Anime Watercolor Chapter Painting for my Fantasy Book
Written by Teresita Blanco (The Artsy Sister)
This is another chapter image for my fantasy book. It is a bit of a work in process. On their own, people seem to like them a lot. I put a lot of thought into the chapter images. I first reread the chapter and the pick a scene. It is important that the chapter image intrigues people, but that it doesn’t reveal much of the plot. If you get the entire plot just from one image, people will not have the incentive to read the rest of the chapter. If they can just scroll through the book and just read the chapter images, then you might as well just make a comic. I studied a bit chapter images based on old books. When I was in Cuba, I used to have a huge library of books. I never sat down to read any of them till I was older.
Then again, I was just a little girl. We had to sell them all before I had a chance to read any of the books. One of my favorite books was Alice in Wonderland. My family had an old edition, with lots of cute pictures. I would just look through the pictures and not bother to read the book. Peter Pan and Wendy was also like that. It had pretty chapter books, but when I tried to read the tome it was super boring. It is for this reason that I am now careful with my chapter images. If they completely tell you everything, there is no incentive to actually read. On the polar opposite, I have my chibi Bible. The book is designed to be just pictures, with no writing.
All the panels and pages are self-explanatory. The book is meant for people who do not like to actually read, but want to learn an interesting story. I first came up with the idea of a comic without words, when I was at University. I was browsing through the short collection of comics. Mixed in with the modern, Japanese junk I found a strange old comic. The comic was God’s Man written by Lynd Ward. It was about a failed painter who gets a brush in exchange for making a painting for a fellow. The brush makes it so that all he paint becomes famous. While in the city, he gets super famous, but eventually all the fame makes him feel depressed and isolated. I thought it was an interesting concept, so I wanted to try it out. It was a best selling novel in the 1930s, but now nobody remembers it. I hope my own work fares a bit better, after my passing. Then again, once I am dead being famous is going to be the least of my problems.
People worry a bit too much about legacies and so forth. In the end, what doesn’t matter. Given enough time, everything and everyone will forget. All that matters is doing what you like, during your lifetime. You will always regret in your age, not doing what made you happy. Well, this brings me back to this painting of mine. I wanted a nice change of pace so I decided to make chapter images. It was a good excuse to try out watercolors. The painting itself features my protagonist talking with a girl he met in the neighborhood. The lines were down with my Prismacolor pen. The skin colors were done with my Winsor and Newton Promarkers. The rest were done with my set of US art supply watercolors. I hope you find this information useful.
