Storlee is a young contemporary artist from Michigan USA. Her award winning paintings have been exhibited widely throughout the country, and are in private collections throughout the world. working mainly in oils, Storlee works in layers from dark to light and uses short textural marks to complete the details of her Ika work. She uses a bright high contrast colour palette with lots of tints [pastels]
Good surface preparation means your work will last a long time and will be easier to work on.
prepare your surface by glueing down a layer of newspaper [to represent how we use Ika as Kai... what do fish n chips come wraped in?!]
cover this with a layer of gesso*, allowing areas of the newsprint to show through . You can do a colour wash over the top of this if you want to or leave it white
*Gesso IS NOT white paint. it is basically a chalk and glue mix which provides a good surface for you to work on and seals the surface so that paint does not soak in to it.
Use a variety of paint applications to show texture and colour blends
Transfer the outlines and details of your ika to your background using carbon paper. Don't go too crazy with the details as you will paint over them! mark out the key transitions between body parts, colours, and textures of parts. Pay attention to the eyes, fins and gills or claw/leg details.
Begin to paint in the shadow areas using a dark "cool" colour [warm red + cool blue]
Paint in the eye and eye area details
Add mid value colours [working over the shadow areas]
Add in light values in blocks of colour blends. [do not worry about texture/details like scales yet]
Begin to add your details and texture layers using short strokes for scales or drybrush/broken colour for rough textures] LOOK AT YOUR ARTIST MODEL - HOW HAVE THEY ADDED DETAILS?
Use light values to add-in highlights
This is a playlist I have created of tutorials - 25 or more! Make sure you watch full screen & click on the lines @top right to see the rest of the videos... watch as many or a few as you would like! But the more you look at, the more knowledge of styles you have to use in your work