Meet the Artist
Andrew Sides
Andrew Sides earned a B.F.A. in sequential art from Savannah College of Art and Design, and continued his studies with Watts Atelier of the Arts. As an illustrator, he has worked in advertising, storyboarding, games, publishing, galleries, and apparel design.…
The Spark: What started this piece? A moment, a place, an idea.
THE GREEN started as a whisper of an idea, with me just playing around with gouache in my sketchbook more, and eventually doing a monstrous take that invited me to explore further. This initial strange, hulking mass I'd still like to revisit, but as I was noodling around further and playing with poses, the shape didn't lend itself well to much else besides standing around so modifications started getting made as I was building reference.
In the Studio: How did it come together? How long did it take, and what surprised you along the way?
This was fairly straightforward – after the initial sketchbook painting I had a plan to do this painting, but didn't get a chance to really touch it for months due to life and various other freelance jobs that kept popping up after nearly a half year drought. During that time though when I was working on other stuff I would sketch various poses and thumbnails on scrap pieces of paper and eventually I built some reference in Zbrush and Blender to get an idea of lighting and camera angle. Even though the idea for the painting started about four months ago, the actual active time for the painting was fairly short – about a week and a half with a couple hours each evening.
Materials: What is it made with, and why those choices?
The painting was executed mainly in gouache – it's quickly become my favorite painting medium because I can take it on the go and use it for final work and it's ease of picking up/putting down at a moment's notice makes it ideal for my current habits and situation. That said, there were some helpers in this: matte acrylic to spot blacks on the drawing so the drawing would have more meat to show through washes of paint, and some colored pencil was involved at the end to correct some details and add others. To seal the drawing before paint came down I ended up using several passes of Spectrafix Degas Fixative (my favorite fixative at the moment) along with a thin wash of ultra matte medium. Both of those in the right amounts seals the paper just enough that washes I put down in gouache can be lifted out using water, letting me play with the underpainting quite a bit before tightening it up.
This is also the first time I did an illustration on Rives BFK paper after talking with Brian Stelfreeze about it at a convention a couple years back. The gouache takes really well to it, and it has a fantastic surface that's not ultra smooth and not too toothy like cold press watercolor paper, which I dislike. The paper does tend to buckle like crazy when it gets saturated, but it also ends up drying flat once all the water has been evaporated out of it.
Look Closer: What should someone notice when they see it in person?
I'm always of the opinion that my scans/photographs of the work tend to always miss like 5-10% of the work, at least. I don't know if that's a failing on my part to touch it up better in photoshop or if that's just something that all artists feel, but hopefully once someone sees it in person they can appreciate all the different ways the paint layered and came together on the surface. One of my favorite things with analog paintings is to see how everything stacked on top of each other and how up these small abstract shapes can combine to form representations of actual (real or imagined) things.
Where It Lands: What does this piece mean to you now that it's finished?
I loved painting it – it was one of those where the experiments didn't go cattywampus on me and enough planning had been done that once it was time for the actual painting it came together fast. If I have one regret it's that I wish I captured the weird silhouette of the sketchbook painting, but that just means I get to have another crack at it down the line.
If you're interested in some more nuts and bolts of the process, I have been cataloging it's development further at my Patreon along with all my other illustrations.
