: 

I don't yet know how it would react.
I'm going to try two other badges on a different textured ACEO than what I usually do which may be more resilient for paint. I have one guinea pig/trade spot left if anyone would like it!
I want to try doing four different ones so I can try out different amounts of the medias.

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Part of a trade with an IRL friend of her character Kim, who is a horror film set designer.  :) I had a lot of fun with this...I ADORE cervines and really loved coming up with an outfit for her that would be fashionable and casual but still horror-themed.  Sweater says "VAMP."
I really like how the fog came out <3

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