A bit of new art...

Hope everyone had a great holiday time! :)

I have absolutely tons of art to post seeing as it's been over two months since my last post. I've been very busy creating art for work and for presents but haven't posted any of it. I've also been taking a new course over at Concept Art and it's a fun one. I'm only just starting though so will have more to post on that later.

Here are some more life drawings! One of my fave things to do. These at left are from a session a couple of weeks ago, my first one in months. These are done in pen in my sketch book and it took me a few drawings to really get back into the swing of things! It's been a while.

Below are some of the value studies I've been doing for the new art course at Concept Art. Obviously mine need a bit of work but we're only supposed to take an hour on each. I need more time than that! LOL.

Final of Collab Canvas with Ayala

All done! Here is the final result of my canvas collaboration with Ayala. I'll link to her video as soon as it's available.

The WIPs are below (click for large images) so you can see how I went from Ayayla's lovely background to the fully realized Frida painting in the final.

I had a couple of reference photos I used for Frida's face and I painted directly onto the canvas with my Golden acrylic paints. I wanted to go for a colorful style so there is plenty of bright blue, pink, red and orange in her face. I thought that would match the super background.

Once Frida's face was painted, I used some pretty scrapbooking papers to cut out flower shapes for her hair. And overtop of those flowers, I just used a gel pen to draw in petals and shapes. I did the same thing directly on the canvas background - gel pens and permanent marker to create more flower definition for background decoration.



I finished off the canvas with a light spray of varnish to keep everything clean and in place. All done!

If anyone else is interested, I'm always up for another canvas board collaboration! Just get in touch with me here and let's get started :)

Here's the canvas I sent to Ayala (see previous post too) and the lovely painting of a pretty Calavera girl she sent back to me.

Canvas Collaboration with Ayala

Lucky me! I get to do a canvas collaboration with Ayala Art. She'll be posting a video (check her post here) of her process while I'll blog about my techniques.

Right now, we're just at the background stage. At right is the 8 x 10 board I made to send her. Ayala will make a nice and pretty painting on this board while I'll do the same with the background canvas she sent me. I can't wait to see the results!

Step 1 I love big and bold color so went with bright and cheerful orange and blue. I used a couple of different background papers (dictionary pages and music sheets) stuck on with a gel medium and white glue mixture. Over top, I added some pretty handmade papers as well as patterned scrapbooking paper.

Step 2 My next step was to take some Golden acrylic paints and dab on over top with a paper towel. I used a bit of Acrylic Glazing Liquid in my mix because I wanted transparency. I much prefer artist grade acrylics over the craft brands for the texture, the colors and the feel. I find craft paints too matte. I like shiny!

Last step - cutting out flower shapes from patterned paper. Again, these were stuck on with my gel medium and white glue mixture.

I can't wait to get started on painting Ayala's canvas.

Art and more art, and a few more arts

I've been busy, arting away on various projects such as Decos, postcards, ATCs and my own canvas art. Plus work. It's a lot of art making!

At left is a postcard for my friend, Ann. She's a Flannery O'Connor fan so I made her an author postcard for a trade we had on illustratedatcs.com. This one is colored pencil on a thick kraft type cardstock. I used inks over top of the pencil.

Below is a big set of Favorite Artist trading cards for a big swap on illustratedatcs.com. Everyone who participates picks a favorite artist and collects cards in the style of or a copy of a master by fellow artists on the trading site. It's one of my favorite swaps since you get to create in a very different style from your own and you get introduced to artists you might not be familiar with. I usually go for the German and Austrian expressionists and have a wonderful collection of mini Beckmann, Klimt and Shiele. Lucky me!

 

At right is a fun watercolor set of still life mini paintings for yet another swap on illustratedatcs.com. I spend a lot of time there, clearly.

Sadly, I didn't have tons of time for 29 Faces this September but I probably have drawn about 20 faces anyway, lol! I should have posted about it. Ah well. There is always February.

ATCs & Figures for August

I went to life drawing for the first time in many months yesterday and it was rough! I felt out of figure drawing practice for the first couple of poses but then I found my groove and things became more comfortable. Sort of like riding a bike I suppose.

I haven't done much art at all this week. I've been busy with work and most of my spare time has gone into playing Dragon Age Inquisition (again). I have such an addiction to games sometimes. But here are a few ATCs made recently. Beetlejuice is watercolor and ink and the Star Trek TOS cards are in marker and ink for a swap on IllustratedATCs.com.

Hope everyone has a great weekend! It's raining here but soon to clear, just in time for the weekend. Happy PPF.

Oh hey! Just saw my painting from last week up on PPF. How cool! :)

Goth Girls and a rooster, not together.

August already. How times flies! And the older you get, the faster it goes. Then again, I'm not a big fan of the heat so I don't really mind if July and August sort of flash quickly by. I'm one of those weird people who prefer cooler weather, even tons of snow (only until March though). I work in my loft though, on the third floor. Our home is air conditioned but it sure doesn't reach all the way up here. This is why I'm longing for September, when I can once again create in a room that doesn't feel like a sauna. My drawing arm sticks to the table due to sweat. It's pretty gross.

Anyway, enough heat whining. Here's a set of art cards in goth girl style. These are done in marker and ink and are for a trade on IllustratedATCs.com, my favorite trading place.

I haven't been posting a lot since I've been pretty busy this year but I have been making lots of art - some for work, some to sell and lots to trade as always. I wish I could be a better blogger but I struggle with it. Well.... mostly I struggle with time management, lol.

Here's a bit of random stuff I've done over the past couple of months: A colorful rooster acrylic painting on canvas for a rooster lover. The pretty, pink peonies are for a graphic set I sell (available on Etsy). They're drawn and colored digitally.

Oh! I made a new coloring book, this one is filled with retro style pin up girls. But they're all nudes so don't click if that sort of thing isn't your thing. :)


Happy PPF! I hope everyone is having a great summer with family and friends and making lots of great art too. :)

Madame X Revisited, Hello again!

Geez, it's been quite a while since I posted anything here. You know how it goes. Some days you have a lot to say and then months go by, time passes and whoops! No blog posts for weeks at a time. I've been busy making graphic files mostly, trying to put out new work all of the time.

Anyway, here's a painting I worked on this week. It's an 18 x 24 mixed media canvas, called Madame X Revisited. Madame X is a very famous (and incredibly beautiful) painting by John Singer Sargent and it's one of my favorites. I saw it at the Metroplitan last year and fell in love with it. I collect artist interpretations of this painting (mostly in ATC/sketch card format) and wanted to create my own version. My daughter modeled for me :)

And below are a recent set of tree ATCs for a swap. I had a lot of fun making these in a graphic style.

Art-A-Thon

I've been absent from posting again. Not because I haven't drawn or painted anything but because I am just a pretty bad blogger.

At the moment, I'm participating in a 24 hour Art-A-Thon. I had a fun party to go to tonight but I hurt my foot a few weeks ago and it's still in very bad shape so no party for me. Art is almost as fun, minus the beer. :)

At left is my Flower Girl, part of the art-a-thon prompts (this one for flowers). The next one is encaustic which I will be steering clear of since it seems messy and I don't have any crayons or wax paint to play with. :)

Below is some of my recent art not posted here yet, all ACEOs available in my Etsy store.

Ladies of the Forest

Day 30 of the 30 Day Painting Challenge and I have one more painting left to go. It's been a hard slog I think! Last night, I went back to my markers (it felt so good!) and made a set of pretty forest ladies for a trading partner who is sending me three pretty antlered ladies in return.

I painted a sitting nude for one of my challenge pieces, this one on canvas board with a book page over top. I find that gets rid of the super annoying grooves in canvas. I should just buy flat masonite or birch board from here on in. The other painting (#29!) is a watercolor of a pretty red head with flowers in her hair. These two are both in my new (well old but recently re-opened) Etsy store.

I am super thankful for the one day respite on January 31st before I start in on the 29 Faces challenge for February. Anyone else in on that one? Can't wait to start blog hopping for it!

Happy PPF!

30 Paintings....I'm fading, sort of.

Ok... I'm going to admit that I'm getting a little tired of painting. I've had to resort to ATCs to stay in the challenge. The big canvases were killing me since I have to work still and then feed my family every day. But I'm still in it! I don't even know which number I'm at now. I'll have to put the paintings all together and do a count to make sure I'm close to Day 26. But yeah, really getting tired of the paints. I would love to switch to my old standby of markers and pens. So much easier and quicker!

At right and left are two very bright and colorful ACEOs (painted!) for my Etsy store. I also included a set of Benedict Cumberbatch silly style ATCs for a swap I'm in, also painted so they count toward my total! Here are: Stimifart Humperdump, Sunniflap Crasterdash, Fundybart Penderthatch and Bennibong Tokinflash.

Goth girls and butterflies!

Here's a new painting I did this week for the 30 Day painting challenge (I'm still going!). A cute little goth girl with her pretty blue butterflies. I stuck this one in my (now open again) Etsy store. I figure I might as well try to sell a few of the paintings I've been doing for the challenge.

I have a bunch of others on the go but none dry or ready to post here yet. I think I might have to finish up the challenge with ATC paintings, lol. Working on larger sizes is really hard when you try to paint daily. There's not quite enough time to pull off a 9 x 12 or 8 x 10 on a daily basis - at least at the rate I'm working here. Maybe I'm just slow :)

Happy PPF! Happy weekend! YAY! It's my favorite time of the week.

Apples and pears!

More paintings from this weekend. The bottom ones are actually ATCs from an art-a-thon over at illustratedatcs.com but I ran out of time to make actual canvas paintings, so I'm going to include the ATCs. They're painted, so paintings!

The pretty girl at left is a mixed media with lots of stuff thrown into the mix - acrylic, pens, colored pencil, book pages, tissue paper. It's an art mash-up over a messed up canvas (a previous painting gone bad). 

More Paintings for the 30 Day Challenge

Here are the painted canvas efforts from the past week with a few more in the previous post. I think I'm actually ahead of the challenge now, by one or two paintings, Woo! It's been a good painting week. I've had fun with the acrylics so far and have been doing a lot of mixed media type of art, lots of fun and bright images too. I think next week I will turn things to the more serious side and see try my hand at still life and realism. Maybe. We'll see how it goes. I usually find that sort of thing such a drag to draw so I might only last a day. 

Happy PPF!

Mixed media rainbow ladies.... and a goth girl!

I've been carrying on with the 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge and it's been good fun so far, with lots of experimenting going on. All of these pieces are mixed media with a lot of papers and book pages pasted on the canvas, then painted over with bright colors. Then I used a glazing method for the portrait part with burnt umber underneath and glazed colors over top. I like the colors and the papers to show through the painting. It's been good practice.

Paintings 2 - 7: Still going strong!

I'm still on the 30 Paintings in 30 Days kick and am doing well so far. I even made a couple more small paintings as back-up, in case I get too busy at some point during the month (or more likely too lazy as I have a slacker's heart). This first week has been a mix of acrylic, mixed media, watercolor and digital. I've also been quite partial to studies of marble statues... and faces of course. I'm just not big on still life and animals or landscapes, try as I might. For the next 7 days, I'm trying out a few style experiments to see where they take me. I love bright colors obviously and I enjoy mixed media with lots of weird papers tossed into the canvas mix so that will be my focus for the upcoming week. And antlers. Those are always good with everything. I might toss in some cigarettes too. I gave up smoking many years ago and I now smoke vicariously through my paintings.... or just breath deeply in the smoking area outside of a pub. I've been that person.

Here's a quickie movie still from Ugly Betty. I like these for practice painting sessions.

Art Resolutions 2015

Happy new year! 

I'm starting off the new year with an art goal. I'm taking part in the 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge and I absolutely plan on finishing it this year. There. I've said it... and now I have to do it. Luckily, I owe a bunch of art cards to various art trading friends, plus a few swaps here and there and I can paint them all. I even have art card sized canvases so it's all good.  

I started off my challenge with a Basquiat style 6" x 6" piece. I have a wall downstairs and it had a small hole in the painting arrangement so this one fits in perfectly. Two birds, right?

Tomorrow I'll try a master study or maybe a portrait since those go quickest for me.

At right and left are a couple of sets of ATCs for a swap. Both are done in markers and inks. 

At right is an old cowboy based on a famous photo from Life Magazine way back when. I think it's from the 1930s though I'm not sure if that's the right decade or not. This one is done in colored pencil on a nice, beige drawing paper.

Art Resolutions 2015

• Finish 30 paintings in 30 days for January.
• Figure out how to mix oil paints properly and then use them to make realistic looking skin tones. Actually, I need to learn how to do this with acrylics too. It's a learning year, clearly.
• Find a proper direction for commercial projects.
• Finish 29 faces for the 29 Faces challenge in February.
• Fill one sketchbook from start to finish without starting 5 new ones in between. I have never done this before. I half fill all of my sketchbooks. It's ridiculous.

Happy goal filling to everyone! :)