Aburaya, first pass

Source media

SPIRITED AWAY by Studio Ghibli (Hayao Miyazaki) is a lovely anime film about a young girl who becomes an indentured servant of a spirit bathhouse, working there in the hopes of freeing her parents who had been captured and transformed into hogs.

The bathhouse is named “Aburaya”, in the film.

One scene in the film involves a bunch of spirit “ducklings” that are bathing together in a sudsy bath. I had been gifted several sheets of large posterboard (roughly 3’ x 4’), and wanted a scene that had many large forms and was colorful.

Projection

This was done in the end of January.

After hanging the poster board on a bookcase, I set up a small projector to cast the image onto the medium. Then I sketched out the main shapes with firm lines, and used softer lines to indicate breakpoints for hue and shade changes.

Painting, first pass

This was done on Feb 24.

The initial color pass involved using watercolors and a divided palette for mixing, and then painting the first coat of color on the whole surface. While I did have a few dozen colors of pre-mixed pigment paste, I had to do a considerable amount of color mixing to try and get it as close as possible to the source material.

I didn’t worry too much about getting the color perfect initially because I knew I’d have to come through with another coat later; I just needed it to be close enough.

I took advantage of the mixability and transparency of watercolor to push the hues of the content that was submerged in the water. The hues of the water would tint the underlying subject, both washing the saturation and also cooling it.

After the initial colors were down, I went back over the dried areas and added some deeper hues to push the contrast further. In my experience, good contrast range really helps an image come alive.

This is where it ended for that session. About 3 hours in. If I had to guess, I would say it’s about halfway done.

The next step will be to finish off the last bit of contrast pushing and then add some more fine-contrast. For that I will probably use a combination of tinted-gouache (for highlights) and oil pastels.