Butterflies on Honeycomb

 Turns out butterflies will steal from honeycomb if it's left out. It was almost completely Red Admiral and Peacock butterflies, with the occasional Comma butterfly.

 

 

....Can you tell I can't figure out how to get Blogger's photos to behave? 

Bee and dragonfly mugs

 

I made these for my mum's birthday in spring. The blank mugs were from a children's mug painting kit (the type of ones with terrible paints.) I used Pebeo's Cerne Relief Outliners for the linework and then once that dried I used a mix of Pebeo's Moon, Prisme and Vitrail....paints? to colour. I have no idea what the correct name for these ceramic paints is.

The only real difficulty was only being able to paint a thin strip at a time without it running around the mug. And hiding the smell the paints make so my mum wouldn't know what I was doing.

I have more blank mugs somewhere, might do more abstract ones.

 

Aureate WIP & Finished work

So this one was fun. I also went about it completely different to how I usually do. As a starting point I wanted to do something somewhat inspired by Klimt, I just wanted gold and jewel colours, I didn't even have a pose at first; which I almost always normally start with.

So I had a look at the sort of patterns Klimt used (a lot of triangles and rectangles) and hunted for a pose that looked a bit Art Nouveau. I ended up using Divine Sword by Liancary-art. Didn't even really mean for her to have wings...just sort of happened when I wanted to break up the space behind her a bit. 

It was so different for me to have what patterns I wanted to use as a starting point instead of the actual character. In a way I feel the character is the weakest point, she's really not that different from the original stock photo. I just made her slightly more warrior like, I wanted her to feel like a warrior queen who wouldn't normally be dressed up like this, giving her a dragon tooth crown helped add to this a bit (somewhat inspired by the jagged crown? from Skyrim.)

A small mistake I made right at the start was forgetting the stock photo had the sword sheathed, therefor the sword blade was actually smaller than it looked....ended up with a blade way to wide for its grip. I did manage to fix/hide this a bit later though.

Fixing damaged/roughened watercolour paper

 

I've damaged my paintings so many times by leaving tape or masking fluid on for too long, so I hunted for ages to find something to help fix/hide it.

...And then on one random forum some random guy just said I take the back of a dessert spoon to it. 

And it works, it doesn't fix everything but it does hide a lot of the more mild damage...it's so simple.

So I did some tests, rubbing Sellotape onto the paper then ripping it off and taking a blade edge along the top for some extra roughness. 

 

From left to right:

1. Just the damaged paper, for reference. 

2. Just rubbing it with a spoon, works but becomes slightly shiny and is easy to roughen again if you touch it too much.

3. Wiping water on with a brush, helps ever so slightly.

4. Water sprayed on, doesn't do quite as much as the brush. 

5. Water sprayed on and then rubbed with the back of a spoon, this works rather well but not as good as:

6. Water rubbed into the paper a bit with a brush and then the back of a dessert spoon. It did smudge the graphite of my writing a bit but on clear paper you'd be fine. Not sure how this would work with paper that already has watercolour on it. It also does still roughen up slightly if it's handled too much so you may need to fix it up again at the end of your painting.

 

Now the bottom strip was testing with some Pound-land PVA glue, not something I'd use on an actual painting at all. Research your glues. It also wouldn't take anymore paint on top later, there is a watercolour medium out there that lets you use watercolour on top of anything; I imagine that would work well. You just need something ever so slightly sticky to dry on it. 

And the glue worked really well, I did three different thicknesses mixed in with the water and you really just need the bare minimum to stop the paper roughening up again when rubbed. 

But yeh, don't use cheap PVA glue on real paintings, get something that might not change colour or crack with time.

Sanctuary of Lost Shells (finished) & Covid-19 lockdown

So, I've finally finished my Hollowknight inspired painting...and I'm really happy with it. 

I'm aware that a lot of what I love about it isn't so much my own ideas: the colour scheme and the bug shell based windows. But I'm also really happy with the overall layout, the Art Nouveau border and very much the way she interacts and stands in front of that border. 

I'm mostly likely going to just keep this one for myself, though my mum has a lot of my paintings (birthday presents over the years) I myself don't really. 

I also never really managed to fix the damage to the white space around the painting from the masking fluid, it ended up with a lot of white gouache trying to cover it up which doesn't look great...I could maybe hide it with mounting board.