Kandy's lips (and fangs)

Kandy Fangs is a novella I’m sharing this Autumn in serialized fashion here on the blog. You may read the weekend updates by visiting Short Fiction-Kandy Fangs in the menu above. For the finished ebook, I wanted to try painting something.

I painted Kandy’s lips using Autodesk SketchBook Pro on my iPad using a Pogo Sketch stylus. I’m impressed with the application. At first I missed my paper and pencil, but after playing around with simple sketches it felt like drawing. Finding the right brushes for the job, I fell into painting by building color. Layers make some cool things possible, allow experimentation, or use a pencil-on-paper sketch as a base to paint over. Like Photoshop, layers support transparency.

Kandy's lips stage 1

I built up the image using layers: white background, a black mask, upper lip, lower lip, teeth, and the blood drip. Lips are on different layers because I wasn’t certain at first if I only wanted an upper lip. In stage 1 image we see the upper lip, black mask, and the beginning of teeth.

Wide paintbrushes create the lips. For highlights and between colors, I used a stippling pencil.

In the image below, we see the lower lip and coloring on the teeth. These aren’t my best teeth, but they fit the style of the overall image. At the end I added the blood drip building from darker to lighter reds shown in the top

Kandy's lips complete without blood

image. And yes, the blood curls around the fang like candy. I added a candy-blood stripe to the title in the same manner, but I imported the font as a bitmap.

I enjoy painting on the iPad and plan on doing more.