Questions for painting

My last painting showed me just how much I’ve been ignoring the planning stage before painting. I’m not saying the painting was bad, just very much outside of the direction I wanted to go in style…it felt like it belonged to the 90s, too saturated and detailed for my tastes.

I spent a while looking at the artists I love, considering the things that annoy me when painting and the things I enjoy, and looking at my own art to see what I was happy with in the past.

May I present to you my new checklist of things to take into account with each painting. Obviously this is tailored towards me, and my own goals, but the idea might be useful to other artists as well.

With some work I’ll hopefully be happier with my paintings. Expect some playing around with style in the future.

 

Blodeuwedd Finished

The finished painting of Blodeuwedd. To be honest I'm not quite sure what I think of this one.

On the technical side yeh I'm mostly happy with her, one of her arms is a bit funny but other than that technically I did well enough. Her face is looking good and the whole leaf/ hair printing random-ness in the background turned out really well, I'm really happy with how it merges with the white of the background. It's a useful technique and I'll definitely use it again.

Year's Dawn Idea and Sketches

I found the inspiration for this one really hard. I nearly always just have an idea pop into my head, refine it a bit and then paint it. I spend a lot of time thinking about the composition and the colours but not actually the concept, just going with what ever thing of interest shows up.

It's been a long long time since I've drawn without an idea before hand.

For this one I knew I wanted to do something winter themed without it being too Christmas-y and with out it being too heavy in the Pagan symbolism either. Something that could act as a Christmas/Yule/Solstice card without only being limited to 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: