So I'm disappearing till after New Years.

First of all happy Winter Solstice, I hope you enjoy yourselves if you celebrate it and if not...I hope today's at least not too stressful. For me food and movies are in store. :)

I'm probably not going to find any time over the winter holidays to post on my blog, I'm going over to see family, so I'll see you all after new years. 

I hope you all have a merry Christmas or what ever holiday is applicable. Enjoy yourselves, good luck surviving the seasonal madness.

Page 2 of heads in different art styles

Second set of studies, these were more carefully examined and I wrote down a lot more.
I did seem to have a problem when it came to drawing faces looking forward though. I'm not sure if it's just my own lack of skill when it comes to getting the facial feature the right distance apart or if it's because I know the artists moved the features about a bit as part of stylising them and then I overdo it. Maybe I've just not drawn enough forward facing faces in a while.
I have been really enjoying doing these studies. There's no pressure behind them, just little drawings, but they're still useful as I work out my style...they do take way longer than they should though, I'd like to say that's because I'm really studying what the original artist did but for the most part I'm just slow.

Page 1 of heads in different art styles

Sorry I ended up failing to post this yesterday, just wasn't up for it at the time of night I had left to write it in.

So there's things I'd like to change about my art style a little but I'm not really sure what to do with it. I suppose I feel that a lot of my drawings come out a bit too realistic but not done well enough to be interesting in that way. At least I feel that it's living in this somewhat boring space of being pretty but not interesting and engaging enough. 

I want to add more to my paintings and drawings, just push the mood I'm going for with a painting a little bit more. So that means making the stylised whimsical ones even more so. I do want to do realistic drawings still too but I want it to be one or the other, not this in between.

For these studies so far I've only been focusing on line work, just looking at all the different ways   people draw lip and hair for example, there's so many different ways of doing hair. Something I've been meaning to learn for a long time is using different line thickness, these studies have really helped with that. 

Finished DeeCon mascot

Once I decided on the final colours and added in little details like eye colour I started working on the side view.

I originally sketched out both a side and back view but decide I wouldn't have enough time for the back view as well and that the side view showed enough of the back details that it would probably be okay.

The side view still took a while to digitally draw the line art out for but at least I'd mostly shaken off the rust from avoiding digital for so long. In comparison the colour was so much quicker for the side view since all the decisions had been made.... Though it still took till 2am to finally email them the design.

Choosing colours for mascot

I was having quite a lot of trouble deciding between the colours for this mascot, so I decided instead to focus on what arias should be the same colours. It's interesting how just switching the arias around the shoulders from being the same colour as her torso to her sleeves changes things: I can have a bolero jacket, a high-necked dress or a waistcoat like thing. 

The one on the far right is how I ended up allocating the colours, I did do some tests for her bottom half as well but forgot to take screenshots at the time and didn't want to recreate them. It was mostly just trying to get each aria to stand out and not overlap in colour with the ones next to it anyway.

Rest of my cards on Etsy and DeeCon mascot design

So first of all I've now got the rest of my cards on Etsy: 8 different artworks and the original lino prints for Flower Elf.
You can find them all here: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/FallenFan…
I've also lowered the price from £3 to £2.50, still with free postage.

These are all the artworks I'm selling as A6 cards:
   
   
 

Spiraled hair sketch

A little sketch from a while ago. I've just got around to photographing all the sketches in my little sketchbook. Not much to say about it but I've just realised that the collar and sleeves are pretty similar to the elf mascot for Dee Con I'm currently working on...guess the idea's still not worked it's way out of me yet properly.

Sorry that this is just a copy from my deviantART, I keep falling ill and I've not managed to get on with things so I didn't want to do a long blog post.

Hopefully I should have my design for the Dee Con mascot ready for the next post.

Just a couple sketches

Just a couple little sketches, I've been ill and lost in business stuff recently.  should do a full review on the Prince's trust workshop but my brain hurts already.

Final steps for Rainbow Forest 2

So progress has been slow, I can't quite see what's wrong exactly but I've been faffing around with it a lot, circling around the problems and chipping away at them. 

I can't remember if I mentioned this when I was working on 'a light in the dark' but I found out a really useful technique for masking fluid. I used it in the above photo. First of all I stripped the paint off (at the bottom of the trees and the edges of the foreground leaves) as much as I could by scrubbing at it with a brush and water, then dabbing it off with toilet paper. Once I got as much of the paint off that way as I could I let it dry and then put masking fluid down over those arias. I don't rub the masking fluid in but I'm not being extremely careful with the masking fluid either. When I peel it off it's taken off a bit more of the paint underneath as well.... However, you have to be so so careful not to peel some of the paper off as well. If you rub the masking fluid in at all then you're going to find it really really hard.

I also started to add in some grass in the foreground, that was fun and satisfyingly easy, just had to make sure the brush strokes didn't get too thick and slowly build them up. 

Artists I like: Len-Yan

First of all: I have been able to work on my rainbow forest painting a little more but not quite enough that it's worth posting about yet. Hopefully by my next post it should be finished.

Instead I wanted to talk about the work of Len-Yan and a bit about my own style and art.