I wanted to show you how we created with Johanna Capelle the Leafy Bushes Cutout pack I propose on my store, by painting first the shapes with black Indian ink.

We choose to use the traditional medium to keep the “happy accident” it provoques. It’s so interesting and rich to play with these incidents ! The traditional brushes and the liquid matter provide a big variety of trails and stains. 

For these different pieces of bushy shrubs, more or less dense bushes, thickets and plants with large sheets, we first studied natural fields. We took photos to capture the plant essence we were interested in, their shapes, colors, organisations.

Back home, Johanna synthesizes and gives shape to our observation painting the silhouettes with ink. We direct special attention to the natural shape language to create expressive figures. Then we scan in 600ppp to obtain very high resolution files to be digitally processed. 

Here is an extract from the painted sheets. You can see some shapes used in the Leafy Bushes Cutout pack and also other silhouettes we will propose in a futur Pixelref pack ! 

The next step after painting and scanning is the digital painting process on photoshop to give the volumes and colors of the bushes, but I think it will be interesting to do another blog post to show you that ! But here is the result of the digital painting of the volumes and colors of the bushes made by Johanna Capelle . You can find all details, full content and an example of illustration made with the Leafy Bushes Cutout pack on my store! 

I wanted to show you how we created with Johanna Capelle the Grunge Wall Textures pack I propose on my store. 

Johanna and I, we work together on Pixelref, an online art resource we created for royalty-free traditional and digital paintings assets, textures and brushes, reference photos and masked images. 

To create this texture pack we took inspiration from the Ghibli style of painting in order to get the poetic and vibrating aspect that we find in the japanese animation background. 

The paintings are done using Nicker Poster Colour paints. It’s the kind of paint used by Ghibli's artists like Kazuo Oga or in other famous animation studios like Deho Gallery. Poster Color are a highly pigmented paint that requires few material to work. 

For the anecdote, Nicker is the first producer of Poster Color, from 1950 in Japan. The little company started to grow in 1963 when Osamu Tezuka's production turned to her paintings to create the animation of Astro the Little Robot.Tezuka wanted a very specific black for Astro and Nicker managed to formulate it. After that they continued to provide him specific colors and progressively Poster Color paints had been used in all the japanese animation studios. 

So to create the wall textures Johanna starts with the general color nuances. 

After this first step she does the fake roughness with diluted paint. As it's a reversible paint, it’s easy to remodel the volumes she wants. 

To finish she uses the paint without dilution to emphasize the lights and shadows. 

It's a subtle work of trompe l'oeil and stylisation to create the good balance between cartoon and realistic shape language. 

The textures we propose had been painted on a 32cm X 24cm pieces of paper, then scan in 600ppp to obtain a very high resolution files perfect to be integrated in any digital composition and give an interesting traditional touch! 

If you are interested to know how I use this textures to created artworks, you can read my previous blog article : How to give volumes and Ghibli style textures to your architectural artworks

And to see the content of the pack, you can go on my Artstation store.

Have a good day ! 

Samples of life drawing session on Procreate. Around 30 sec, 1, 2, 5 and 10 minutes per pose.