Process stuff for my Totoro painting

by matt

Here are a couple preliminary gouache sketches I did for my piece for the Totoro Forest Project. I didn’t really need to do them, I just had my paints out and wanted to play around before starting.

Here’s the lineart – done with a G-nib pen and FW black ink. I love FW, but it often globs around and things can get messy quickly (like down there in the bottom right corner).

Then I added a couple layers of brush strokes and knocked out all of the unnecessary outlines. Here’s me playing with a bunch of colours.

In the end, I decided to keep the composition and colours very simple and uncluttered.

Also check out Clio Chang’s process sketches for her Totoro piece, Shedding.