The comedy-themed project streak continues unabated this week as Michelle and I each take a turn at rendering the classic Scooby-Doo villain, Ghost Clown. And everyone knows there’s nothing funnier than a clown who could swallow you whole.
The clown first appeared in episode 10 of the first season, Bedlam In The Bigtop. I’m guessing the original clown design was done by Iwao Takamodo, since he handled most of the designs for those early Scooby-Doo episode. His design was tight and perfect for the show, and looked like this:
I love that clown. But I wanted to try to make him a little scarier. So, after a few sketches, I landed on a slug-like monster with two-rows of razor sharp teeth. I lightboxed my digital sketch, and inked it with Microns, Tombow Brush Pens, and some brushed inks.
The wash I use is just water and Dr.Ph Martin’s Black Star ink. I keep a few pre-mixed jars of it so I don’t have to work out the ink-to-water proportions every time I sit down to do a wash. Once all of that ink is dry — all of it waterproof — I put down some nice, bright, circus colors that echo the original Scooby-Doo design.
And in addition to my version of the clown, this week Michelle plays another round of Ink It or Stink It where she tries to ink one of my drawings for a panel of judges. I sketched out the original Takamodo design for her to try her hand at, and members of our Patreon voted whether the final outcome was an “ink” or a “stink.”
If you want to see the process video, and hear us talk about Bedlam In the Bigtop, the video link is below.
This week’s project is a series of dioramas based on the annual Halloween misadventures of everyone’s favorite round-headed kid, Charlie Brown.
Every year, Chuck’s costume earns him nothing but rocks in his candy bag. We sculpted him and his bag of rocks in two separate pieces because we wanted to try to make a mold of this little guy and cast him in resin (and it’d be a lot easier to make the molds if he were separated from his bag). We also experimented for the first time with a pressure pot.
Since our first set of castings without the pressure pot were a little bubbly, we decided to head out to the hardware store and pick up the pressure pot. Working with the pressure pot was a learning experience, but we were happy with the results.
Downside, there was a lot more flash to be sanded or filed off, but that’s a fairly simple process. Upside? As far as bubbles go, we didn’t have any issues. The surface of this ghost (aside from the flash) was silky smooth.
After we pulled the little ghost from the mold, we had to wash off the mold release and sand off any little imperfections. Then it was time to prime and paint him, and assemble the parts.
We made three separate castings, so we had some options when it came to putting the figure on a base. The original plan was to have him walking down the sidewalk the way you see him in the opening of the animated special.
The first two castings were done without a pressure pot, so there’s a difference in the way the surface of the figure looks (image above). But since he’s wearing an old sheet with holes cut into it, we thought the unwanted texture might not be too distracting.
But by the time we pulled the third image from the mold, after pressure casting, his surface was A lot smoother. If you want to see us put this all together, you can watch the video below.
Maybe haunted isn’t the right word. More like it’s crawling with monsters. And it’s not just one friend, it’s a few. And it’s all my fault. Because this year, Michelle and I decided to draw and ink a bunch of Universal Monsters and send them to some of our friends and Patreon supporters as Halloween cards.
Sending and receiving Halloween cards is a tradition that seemed a lot more prevalent when I was a kid. Hardly any of my friends do it anymore. But it’s something I always enjoyed, and something I’m not willing to let slip so easily into the past.
And while picking a few cards up in the drug store to mail out is perfectly fine, whenever I can squeeze in the time to make the cards by hand, it’s always a lot more fun. So I grabbed some watercolor paper, inks, brushes, and pens and got to work.
We even figured out a way to make them a little more than just hand-done illustrations (although, that would’ve been fine). We crafted a delivery system that made the drawings more like actual cards, and even supplied a little mystery by way of a window cutout that obscures parts of the illustration until you open the card.
If you want to see all the monsters we sent out to terrorize our friends this Halloween, you can watch the process video below:
Hey! During October, a lot of artsy-types do a daily challenge: ink something every day, draw something every day, and they match it to a particular theme. I’ve done it before and I’m doing it again. This year, we’re calling it Muppetober!
For every day in October, I’ll be inking a Muppet. There’s a lot to choose from, so I’m just picking some of my favorites. But I’m not inking too heavily or elaborately, because it’s more than just inking, I’m also going to try to add some watercolor on top.
Will I be able to pull it off? I don’t know. We’re 13 days in and…yeah, it’s a struggle. And it’s not necessarily the drawing and inking. That’s goes down pretty smoothly. The watercolors, they’re a bit more involved. But the real pressure? The real time suck? Michelle and I are recording my process for all of these, editing and uploading a short to YouTube every single day.
All of this is going on, of course, while we’re juggling some other projects and commissions. But we’re letting you know about this in case you need some Muppets in your life every day. Even for just one precious minute.
During our month-long summer break, Michelle and I hit a few different art stores in a quest to find some new, decent brushes for inking and watercolor. I decided to try Princeton Velvetouch brushes, and I thought we’d test them out inking and coloring some scary Spider-Man villains.
The Green Goblin was inked entirely with a number one round. Even the smallest detail lines where I’d normally use a fine liner, I inked with that brush.
I liked the way this brush handled. It has a great point, and the bristles held plenty of ink for me to draw long, variable-width lines without going back to the ink jar too often.
The inks went down smooth and dark on this hot press watercolor paper. And after getting used to the feel of the brush with the Goblin, inking the Lizard was a breeze. However, we wanted to color these villains. But unlike our reptile friend above, hot press paper does not have a lot of tooth. And we knew that watercolor was not going to lay down as nicely on a paper with so little tooth.
There’s a bit of a trick to it, but if you’re careful, you can get decent results with watercolor even on the hot press paper. I imagine the colors would look even nicer on cold press, but then I’d have to sacrifice that smooth surface I love so much for inking.
And I wasn’t the only one trying to get watercolors to work on hot press. Michelle, once again, took the Ink It or Stink It challenge with a Spider-Ham I sketched for her. However, there was a new twist: Sure, she doesn’t ink and yet is forced to ink during this game. But to balance that out, she has also never worked with watercolors. So I threw my palette in front of her and had her color the image she inked. Did she get an Ink or a Stink from the judges? Did I enjoy the Princeton brushes enough to start using them on a regular basis? Am I way off base with my choices for scariest Spidey-villains? You can find the answer to these questions (and a whole lot of art tips) in the video below.
I recently received a book filled with Mary Blair’s concept art for Disney and spent an hour flipping through all the amazing illustrations. It was a crash course in how to effectively use color and composition to tell a story.
The image above is from her concept artwork for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, a classic Disney feature and an annual watch around here near Halloween.
The book is filled with images like this, and, since Blair worked mostly in gouache and watercolor to create these images, it inspired me to try gouache for the first time. There’s a bit of a learning curve since this medium sits somewhere between acrylics and watercolors…and I consider myself a novice at both.
But, since experimenting is what we do around here, I pressed on. I started with a basic gradient blend, something Blair relied on heavily in her concept art. And while you can use gouache much like watercolor — diluting it and layering translucent washes — I tried to use it the way Mary Blair did in her illustrations: just enough water to create a loose but creamy texture that glides over the paper and remains satisfyingly opaque.
I ended up doing four separate paintings. Practice makes progress. Because Blair and her work for Disney was my inspiration, I stuck mostly to Disney ghosts. Doing a couple from the Haunted Mansion, and even my own take on the Headless Horseman.
For my first attempt with gouache, I was pretty happy with my results. But a lot of that was due to the gouache and how, even when the paint dried to a dead flat finish, the colors stayed vibrant and alive. I can’t wait to try it again and see what else I come up with.
The Haunted Mansion movie opens this weekend, so I may get out of the heat and into an air conditioned recliner to see if inspiration strikes again. And if you’d like to see my first-time gouache experiment, there’s a link to this week’s video below.
This is the latest post for the members of the Long Lost Friend Studio Patreon, but gathering the photos and talking about what we’ve done in just the last three months was so much fun, I figured I’d share it here too. If you like the projects you see here, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and consider becoming a member of our Patreon.
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“Looks like a cold, cold winter. Plenty of ice and snow. But, we’ll keep the work-lights in the studio aglow.”
Now that I’m done mangling the lyrics to a Bing Crosby classic, Michelle and I will be taking a short break from YouTube videos for the next couple months. We’ve been posting to YouTube for a couple years now and it seems like, starting near Thanksgiving, folks are just too busy with the holidays to tune in. But don’t worry, loyal patrons. It’s not like we ever actually take a break from making and crafting and learning. So we’ll still do our best to keep posting updates and videos for our Patreon members.
In the meantime, take a look at all the fun stuff we made in just the few months since our last break. And this first photo is just the sculpting!
What a giant pile of fun stuff we worked on! We’re hoping you had as much fun watching those projects come together as we had making them. And maybe, like us, you learned a little along the way. Since September, this is some of the stuff Long Lost Friend Studio accomplished:
Needle Felting and Foam Carving Michelle showed us how to breathe new life into an old design for her owl feltie, and dropped some great needle-felting tips while she was at it. And I took the opportunity to learn how to carve foam with hot-wire tools so I could sculpt that rock base the owl sits on. Teamwork.
Foam Clay Mask-Making I worked with two new types of sculpting materials for the first time. I used foam clay (Foam-Mo and Model Magic) to sculpt three creepy masks. Weird and spongy, but lightweight and perfect for the job.
Mixed-Media Scooby Doo Diorama And I tried Apoxie Sculpt to build that Captain Cutler diorama. It air-dries in two hours, so plan ahead or you’re stuck with a lump of junk as hard as a rock. Other parts of this diorama were made with CosClay, XPS foam, and wood. I enjoyed working with Foam-Mo and Apoxie Sculpt. They have their advantages and drawbacks, but I still think basic polymer clay (like Sculpey) is my favorite. We’ll be doing some sculpts with that in the new year.
2-D Illustrations I continued working on my inking and watercolor skills. I’m happy with my progress and look forward to experimenting more with these mediums.
Fall Diorama Of course, Michelle and I used all of our burgeoning sculpting and diorama-building skills to put this fall diorama together. There were a few exciting firsts with this project — Pumpkinhead is my first art doll, those crows were the first figures I sculpted with foam clay, and those leafy vines were a successful experiment crafted with EVA foam.
Along with all of that, we’re proud to have also done ten Patreon-exclusive blog posts and eight Patreon-exclusive videos in that timespan. And that was our ‘fall season’ in a nutshell. September through November. Looking back over these photos, it seems like a lot of stuff to learn and make and do in just three months, but I can’t remember a minute of it when we weren’t having fun. Hope you did too. And if we inspired you to try some new things yourself, that makes it even better! Now it’s back into the studio to figure out more stuff and create some exclusive Patreon content. We both thank you very much for your continued support and enthusiasm. -v
Last time Michelle (Run Red Run) and I encountered this classic Scooby Doo villain, we experimented with neon markers and captured him on paper.
But the ghost returned! And this time we experimented with Apoxie Sculpt Modelling Compound, sculpted an entire Rocky Point Beach diorama out of foam, Cosclay, and Apoxie Sculpt, and captured him in three ghoulish dimensions! Zoinks, right?
Apoxie Sculpt is a modelling compound where you mix parts A and B, and then have about 2 to 3 hours before the stuff hardens like a rock. It was a little dicey working on something like this with a time limit. But, by the same token, it was really nice to make it whatever size I wanted, not having to worry if it’d fit in my oven. I think Captain Cutler turned out pretty good for a first-time experiment with this modelling compound. You can follow our process in the video below. -v
If you’ve been following our videos on YouTube, you know we’ve been low-key obsessed with this Pumpkinhead Scarecrow project as it grew from a watercolor exercise, to sculpting an art doll and some crows, and finally to this full-blown 3D diorama build.
If you haven’t followed along, I’ve posted the whole series of 4 videos down below. This was some of the most fun we’ve had in the studio since The Witchening diorama build last year. I hope you enjoy this new series as much as we did. -v
Halloween is less than two weeks away! A few weeks ago, I showed you how I sculpted a Witch Mask using Crayola Model Magic Foam Clay.
This week, I followed that up by sculpting a creepy Ventriloquist’s Dummy Mask with Foam-Mo Foam Clay.
These are mostly intended for decorative use (there’s a lot of dicey chemicals that go into the sealants) but of course I’ll put one on if it means having some spooky fun on Halloween night.
Did Foam-Mo perform as well as Model Magic? Is a creepy dummy as terrifying as a scary witch? Watch the video to find out. -v
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