Snow Runner

Yup, it's me. Did this for my running blog.

Check my stride, height and expression. Obviously, I mean business.

Happy New Year!!

No Crying He Makes

A Mary and Jesus portrait for Christmas.

Babies are hard to draw. If you get them wrong they look like fat pigs. This isn't perfect, but it was a good exercise.

Sylvan Bath

Many, many hours on photoshop. Far from satisfied with this (as ever?) but moving on to other things now...

I had to save this on a much smaller scale in order to post this here. The quality of this image kind of stinks, but you get the idea. I just tried to zoom in on it and it's possible to see it better. I will post a new image when I'm not so tired.  Particularly proud of the hands - I generally do good hands, but lately they've kind of been substandard. These are better, though.

Subject: from one of my books again (same as previous posts.) Emma, the main character of this particular book somewhere in the forest. Nevermind the lack of shoes or provisions. They are probably there in the bushes somewhere. (I didn't want to draw them....)

Trivia: this image was originally conceived in reverse.

Merry Christmas!

Olivia and Gregory

This one took longer than the others. There are some things, as always, that I'm not totally happy with, but after spending this long on it, I'm fairly satisfied. I learned a lot doing this picture, and am excited to move onto other, perhaps even more complicated projects.

The figures are characters from one of my books, yet again. The fellow on the right turns out to be the sallow-faced guy from the previous post after his wife (on the left) dies and he is forced to flee the country. The girl, Olivia, is one of those characters that only has to show up for a few pages, look pretty, and then languish and die in order to set off other more important events in the book.

On a more artistic note, I'm not sure I like the cherry branch hanging down or the petals floating away. Maybe I'll think about that a little bit more and then perhaps repost.

On a more critical note, I really don't like the picture of Gregory I posted last time. I particularly hate the background, which is odd because I really liked it at the time. Eh.

For Once, An Inspiration

This time I did have someone in mind when doing this painting. This is a character from a book I wrote a while ago. First of all, there are some things wrong with this that I just can't seem to fix. I'm going to have to do some learning of certain techniques before I'm satisfied with it. I'm not sure if I'll rework this or if I'll do another portrait of him later.

As for the character, I wish I'd made him a bit more stern. Sometime when I'm feeling a bit more confident I might tell you more about who he is. For now, enjoy the picture.

And a close up. Click for better.

Much better?

I feel like I'm making progress. This was fun to do...I tried to make all the bits I hate (hair, etc.) fun, and it seemed to help. I'm kind of proud of 1) freckles (as always) 2) eyes and 3) hair.

As always, compression ruins detail, so zoom in for a better experience!

Eye

Eye practice.

Christmas Girl

This took way too long for how good it looks.

And some up closers:

A Mouth

You know when you start on something that you want to turn out great, but it doesn't? At least, it doesn't as a whole? but certain parts of it work? Then you can crop the picture and pretend that you were really just going for the part to begin with.

Yep. I was just going for drawing a mouth. A disembodied mouth.

10 points to the house of your choice if you can guess the owner of said disembodied mouth.

Quick 2 hr sketch

I stole the reference photo from a friend's Facebook page so I hope she forgives me! Lots of things that could be fixed, but this was done from a very small photo reference. It's hard to blow things up like this. You end up inventing a lot.

Self Portrait from Photo: Difficulty Level 10!!

I don't know why I have such a hard time drawing/painting from photographs. Maybe it's because I start to look at every tiny little detail and get too bogged down in the miniscule. In any case, Here is some portrait work. Scarf kind of got a cop out. I'll work on textile textures someday...

And the close ups: note the freckles. (I'm kind of proud of them.)



Island Man

Color sketch.

Mommy and Me

Quick sketch.

Colored.

Mermaid

Can't decide which lighting I like best, so I'm posting both. Top would be more realistic underwater lighting, I suppose, but the bottom does better things to the colors. Compression messes up some detail, so detail shots below:

I haven't published for a bit because I'm working on a top secret project to be revealed soon!

Parisienne

Ha! Take that, extremely obvious and boring titles!

I might have refined this further, but I am sick of looking at it, so I will just post it.

I do like the colors although there are many things I would do differently if ever (perish the thought!) were to attempt it again. Still, like always, I learned something, and at this point, that's what I'm really going for, so I guess it was a success.

Girl Robot is currently on hold: too many things I want to try before coming back to her including (perhaps!) learning Illustrator!

Sad Giraffe

Sometimes a green giraffe just really wishes he were a dragon. Sometimes life isn't fair.

Also: I've officially decided that Girl Robot's head/face is definitely creepy. It will be reworked. I promise.

Girl Robot

In the tradition of my previous paintings' titles, I present: "Girl Robot."

This robot tries to be a girl. Good thing she was manufactured with pink fiber optics hair!

Look for future adventures from Girl Robot. This was a character test sketch. Stay tuned for exciting episodes from the life of a Girl Robot.

Because this was a test, don't be surprised if future versions of Girl Robot are slightly different. I might change some features. For instance, I wanted the eyes to be big so they can look big and pitiful, but judging from my 2 year old son's reaction, they are most likely actually big and scary.

I just had one of those weird moments where you look at a word too long and start thinking it's strange. Girl? Girl? Girl. GIRL. Really? GIRL. How do r and l end up together in an actual English word? Eesh. Anyway. Enjoy.

Green Eyed Face

I come up with very interesting names for my paintings. "Green Eyed Face" is one of them. Oh, well. At least it's descriptive.

This took me a couple of days to do - just another exercise. This time I was working on being better about shading and I tried out some metal (in the headband). I'm learning more the more I do. As for clothes, yeah, I'll get to that...

Here's a close up of the face.

And a closer-upper.



Old Stuff

Back from Photoshop Elements 7:

Actually am pretty proud of this apple.

Gaussian blurred the skin to death and the hair looks like plastic. Still, it was an interesting exercise. By the way, it's supposed to be Mary.

Henry B. I was investigating a technique of doing portraits by putting in highlights and shadows and then blending them out over and over. Thus the foggy look.



Portrait Work

Some portrait work. Followed an online tutorial for some help.

And then I messed around with it to get:

I know these portraits have issues (especially around the eyes, *YEESH*), but they were good learning experiences.

Header Image

I worked today to create the image in the header. It didn't turn out exactly how I envisioned it, but I did it completely from my head (except one time when I looked at the way light shines on a face from underneath) so I'm not too displeased with it. Here is the image that was used in the header:

I used Photoshop CS5 and a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet. In the squished down form it looks kind of funny...it's lost some of the detail. Try clicking images to see them larger (and better!)

Then I played around with makeuping the water figure:

Didn't like the result as much as I thought I might. Thus the non-painted face in the header.

I might work more on this later - I don't really like how the water looks (yes, it's water) and I might want to add some sort of decoration to the head like a headband or something. Stay tuned.