Life Drawing & Photos

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post and I have a lot of art to share but I can't share any of it yet! Blarg! Everything I've created this week, with the exception of the life drawing, is for a Secret Solstice swap on an art trading site I belong to. I've made a few arty pieces and lots of ATCs but they're all being sent off to new homes as a surprise and I think some of the recipients might be blog readers. Can't spoil things.


I did the life drawing at right this afternoon. We had a long pose today and it was nice to take some time and work on shading and highlights instead of rushing to get something down before the next pose.


I was away last weekend, in NYC and NJ to visit family and I headed out to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Beautiful! I got to see one of my favourite paintings, Madame X, by John Singer Sargent. It's incredibly beautiful up close. He's such a masterful painter. I saw so many paintings my head was spinning by the time we left. Here are a couple of photos.

I also had the opportunity to see Bouguereau's Nymphs and Satyr painting up close. Quite a few years back I made a master study of the painting which took me many long hours so it was wonderful to see it in real life (it's huge!).

Ice Cream Lickers

Happy Friday!

Here are a couple of ice cream licker ATCs for the Art-A-Thon that's happening over at illustratedATCs.com this weekend. These are watercolor and ink. I think the guy in the red shirt has encountered sour lime ice cream judging by his expression or maybe this is about 1 second pre-brain freeze. We've all been there.

A while ago, I did some lighting and action pose paint sketches and they were such great exercises. I thought I'd bring back the idea as a practice exercise a couple of times a week for an hour or so. I didn't spend long of these ones above, probably about 20 minutes each or so though probably longer on the dancing duo. And by the way, I did do a movie still! But it's really ugly. I'll leave it hidden.

I had made a few coloring books a while ago but I've now made PDF versions for my Etsy store. I printed a few off and was coloring them to get a few Etsy photos and it was a lot of fun. Coloring is probably the best part of the artwork for me. It seems like it can be more work to get the sketch done and looking the way you want it, then the lineart is just sort of boring but coloring, it's easy! All of the hardwork is done and you can just fill in areas between the lines. Here are a couple of the images from my Day of the Dead book and The Ladies (adult colouring).

Speed painting Iron Man

Back in the summer, I was going to paint a whole bunch of movie stills with different lighting and action poses as art practice. You know those "I'm going to totally practice my art" speeches we all give to ourselves monthly? Well, I got as far as Iron Man (definitely not finished) and some other movie with a female lead (I can't even remember) and then promptly got too busy or too distracted by shiny new paint to do any others. I still have my directory of movie stills and I am determined use them for painting practice until I've gone through all of them. Maybe I should make it a PPF thing to do one per week. Maybe this goal will stick. I know this looks like another "I'm going to totally practice my art" speeches but pretend you didn't notice that.




I'm not sure what the girls on the left are for yet. I thought I might do a whimsical stylized set of painted cartoony girls as ACEOs. Hope to have a few done for next week's PPF!

Have a good weekend :)