Rowan Fairy (Finished)

So, for this one I just wanted to paint rowan leaves really, though you can’t see them here yet. I decided to do the sketch without them, just because the sketch was small and things would have gotten confusing with a pile of leaves dumped on top of her.

So in that aspect it worked, however she doesn’t quite feel like she’s interacting with the leaves, hiding behind them when I carefully placed the leaves not to cover the interesting bits of her. Maybe I should have moved those interesting details around so I could fit more leaves over her.

Rather happy with her expression, you can find the reference for it here: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/closeup-portrait-curious-young-girl-looking-200661203

Posy WIP & finished art

I'm rather happy with this one... She's nothing like my original idea, but she's came out rather sweet and extremely colourful for me. I actually had quite a fight between my scanner and Photoshop to show off how vibrant she is without it looking over saturated.

Blodeuwedd WIP

Blodeuwedd was actually a strange painting for me, both in art style and in how I worked on it. I'll mostly near complete one area before moving onto another. For Blodeuwedd I slowly built up multiple areas at once.

There's some good in doing it like this: Firstly it means one area can dry whilst I work on another, useful for such a large painting. I get an idea of how the overall colour scheme sits quicker and can adjust things in the early stages. Also I am less likely to overwork areas that don't need it.

However.....having your entire painting spending most of the time looking bad can be pretty disheartening. I was already pushing how interested I was in painting her due to doing so many tests for her before hand, adding in the extra time of waiting for her to look good didn't help.

I think in the end I'd probably be best of mixing the two methods, get the important bits like the face near complete and then I can start working on multiple areas at once.

Also working on multiple areas means it's harder to talk about my progress with each picture, you'll probably not notice the slight colour shifts things go through and it's really not worth mentioning on it's own.

Masking out the embroidery on her dress. For the bottom of it I used purple lake, shadow and payne's grey, with a lot of granulation fluid. Her original dress design was very princess-y and I wanted to stain it up a bit.

At this point her skin looks really weird, very much a case of it needing context to sit well though I do tone down the colour later. I think it'll take a while for me to decide if I want to do my painting's skin first because it's important and easy to mess up a face or closer to the end so I can compare it to it's surroundings. Hair first then skin?

Micron coloured pen reveiw and girl with candle WIP

 

So pretty recently I decided to buy some coloured Pigma Micron pens, I was inspired by the way Danica Sills' uses them for her linework. (example video here.)

I do like having linework. It lets me have a clear guide line for where things go as I'm painting, pencil can get too easily lost under the paint and then I make a lot of mistakes once that happens, mostly in the proportion of facial features. And especially with watercolour it can feel a bit hard to understand the end result without some line art in there somewhere, landscapes are fine but people can end up looking a bit hazy.

A lot of the time though it's just too extreme a contrast to the colours it's bordering if that makes sense. For example if I was to draw blue water with black line art then it makes it more solid than I'd want it to be, it's even worse for really pale things...drawing the sun, a nearly white thing, should probably not have such a solid black outline. 

Unfortunately I only bought the 8 colour pack, and one of them's black. So other than the red their all pretty dark colours...still doesn't help greatly with drawing pale things.

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.