Markers!

And a long weekend! Yay!

Also, I really need to clean off my desk. I'm sitting here with my elbows in trying not to lean on anything or bump anything over as I move about. It's been one of those weeks.
...After lunch. I'll start then.

Anyway, yesterday I woke up really early. That doesn't mean I actually got up that early, but I woke up then. And that's where the problem started. When I wake up early but don't get up, it does really funny things to me and I typically end up getting nothing done at all for the rest of the day. My surefire trick to breaking free of that funk, though, is sketching. Figure drawing is my favorite. Really fast gestures, no longer than thirty seconds, typically. On Fridays at my university there's an open draw session where they have live models come in and you can go sketch for free, but I'd already bummed around the apartment long enough to miss that (sad day) so I went to my favorite fallback, the figure and gesture drawing tool over at pixel lovely.
I spent a good long while making completely unintelligible scribbles all over my new sketchbook with my copic markers, which have hardly seen any use of late. I'd forgotten how great those things are.

Later that night, I was still kind of in the swing of things, so I decided I wanted to try my hand at something a little more finish. There's this model on deviantart, Devin Willow who does modeling and photography, and is just always inspiring to me, so I pulled up one of her latest portraits and did my best with it...

Not a terribly good likeness, but not a very bad drawing...

And there's my day. :)

I never knew I was doing it wrong...

...but THIS, my friends, is french toast.

And so I stand forever corrected. My life has been forever changed.

This is stuffed french toast, the stove-top version. It's all crispy and wonderful on the outside, and all full of warm, sweet and tangy gooey amazing ... stuff on the inside.

French toast has probably the least precise recipe of anything I've ever encountered, so I apologize to all of you out there who just cannot function without a recipe... Also, my husband (Yes, my husband, I got married over the holidays. I was going to make a special post about that, and it's still on the way. I'd been waiting on the photo CD back so I could actually get some pretty pictures up here ;) made this for me, so I didn't really catch anything more than what went into it, not how much. 

Good luck to you (it's worth it!)

Take nice, thick slices of french bread, and cut a pocket into them. Don't cut all the way through, but cut deep and wide enough you can kind of fold them open a bit. Also, don't worry about scooping a pocket into them or anything, the bread should be soft and you'll be able to smoosh the fillings in well enough :)

We filled them with previously frozen berries and a mixture we made of softened cream cheese, maple syrup and brown sugar. Heavenly.

The dipping stuff for the french toast was pretty classic, eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and lots of vanilla (that was my contribution... I always get a little carried away)

So, you stuff the bread with as much of the cream cheese mixture and berries as you can (and it will be oozing out all over the place, that's how you know you've done it right apparently. And once I tasted it I couldn't find room to argue), dip both sides in the egg mixture (don't concern yourself too much with the sides, that'll leave room for it to toast a bit and then soak up syrup later), and toss it in a hot buttered pan and brown it on both sides.

Top it off with more berries and sweetened cream cheese and some maple syrup as desired and fall into the deepest and most blissful sugar-coma you've experienced in the past two-years.

Needless to say, I was highly impressed. I think I have found myself a good man.

Hey! Another post!

So, that paper airplane painting I mentioned? Finished it! It didn't turn out too badly, either.

New year, new classes, new new new...

Could also be titled 'what I like to do when I don't want to do what I have to do', but that's a long title.

So. This upcoming week I have the first projects of the year due. In one class we are doing cover illustrations for Peter Pan. Tons of fun, really. I'm loving designing it. sketching it, doing color roughs and noodling about and composing the whole deal... It's just really intimidating to sit down and paint what I've designed XD Here's one of the face sketches for Peter, though. I think I'm getting to about the right amount of smug. Almost...

The other painting is a still life. My teacher in that class gave us a list of requirements involving a paper airplane made of college-ruled blue-lined paper, and said go. The exercise is supposed to help us get familiar with acrylic paints, which I've not really used before, unless you count using the really crappy stuff in high school a few times. Which was fun, but it's been a really long time, and I honestly hadn't the foggiest idea what I was doing back then. Anyway, I got my list of requirements, and sat down at home, made my paper airplane, started setting up my still life... and proceeded to throw the plane against the wall for five minutes. My teacher laughed when he saw my photo reference and said go for it.

So, here I am, down to crunch time on both of these, getting a little overwhelmed and more than a little scared of this new paint, and so what do I do to relieve the tension?

Tadaaaaa~
I figure I might as well do something that is not for a grade as my first foray into the new medium instead of risking my life, livelihood and reputation before the class on the first thing. Also... come on. The bowler hat is going to be so much more fun to paint than all those stripes.
Seriously.


Also, later, I have a huge explanation with many pretty photos as to where I've been for over a month. It was good. I promise. ;) Some of you kind of already know, but I have pictures of New York and me in a pretty dress and all and I want to show off. So there.

Quickly update- My behatted lizard has a background ;)

Oops, could have sworn I'd taken a shot with just the flat color step... oh well. See what I'm doing with my day off? NOT HOMEWORK! Yay!

Aaaand... done! He's such a posh professor type looking sort of skeleton raptor thing. :)

There'll be a better scan up eventually. Better scan is up! I'm thinking I might enter this one into a local art show, though. I'd been planning something else, but this turned out so nicely and in theme... should i put him up for sale?

The Christmas ornaments are out!

Yay! It's the holidays! As an exercise in class today we drew Christmas ornaments. I really need to do more of this. It was a ton of fun :)

On a mildly related side note, I had kind of a cool thought yesterday, and a mid-holidays personal resolution.
It is so cool (and sadly under-noticed) that in America our 'holiday season' kicks off with none other than Thanksgiving, the holiday dedicated to gathering together those nearest and dearest to you and counting your blessings. What a way to start out the best part of the year, really.
I've resolved to do my best to let this influence every bit of my holiday season.

Cool little moment. Maybe its a little silly, but it was a bit of a perspective change.

Anyway, hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving, and that your Christmas preparations go well and any traveling you do goes safely and if anything goes wrong it's the sort that gives you good stories to tell at the other end ;)

Landscape, continued...

So, after I had the composition and my basic color scheme figured out, it was time to get over my qualms and start the piece. I should have taken more in progress shots, so you all could see how ugly an oil painting starts out, but I was actually focused, and didn't think of it. Oops.

Initially I had this piece planned for a larger canvas that was about the proportion of those initial sketches, but because of time constraints I had to do some quick problem solving and figure out how to make it work on a smaller canvas.

I've done a piece before with this really lovely vignette effect that I thought might look really nice if I got the right level of detail into the interior of the painting, and frame the image, leading the eye in deeper to the image. I think in the end it actually worked, and my teacher seemed to get it. He actually gave me a couple of suggestions to make it a little more successful that I'm going to try once the paint sets a bit more.

Anyway, with all that prep the painting actually went really smoothly, especially for anything oil paint related and me... up till this point. And then something about the composition just really started bothering me.

At this point I remembered a post I'd read by Justin Gerard about something Rembrandt reportedly did- whenever he got stuck on a painting, instead of pushing through and, like I always do, risking ruining the whole thing, he would do small studies of the painting to figure out the problems. Gerard picked up the idea... but digitally. So, I decided to give it a try.

It actually helped a ton!

Many hours later and a little more back and forth and I'm actually really happy with where it's heading... and i've hit that point where the fear sets in. You know you're close, and you have that last set of details you want to add, and you know they're absolutely crucial to the painting.

You also know that at this point you have every potential to absolutely destroy everything you've done so far.

So, I took one last photo, and went back to my trusty Paint Tool SAI and started messing about again. It really saved my tail. It doesn't seem like much, but this was the first substantial composition change I'd made to the painting since I'd come up with it in the first place. It is much better for it, really, but there's really no way it would have happened without the digital 'inter-medium'...

And after another few hours of touch-ups and fiddling, here's my final piece. :)

I am rather pleased with the end result. There are certainly things that need to be fixed, but on the whole I think I'm finally getting the hang of oils :D

Landscape in Progress

Finally, some original art! Yay! (that I'm not afraid or ashamed to show! Yay!)

To get things rolling again around here, I'm going to start out with a couple posts on the progress of this oil paint landscape. First stage- reference. Color, composition, material, whatever you are referencing, find it. It's always best to get your own shots, so you'll be certain to get just what you need, but in a pinch the internet sometimes has something close. I can say I definitely didn't take that lovely foggy shot, but it ended up helping me a ton in my color roughs.

 

      

Also, on-site studies, even better than any photograph ever. I'm terrible at them, but they still help a ton.

Next stage, composition sketches. I struggle with color a lot, so I keep them in greyscale and leave the color out of the mix entirely. Also, I'm really coming to love doing almost all of my fiddly composition work digitally. It seems to save a lot of headaching.

These are a few of the best that I thought up. I still struggle with this a bit. I used to do this part all in my head, which is problematic in a lot of ways. It's like doing math in your head. Yeah, you might do it alright most of the time, but then sometimes you're wrong, or you miss something, and you won't know where or when it was because you never wrote it down. So, I'm trying to train myself out of a very bad habit and actually draw out my thought process. My art really is improving as I do so.

Next comes the color studies. This is my favorite digital trick in the pre-painting stage.

See? So simple! You just take your favorite composition and go over and over and over again with all your different color potentials. Which is the same thing as you'd be doing by hand, except in this case you don't have to worry about the composition constantly accidentally changing on you, too. Fewer happy accidents, but far fewer frustrations as well. 

Aaaand I think that's it for tonight. Next post I'll get into the actual painting :) I'll have to see the finished thing in the light of day, but I think I actually like this one.