Ox Beetle Finished

That is one shiny little bug.  I got around to a second session with this painting and finished it off, adding a more saturated red to the side of the beetle, enhancing the cool reflected light on top, and adding the details, such as the hairs on its underside and the motes of light around the highlights on its exoskeleton.

This ox beetle was painted using Holbein Acryla Gouache, which is extremely enjoyable to work with.  It seems to be a good gouache for beginners (like me) because it's cheaper than other brands, handling is easy, and because it is made with a clear acryl resin rather than a cloudy acrylic emulsion, the color it is freshly applied as wet paint carries through consistently to when it dries.  Give it a whirl if you have the chance.

Apologies for the color dissonance, my camera and my scanner never completely agree on hue and value, even with Photoshop acting as mediator.

Ox Beetle WIP

Working on a painting of an ox beetle this week.  Located generally in the eastern United States, they live in pine forests, and subsist on decaying tree roots.  This particular specimen here is a male, as evinced by the horns growing off its "shoulder plate".

Ink Clouds

I love clouds as a subject for art.  They have an endless array of colors, shapes, appearances, and associations.  A sky for every landscape is how I like to think of it.  However, I haven't been so good at drawing and painting clouds; I look at a sunset or a late afternoon cloudscape, and I am simultaneously awed by it, and saddened by my inability to depict it perfectly.

It's something I am going to get past this coming year.  Starting now, with this humble little ink sketch.

Midwestern Evening

This is a watercolor from a photo I took while on the way to Mesa Verde.  I was going to do it in gouache, but the first layer turned out so well I thought "you know, let's just roll with it."  I am glad I did go with watercolor.  Gouache is easier to hide mistakes with, but watercolor really has that inner glow to it.

Snowy Owl Finished

Now that is one fluffy (and probably cozy) snowy owl.  Progress is slowly being made, I learn a little more about gouache each time I paint with it.

I started with a preliminary wash of watercolor across the paper, to set the mood and give me a background that wasn't blinding white.  (Blank white is intimidating to paint on, and makes it harder to see the real hue and value of your first layers, which makes eyeballing, er, planning your painting a little more difficult.)  I laid the very first layer of the owl in with watercolor as well, getting an idea of how I wanted to put the gouache down.  With the watercolor as my guide, I divided the base colors of the owl into zones, outlined them in my first layer of gouache (kind of like paint-by-numbers) and then filled them in with the second layer.  I laid a third brighter gouache layer over the base layer, and the fourth and fifth layers blurred together as I diffused the owl's outer feathers, adjusted the lighting, added the stripes, and covered up the remnants of the previous layers.

The GIF I created by following the extremely handy and hitherto unknown Photoshop technique demonstrated by illustrator Howard Lyon over here.  It centers your process images and makes the GIF animation a lot nicer.

Snowy Owl WIP

It looks really abstract at the moment, but by next weekend this will be a snowy owl fluffing itself out against the winter cold.

Sketches 11/16/15: Construction Workers

Trying out my new marker in my new sketchbook.  Also put the reference photos of construction workers and their equipment I have on my hard drive to use.

Smoky Sunset

If you passed through Oregon or Washington this summer, you might have seen the smoke clouds from the wildfires.  They grayed out the sky for a few days, depending on location.  Portland was fogged over for a bit; middle Oregon was too.

This is out in the middle of Oregon, in the surrounding country around the Smith Rock park.  This gouache painting is based off one of the photos I took, looking out from a hilltop across a hazy countryside, populated with skeletal trees, and with a hint of burning firewood in my nose from the constant smoke.

It was almost apocalyptic in feeling.  While I don't know if that quite made it into the painting, working with gouache is getting easier, bit by bit.

The reference photo.

Sketches 11/01/15

Colored pencil sketches of landscapes.

Sketches 10/26/15

Sorry there's not more this week.  These are studies from photos, the soldiers from WWII, the ladies from fashion photos.

Back on the Branch

Hey!  First off, I am so sorry for missing last week's post.  It was a busy weekend, things snowballed, and I fell behind.

This feller here is a white-cheeked (I think...) long-tailed bushtit.  The guinea pig of birds.  No neck, all head...or body?  Basically a golf-ball-sized puff of adorable fluff with wings.  Ink and watercolor, this went really fast, only about 2 hours from start to finish, thanks to the hair dryer for speeding up the painting process.  

A Lovely Portrait

Wait, don't run away, the goblin shark just wants to say hi!

I considered doing this shark for one of my acrylic practice paintings, and still might paint him.  There isn't a lot known about the goblin shark, and not a lot of reference pictures–at least, trustworthy pictures–either.  It's really too bad, this is a really unique creature, it deserves attention that isn't just "oh-look-another-freaky-sea-creature" hype.

Digital Orchid

It's been an interesting week.  The job has been busy, which is good, but I haven't had much time to do art, which isn't so good.  Plus the scanner died on me, I am in the process of finding a new one.  It's going to be digital for a few weeks.

Sunset Sketch

Colored pencil study from a stunning photograph of sunset-lit clouds.

Gouache Sun Hat

Done from photo reference, my first time dipping into gouache in a long, long while.  I wish I'd done this earlier, this was a lot of fun, even if it got tricky nailing down the values at the end.  (There's supposed to be differentiation between the T-shirt and the skin, for example...)

This is also my 201st post!  Yay for milestones!

Marina Watercolors

A couple quick watercolors I did on a recent trip.

Farewell, Sci-Fi Sister Ship...

It's up!  It ain't perfect, and it's only in its infancy, but my sci-fi art has moved into its own space here.  From here on out, this blog will be dedicated to my representational art (flowers, sharks, whales, sunsets, etc).  Thanks for staying on; I hope my art has and will continue to be a source of beauty and inspiration to people out there.

Sketches 8/30/15: Model Watercolors #2

Got back to life drawing after a few weeks' absence, bit more abstract this time.  Update on the blog split coming soon, within the next day or two.

Changes Coming Soon

Big changes coming up in the next few weeks for this blog!  I will be splitting it into two blogs, one for my representational art, the other for the crazy sci-fi/fantasy art.  Updates will follow later this week.

Sand Tiger Finished

After a little procrastination, I sat down again and laid the opaque layers over the translucent underpainting.  I blobbed in the background fairly abstractly, but stayed faithful to the reference photo in regards to the shark's skin.  It was a tricky color to mix, there were subtle hints of yellow and pale red towards the shark's tail.  I mixed a blob of white, a dab of blue, and tiny dabs of yellow and red to get the proper color.

I'm liking this translucent-underpainting-opaque-finish method.  It lets me see where my drawing is during the first stages of the painting, and at the same time I can figure out what colors I'll need and to build the painting up.  It takes two or three layers of watered-down acrylic before I'm ready for the opaque, but the total painting time wasn't much more than 6-7 hours for this one.

Sand Tiger WIP

Here's a work in progress of a Sand Tiger shark (or the Grey Nurse, or Ragged-Tooth shark, as it's called in other countries).  Nothing else out there has gums made of teeth like this guy.  The painting is acrylic on 110lb "canvas paper".  It's very similar in texture and weight to real canvas, slicker, suitable for acrylic or gouache.  The underpainting is watered-down and translucent, so I can see what I'm doing, and then the final layers are thick and opaque.

Wingman Death

Even if you are the capable commander of a starfighter squadron, this is one wingman you really would rather do without.

Space Amazons

The companion painting to go with the "Bold" post.  These space Amazons are the manly men pilots' counterpart, and they team up occasionally to clean out the pirates infesting the local shipping lanes. 

Sketches 7/20/2015 - Magic and Robots

No finished paintings this week, unfortunately, life has been busy.  Here's a peek at some of my characters for a story involving wizards, witches, and maybe hostile sentient robots.

Sharks in Acrylic

The fruits of my labor so far, in my efforts to re-learn acrylic.  These were done off photo reference.  At the moment I don't care about composition so much as mixing/matching colors properly, finding the shapes in the darks and lights, and feeling out how acrylic works.

I like the glazes I can get with acrylics; getting them evenly is what I have trouble with.  That, and estimating properly how much paint I'll need for any given area.  The individual brush strokes matter very much, the marks they leave are immediate and obvious, somewhat unlike watercolor (where the start and end of the stroke is obvious, but the water and pigment evens out in the middle of the stroke on its own).  It's not a bad thing that the brushstrokes show up; they can be incorporated into the painting.  I did just that with the shadow on the light belly of the great white, to emphasize its sleekness.  The great white's forehead was pretty well chewed up by other sharks, it was a mishmash of blue-gray shapes.  I mimicked that by blobbing colors of similar values on, so as to achieve the mottled effect.

Long story short, I am, in fact, enjoying this exploration into acrylics.  Stay tuned for more.

Sketches 7/5/15: Model Acrylics

Back to the life drawing studio, this time attempting to learn the ways of acrylics.  A big thank-you to Chelsea for modeling.

Gonna Do It

I'm gonna do it.  I'm gonna get back into acrylic, even though I have no idea what I'm doing, as this acrylic sketch so clearly evinces.  It's based off this photo, taken at a nearby park:

With practice, lots of practice, all the study, all the tutorials, I will one day be able to paint streams of light like that.  I'm gonna make it happen.

Sketches 6/22/15: Model Watercolors

I've started going to a local life-drawing studio on weekends, and the model this week very graciously gave me permission to post these watercolors.  While I do make some sketches for the gesture poses, doing watercolors for the longer poses is really what I enjoy.  I can capture shapes much better with a brush than a pencil.

Bold

These bold, brash, manly pilots are members of a starfighter squadron, which I hope to write a story or five about some day.  I'm planning another three paintings like this one, with other characters associated with these guys, to make it a series.

Angel in Shining Armor

Just a quick one this week, thinking about the appearance a warrior angel might take.