Doodle of the day

[spqrblues]

Today's doodle was going to be a comic in the regular lineup, but the idea was just a little bit too silly :)





This version was made with watercolours created by hand from some pigments I picked up a long while ago--all of them pigments used in ancient Roman painting: Yellow Ochres, Red Ochres, Brown Siennas, Lamp Black, Cinnabar (equivalent), and Green Earth. Which is close to the prehistoric cave-painting palette, except for the bright Cinnabar red. One thing I don't have on my palette yet is an ancient-style blue (which might be made from a pigment created by the Egyptians called Blue Frit, or made from Lapis Lazuli). It took a long time for artists to come up with a more vivid blue pigment that was stable and was not as hideously expensive as ground-up gemstones.

I don't know whether I made these watercolours well enough to last a couple of thousand years, but they do scan pretty nicely.
 

Comments

Where there are kids, there's silly

[esmerelda-ogg.livejournal.com]

I dunno - I kind of like this as a one-day interlude in the regular lineup. After all, there are a good many characters (and random nameless everyday Romans) going about their own lives while the main actors get deeper and deeper into trouble, and you show us some of them in the street scenes or long shots within the imperial palace...it makes sense (to me at least) to have occasional closeup glimpses of what the "fringe characters" are up to.

[corvideye.livejournal.com]

Nifty! Daniel Smith has an ultramarine genuine (lapis), but I haven't splurged to try it yet. This is a nice palette, though, very evocative of the time. I love the sense of continuity in those earth pigments, that humanity has used them for as long as intentional marks were made.