Whimsy!

Available now on my Storenvy site is "Blue Flowers", a watered down acrylic painting on watercolor paper.

Sorry I've been gone for a few days, but I do like to socialize in person from time to time! Wouldn't want to stagnate staying at home all the time. I had a great time with some friends playing music, singing, and drawing while our kids played together. And I've now been commissioned to do a tattoo for one of those friends after she saw all of my work so far. Ego booster!

Here's what I started drawing at said social event:

I had this song stuck in my head while drawing her:



Oh, and THIS!

I'm official! I've already taken my business cards to a couple of local locations. One of ladies at my friend's house the other day mentioned a few places that sells local art, so I'm going to check those out next. See if they'll sell my prints or just my originals. Maybe even both! So excited!

Project Inside the Pain

I'm working on another drawing.  Hoping to finish it today.

I simply cannot use the blogger app for posting on here. It is not easy at all to place or size photos on it and there's no dealing with the HTML so I can remove the right click and save image capability. It would be nice to find a good blogging app on my tablet since I've pretty much figured out how to get everything else on there that I need to post copies for sale in my store. Do you know of any good blogging apps for android?

Solace in Observation

I had a wild hair earlier and decided to rummage through my son's construction paper for a black sheet. I have a single white pastel pencil (chalk type) and I wanted to experiment with lightening instead of darkening. I drew out an outline of a face and some hair, a little bit of shoulder and the neck. Ooooh, it was fun! I think I found what type of paper I'll use for my Narcoleptic inspired drawings. Maybe something a little higher in quality. Perhaps even black matboard. I haven't finished this drawing yet, but it's close.

As you can see, I have a tendency to change things around as I work. Her eyes were terribly annoying to do. Part of my problem is that I am working at a regular old table, not anything I can tilt up to get a better view of what I'm doing. In fact, I wind up having to completely change a drawing because I will see it just fine from the angle I'm drawing in, but as soon as I stand up to stare straight down or pick it up to hold it in front of my face, I'm all streaming profanity and violently crinkled features. Just, no. One of these days I'll have a drafting table!

Overall, I'm happy with how she's turned out so far. I will definitely be exploring this way of drawing further. May just have to ask for pastels for Christmas.

I like posting these progressions of my artwork. It's crazy to see how something starts and how completely different it winds up by the finish. I like to watch others as well and because of my experiment today I searched youtube to find videos of just that. This soothed me as I watched:



It's interesting how at first, it's all just basic shapes and seemingly random lines and squiggles. I spent a lot of my time in the past focusing so much on the end result that I couldn't wrap my head around what goes into it to give it the depth I needed to produce the intended result. Nothing but frustration. Obsessing about how you think it should look can impede the whole process. Let it evolve if it wants to evolve! You'll be surprised by what you wind up with. 

The Things You Find

I got to talking with a friend today about supplies for my shop and artwork. Etsy now allows you to work with a manufacturer as long as they fall under their guidelines and after looking at what I'd have to pay for matte photo paper, packaging to protect said paper, shipping labels, and ink, I went looking around online today to compare some professional printers. So far I've focused on one. White House Custom Color. I'm going to test them out since they let you do up to 5 8x10 inch test prints at no cost and that includes examples of what they have to offer. I'm not sure I'll do it, but it doesn't hurt to see what they can do.

My Epson XP-310 Printer is pretty good though. I've printed several copies of my "Druantia" drawing to test it out and it looks like it's been drawn on, except of course for the graphite glare I see on my original. I'm troubled, though, because after six or seven 8.5x11 inch prints on photo matte paper the black ink is already starting to run out. It's ink that came with the printer so I don't know if it's just a small sample of the ink or if all of their ink is like that. I sure hope not. Here's an example:

Believe it or not, the one on the left is the original. Without the glare from the graphite and grayscaling the image before printing, this is what you get on the right. Do you think I should do grayscale or keep it RGB?

I will never sell the original drawing. One, because my old man pretty much commissioned it and loves it, two because I had to tear the page out of a sketchbook and you can tell along one side, three... it's mine. I'm not sure about this printing paper, folks. It looks fantastic but nowhere on the packaging does it say acid free, archival type paper. I will be looking for another brand of paper to go with my next ink cartridge if White House Custom Color doesn't work out.

Other things I searched for today was a set of graphite lead that a friend gave to me years ago. I've moved around a lot and some of my art boxes have been taped up for a really long time. I finally moved into a house that I intend to never move from so I thought I'd bust out every bit of my art supplies and works while my kiddo slept. I have 3 boxes (BIG boxes) downstairs and it took looking through all of them to find what I just knew I had. I did think that I lost the ProArt lead holder, though.

Turquoise Eagle Drawing Leads. I looked up this particular lead a little bit ago because I didn't know much about it when I got it. It seems to be "vintage" now. I also found some charcoal pencils I never messed with and an ebony pencil. I'm going to experiment tomorrow with all of this. Fun times! Will post pictures of whatever I do, be they epic failures or not.

By the way, with all of this drawing I've been doing lately, my kiddo seems to have taken an interest in messing with my pencils (dubbed "Mommy's special-don't-you-dare-drop-them-and-break-the-lead-or-a-terrible-and-ominous-glare-in-your-particular-direction-will-befall-you pencils"). Here's how I found him earlier, tampering with a drawing I started this afternoon. He was drawing leaves on the bottom of the paper. 

I let him get away with it just this once because he was so determined. I told him later that he needs to ask before he goes drawing on other people's artwork. He seemed to understand. I tested him to see if he remembered an hour later when I gave him his own paper and pencils. I came in beside him, picked up a colored pencil and acted like I was going to draw something on his paper. The glare I received.... Yup, he got it. Oh, and now he wants me to scan his artwork like I've been doing with mine. He wants to show off! Heh. 

Well, it's super late AGAIN! As always, thanks for stopping by.

Project Autumn

After last night's fiasco with watercolor (grumble, grumble) I resolved that I wouldn't swing the hammer down on myself too hard and instead started drawing earlier this evening on THIS!

Oh, I know. Not much there to see just yet, but there will be. There will be all sorts of autumn flowers surrounding this lady and that right there will be the major challenge. I mean, all those petals. Alas, there will be no color unless I do it digitally at a later date. Oh, but the oranges, and reds... yellows... (pout). Honestly, though, I'm too indecisive about things to physically put color to my drawings. There's a lot of erasing that goes on when I work. 

While I was looking for references for the piece I'm working on, I stumbled across this nifty website called posemaniacs.com. So many poses for people! Now I don't have to slough through google images trying to find the position I'm looking for. Sometimes I just have a hard time getting an arm or a leg to look right, you know? What I find so awesome is that not only is it a picture of the position, but you can move the image around if you don't want to have someone looking dead-on at you. Also, if you have issues eyeballing things, they have a grid option. It's all well categorized too, which drastically reduces the search.  Cool, right?

Alright, folks. So I have some questions for you. What do you like to work with? Oils, pastels, etc.?  Is there another art form you'd like to try for which you are too apprehensive to attempt? How about epic fails? Do you have a hard time throwing those away? 

That's all for today! Thanks for stopping by!