The Strain Vampire Acrylic Painting Work In Progress

The Strain Vampire acrylic art in progress. Painting with acrylic paint on a 50x60cm canvas from the beginning loose paint strokes to some slightly more detailed efforts later on. My hope for this painting is to actually finish it as I rarely complete a painting as I either get distracted or just lose interest in an acrylic painting.

Starting off the painting I always do a light colour glaze over the whole canvas and this was a very watered down Crimson Red and whilst it was wet I used a light brown acrylic paint to sketch with the paint brush the basic vampire in the middle and the two at either side of him. I didn't want to draw with pencil before hand as that would have been a waste of time, so instead paint sketch helps mark everything out that you want on the canvas, because you can paint over anything that becomes a mistake anyway.

The middle Vampire up close painted with a light brown acrylic paint

Painting the general shapes with brown acrylic paint helps create an under layer for more layers on top

The middle Vampire is starting to take shape slowly with the huge Vampiric tongue with blood drips

The left hand side Vampire isn't meant to look as impressive as the middle one, but I still want to add some cool detail in on it.

Only half the head is showing on this Vampire, I wanted to get a sense of them stood in a crowd and I'll probably add a few more figures in the background later on in the shadows.

Taking a step back to look at my painting I noticed that the background needs to be darker and so that's what I did next.

Here in the final photo I left it for the night. The next thing to add is more details, more colour and quite possible more glazed areas to enrich the colours more. I want the Vampires to pop off the canvas and really look like the Vampires from the horror TV Series. So, please do look for updates on this one! I hope to finish this painting and have it up for sale very soon.

The Vampires are looking more defined now that I've added a huge amount of shading, a few areas need cleaning up slightly as I've over shadowed them somewhat.

Sharpie Metallic Permanent Markers Review

I recently bought some Sharpie Metallic permanent markers in the hopes of using them at some point. Of course you can use them on white paper or usually any other surface type except porous surfaces such as concrete etc. So in this review I've decided to draw on black card and this black card has a similar texture to white cartridge paper meaning it has some tooth to draw on.

First of all if you are familiar with using Sharpie markers they are often permanent markers which are resistant to water and also fade resistant and quick drying.

Here is the 3 pack I bought for £1.99. The pack includes a Gold, A Silver and a Bronze marker and these are the three main metallic colours you can obtain.

The unopened pack of Sharpie metallic art markers

The 3 metallic sharpie art markers ready for drawing with

I like the use of these art pens, although the uses could be limited in some respects as it's not often you might need these three colour combinations, but still there will be some uses for these pens in card making and other crafts. Here though I've thought about drawing something that would have some sort of mechanical metallic sheen to contrast against the black paper.

At first I was going to use a white pencil to sketch something in, but I decided to just throw myself into it and use these markers boldly with confidence. On first use of the markers I quickly realized that the markers are not great at layering colours over each other the Silver showed through the Bronze on the Helmet illustration, the Gold however seems to cover the Silver, so some trial and error is advised in using these pens in conjunction with each other.

It is possible to create a total covering of each colour but sometimes that might mean going over the same areas twice with each pen. Again some more experimentation could be used to try and let some of the black show through from the paper. Like most permanent markers these pens stink and it is best to use these in a well ventilated room or else you may feel light headed like I am now lol!

The Silver in the final drawing left some streaks, but again if you want total coverage you will have to cover it a couple of times once the under layer has dried. Now I am wondering if you can add other inks over the top. Well you can but the ink doesn't glide very well over the surface and in some cases with the Uni-pin and the Pigma micron pens I used the ink starts to disappear slightly with a 50% reduction.

As a small test I thought about comparing the pens against using them on white paper and the results are not as effective I think, however the bronze colour shows up well, the silver is dwarfed by the white of the paper and also the Gold doesn't have the same mid tone brightness as it does on black paper. Mixed results Black paper is best.

The best thing about these art markers is that on black paper if you use the bronze as the darkest colour, then the Gold as a mid tone and finally the Silver as a highlight, then it creates a nice effect which is perfect for drawing tribal designs of any sort or highly detailed armour and weaponry and this is something to do more of in the future on this blog.

What do you think of these art markers? Let us know in the comments!