This week’s folklore thursday features a bonus strip. And the reason is, well, we’re working on an advanced list of folklore topics for twitter, and they changed one without us knowing.
Being pros (which is what it says in most of my bios, so it must be true) we decided to do another (this is particular ironic given this weeks was the first I’d done well in advance) so John emailed – said he had something interesting about bees and a lion and I started thinking about what to do.
I knew it’d be a single image, I figured I’d sketch a pencil drawing of a lion lying there would do. (one of my favourite jokes Man walks into a bar with a giraffe. Man and giraffe get drunk. Man walks out, giraffe falls down drunk on ground. Barman shouts “Oi! You gonna leave that lyin’ there?” Man “that’s not a lion, that’s a giraffe”.)
Anyway, John tweets:
“Out of the eater came something to eat, and out of the strong came something sweet.” Sampson’s riddle refers to the lion which the hero killed bare handed. Bees are said to have spawned from its dead flesh. Making their home, and their honey, within the corpse. #FolkloreThursday
And I think “cor, Sampson!*” (Later, after doing a lot of work, I find out it’s “Samson” – you live and learn)
So now I wanted to do a big pic of Samson walking away from the Lion. But it felt too empty – and I thought, well if I ink it simple enough it’ll be quick – and could be nice to colour as a two colour animated thing. But then the background would need to be painterly.
So I googled up some images of Prince of Egypt, nabbed one to use for some colour inspiration (and er… colour picking). Coloured Samson and the lion as flat (I actually flatted them to fully colour them, but given I had a nice red/yellow background I wanted a blue foreground for the figures
I colourised the lineart in clip studio by setting the lineart alpha lock to ON, and then changing the layer from b&w to colour. Then I can draw over the black lineart with anycolour, and that’s how I did the orange colour holds below…
And then scumbled up a background using the various tools in clip studio, shunting colours around trying to make it work (and then, finally using the watercolour brush to add a red wash over the background, and and orange circular gradient to do a sun behind Samson.
Total time? Between 2-3 hours. Not bad. And I’m fairly happy with it. Not everything needs to be complicated.
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