The Dog Project

I have a plan.

please visit my new dog project by clicking here.

Girl dancing

This was mostly some more experimenting with lights. I have had the idea to paint something like this in my head for several days now, but I thought it deserved more than my watercoloring skills. So for that reason, I used the tablet :)

(I know it seems like I use the tablet a lot, but I get the best results with it.)

I'm still really looking forward to using oils, though. I'm determined that tablet and oil are fairly similar, but I don't really know for sure. It seems like they would be.

I also took many screen shots to show it as a WIP so people can understand how these things come about. This is done with a few different colors, the smudge and blur tools, and the burn and dodge tools. Most of it is taken step by step after every different thing I did, though I didn't bother to show the creation of the background, mainly because I was just making lines and colors to fill blank space.

My only complaint is that I didn't really get the expression I wanted out of her... but she doesn't look bad, regardless. Also (not that it matters), she's sort of slow dancing and waving her arm back and forth hula style. NOT fast crazy dancing or anything. She was supposed to look peaceful, which is why the expression was important!

click to see it as a WIP

(it is originally a larger image, but everywhere resizes if it's too big... I am currently searching for someplace to host the original size.)

Something is off with that raised arm and the missing shoulder... but it's done, I'm not going to mess with it!!!

Tree House

Tonight I wanted to experiment, so I did this painting of a tree house. I wanted to try using only a few colors, also wanted to try alcohol splatters on it (I hear it makes the paint go away - didn't have a lot of luck with that), also wanted to try a cartoonish, dreamier style. And one more also, I did a lot of wet on wet, which I normally don't do.

I like the concept of this painting, but not sure it came out how I wanted it to. I didn't sketch it out ahead of time, I just let it go - and I feel that the tree house is what suffered for it. I really like the ground - I used leftover coffee instead of water for painting it. I wish I would have used regular water for the sky, though - it looks dirty now, and it didn't turn out as I wanted it to... (I was hoping the alcohol could look like stars, but it didn't).

Oh well, it is what it is :) I learned what coffee painting is and isn't good for, at least.

regular watercolors

After staring at it and hating it, though, I decided to see what would happen if I played with it in Photoshop like I've done with my landscape paintings. I really wanted to add stars and fix the crazy coloring (which I never intended to be so bright).

watercolor with tablet

So now I have two different versions of this, and I'm not overly happy with either of them!

Portrait (some guy)

I've said before that since this blog is new and I missed a lot of art challenges on different blogs, I wanted to try to go back and redo them, even though I can't submit them. This one is for the Different Strokes from Different Folks year end challenge. Obviously, I don't have anyone to swap portraits with at this point, so I just chose a headshot of somebody in a music video I was watching on Youtube. I could have done myself, but I know there's a self portrait challenge also that I'll get to eventually.

I chose this image specifically because it has abnormal coloring and lighting effects.

I did it all on the tablet. Its fast and mess free, and a breeze to correct errors. I haven't used oils yet, but I like to think this is similar to them as far as how you blend colors and shadows. Anyway, I don't think anybody that's been doing these challenges have submitted anything done on a tablet, and I don't know if people even realize what these things can do. The only real downside is that you have nothing tangible... except a print.

Hmm... my art looks so much more confident in this medium compared to in others. But I'm going to try oil painting soon, so that's exciting.

Detail || Reference

Shading

Wanted to try some simple line shading. I'm afraid I don't have the patience to do it really well, so my lines are more like quick scribbles! But I did get some sloppy cross hatching in.

(By the way, I drew this on a Wacom tablet, which is why some lines are so thick and some aren't, and why you can't see eraser marks everywhere, ha!)