#aliencats

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If you've been paying attention, Sparklers, you may recognize these extra-purr-estrials from this little update I post back in April. If you've been paying extra close attention, you may also remember I mentioned this drawing is, out here in the real world, on the front side of The One For Me. 😉 For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to just call them "alien" or "space" cats even though they do have names (Sardonyx and Tourmaline). But these cuties were "born" shall we say out of just a genuine desire to make...well, just that really. Some little alien cats that could be strange colors and have three eyes. I'm not really sure where the impulse came from, but wherever it was, it emerged right around the time I'd also picked up a cheap set of acrylic paint pens made by FineLife (In March, if you can believe that!). I already had one sketch of just the pink alien cat (Sardonyx) that I'd used to develop the design, but when I realized it might translate well into the lineless style that I think suits Acrylic Paint Pens well, that's when I had the idea for almost exactly the image you see here. I busted out a thumbnail sketch at about half this size just to get the general positioning and stuff down, and then I did as I exclusively do with acrylic pens and started sketching right on the "final" paper. I've said it before and I'll definitely say it again, that is one very convenient perk of this medium. What is not a convenient perk of this medium I've also mentioned before is how acrylic pens and gouache don't mix, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. 🙃 Fortunately for me, I'm getting to a point where drawing cats is relatively easy for me, and I did mention I'd already figured out the "alien" additions I wanted to make beforehand, so sketching went fairly quickly. The thing that took the most time there was just figuring out how I wanted to handle the eyes, and as you can see I opted in the end for the "main" eyes to be closed and each cat's third eye to be open. There's not really a reason beyond I just thought it looked cuter this way and I wasn't sure how to draw the third eye closed. 🤷‍♀️ Then I could jump straight into the acrylic pens. This isn't really a review of the FineLife ones (hence the lack of anything saying such in the title) because I didn't actually end up using that many (the pink for the alien cat body, the black for their faces, and that luxurious purple for their bows--which were a last-minute addition solely so I could use that color!). But, I have to say it terms of quality they don't feel that different from the Ohuhu Paint Pens I tested a while ago. Their tips are the tiniest bit smaller and their paint/ink formula seems to be a bit different, but overall I didn't have any issues using them the same way and in combination with the Ohuhu ones. Haven't tried them on the wooden panels I've used the Ohuhus on yet, but I should get around to that eventually. 😉 Now, one thing I did struggle with was consistent color payoff, but that goes for both brands of pens and is partially up to me, too. Acrylic paint pens seem to always need a little warming up (after you shake them) to get going, and if you don't warm them up enough (or shake them enough) you'll run into consistency issues regardless. When you started layering the pens over anything that isn't pure white, you'll start to notice some are more transparent than others. So that means I ended up going over some areas on the cats multiple times. The shadows in particular--and the shadows on the green cat are no longer a color straight from a pen because of this. Because I had somewhat set colors in mind for the cats and the 52 or so acrylic paint pen colors I have feels oddly limiting at times, I had to more or less guess what was going to work. I actually started with this really dark green (in comparison to the mint, anyway) and then realized how much more dramatic the shading looked compared to the pink one, so I had to pivot. I tried layering the mint over the green, but that was way too subtle, so I circled back to this tealy-blue for a topper, and if I remember correctly I think I had to layer it twice. I also think somewhere in there I tried a hot pink for the shading on the pink cat, but obviously, I still had a negative reaction to how bold it was. Colors in mind aside, I really did want something that was overall soft in contrast to the dark (I don't think I settled on black right away but I don't remember) background I had planned. Speaking of that background...🤬 Some of you may remember when I posted The One For Me and said the following: "Let me make this loud and clear to save others some pain: Attempting to use Acrylic Paint Pens over Gouache is a Bad Idea. It does work, but it takes so long to make it work when other methods would be much faster and less painful, you're really better off trying something else. I don't know about oil-based paint pens since I have none at my disposal and thus can't test it, but I believe the problem with both acrylic pens and my beloved Gelly Roll Moonlights is the liquid/water in the ink formula. It appeared to partially reactivate the gouache, which causes it to stick to the pen tip, and then you're smearing the color into the color of the pen and just making kind of a big mess." I even mentioned this very drawing a few sentences later. Now, two my credit, I did try to do the background with the black acrylic pens first, but for reasons I can't fathom, both the FineLife and Ohuhu black pens just wouldn't work for more than a few strokes! I'm still baffled, as I've used them both a few times since then and not had that problem. And I truly wasn't doing anything different than how I otherwise use them. My movement speed was the same, I'd shaken and warmed them up beforehand...I just don't get it! 😵‍💫 But because of that and my bad streak of being too lazy to pull out my acrylic paints (I really need to get a more easy-access storage system/location for them so maybe that won't be such a problem...) I went with black gouache, apparently having forgotten how much the acrylic pens seemed to not like going over gouache when I tried it on an Artist Trading Card (and I will post another batch of those eventually, I just think it's best to stick to groups of ten and I've been stalled on 9 for a while now for the next group). Or I may have chalked it up to the pink pen I used on the ATC, and incorrectly thought maybe the white Ohuhu (or, since I had it now, the white FineLife) would miraculously work better. So there's your answer to why the stars in this don't look...great. 😅 The borders around the cats only look decent because...well, I could just go around them and leave the white of the paper. I did have to touch up a few spots, which wasn't fun, but it saved me a little bit of trouble anyway. Oh, and the border around the black blob? You can thank Photoshop for that. 😉 It was either that, or have a plain white background, and unfortunately for me, the edges of the blob weren't very clean with little I could do about it (considering how swimmingly the white touch-ups were already going 🙄) which means white digital border it was! 😃 I could have touched up the stars digitally, but I got carried away with just how many are there and at this point, I don't really feel like it would be worth it. And besides, if I do that, the stars will be super smooth while nothing else is...I may redo this piece digitally so everything is smooth (and the cats are proportionally identical) one day, but in the meantime, I think the lesson about gouache and paint pens not mixing is enough to warrant letting this version go up. So, I'll say it one more time to hopefully really hammer it home for me and all of you: Acrylic Paint Pens do NOT work well over Gouache! Still, at least this does mean I finally get to show the little cat creatures to you Sparklers. 😊 I know they're not really anything exceptional, but I like them, and hopefully you'll be seeing more of them in the future. 😁 Oh, right. Future. I was hoping to get another watercolor piece up before the end of the month and that's not ready yet...I'll go get back to work on that now! 👋😉

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Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

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