Skull Girl

I had quite the obsession for a few months of an idea of a woman in a lovely dress with an animal skull sort of serving as a mask.  It took me a while to realize it, but I think the idea came from the ballroom scene from the movie Labyrinth.  It's my favorite movie and I've seen it way too many times, so I can see why this idea was so firmly lodged in my subconscious.

This one took so much reference photo research, I kind of don't want to talk about it.  There are also several photo-shopped versions of other women and other skulls that just weren't quite right.  Ultimately I settled on this combination because it presented the least amount of problems where lighting was concerned.  Ideally, I'd just like to have a collection of animal skulls and take these kinds of reference pictures myself, but I don't hunt, nor do I have the kind of money to just buy animal skulls online whenever I want.

This image isn't ideal because I was imagining a more feminine dress and just more of the woman shown, but I'm a bit of a slave to my reference photos and don't like to invent anything if I can help it.  I wanted the colors to give a cold, austere kind of mood, which I think it mostly does, but it is rather monochromatic.  The paper I used was a higher grade, but it still couldn't take quite the beating I'm used to doling out on cold press, so the background's a little streaky.  Ultimately I do like this painting if I just appreciate it for what it is, rather than comparing it to what I had originally intended.  It seems like my resources end up making a lot of my creative decisions.

Skull!

So I'm kind of in love with skulls and I just really wanted to paint a  no-frills human skull.  I took another swing at being more loose with watercolor and putting wet into wet over masking fluid with the background.  Then after removing the masking fluid, I painted in the actual skull in my normal, anal-retentive way.  This was again using my crappy paper, so after putting so much paint in the background, I actually couldn't remove my masking fluid, so I had to use a wet paint brush to dilute the layers of paint over the masking fluid and sop them up with paper towel.  Not a huge to-do, but still annoying.  This is the last piece I did with my crappy paper, so in case anyone thinks paper quality doesn't matter, take it from me: INVEST IN GOOD PAPER.

So again, not totally successful.  My wet into wet got so saturated that it's kinda hard to tell it IS wet into wet.  And the skull, while not exactly mono-chromatic, still feels local color-esque and not all that dynamic.  It's not a bad skull anatomically, though, and overall the piece is kinda neat looking.

Watercolor on cold press.

Beauty is Pain

I had this idea a few years ago for a school assignment.  I was trying to think of a theme for a series of paintings and I was looking at old make-up and clothing ads.  I wanted to re-create the ads with more sinister elements as a commentary on using fur and animal testing for beauty products.  I ended up not doing the series, but this particular idea stuck in my head, and I decided to paint it in the spring of '12.

I put the original ad underneath as a way to compare and contrast.  The idea for the bladed glove came from Paul Outerbridge's Woman with Claws, which I saw years and years ago.  I remember the website I saw it on referred to the gloves as old meat-packing gloves, but while doing research for this painting, I couldn't find any other references to these gloves as meat-packing gloves, so who knows.

I'm mostly happy with this painting.  The colors aren't quite right, and I had a hard time making the blood convincing, but I'm happy with how close it resembles the original ad.  The paper I was using for this painting wasn't exactly ideal, so there was a bit of puddling and that was a bit frustrating.  I also wish I had done the lips more like how they appear in the ad.  I honestly don't remember why I painted them differently.

Watercolor on cold press.

Heights

Another Illustration Friday prompt.  This one took me over two weeks to complete and it's only half of what I was aiming for.  Granted, I did lose quite a few days on the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend, but I still think I was unreasonably slow on this.  I'm still learning a lot about the software, so I guess that's understandable.  It's still frustrating, though.

This piece took a few days just to come up with an idea I liked, and it only came about after talking over the ideas with a friend and then having my eyes randomly land on my shoes sitting on the floor.  I wanted a solution to the idea of heights without going for something terribly obvious, and really high high-heeled shoes seemed like a fun way to address the idea.  I also got to look up lots of shoe porn for reference photos.  The shoes I did settle on weren't quite high enough for my tastes, so I added a few inches.  I originally intended to have a pair of shoes, but the second shoe had such odd reflections of color and was so fuzzy, I just scrapped it out of frustration.  I should've spent longer on the skin, but I was eager to be done with this project and the skin was the last step, so there you go.  I also had  no idea what to do with the background, but that's par for the course.

I did learn a lot, though.  After trying to erase around the shoe and make a perfect shoe shape, I found that using the paths tool was really what I needed, since it could give me perfect lines and curves, which is really necessary for something man-made like a high-heel shoe.  I also used the paths tool on the leg, but I don't think it was quite as necessary.  Maybe it saved me some time, I don't know.  I also learned that a gaussian blur can really come in handy (i.e. the heel of the shoe).  And I finally figured out that changing your brush is a good thing.  For the longest time I've been frustrated by using the brush on anything lower than 100% opacity, because you'd get this annoying layering effect if you went over something after lifting up your brush.        So I finally experimented with the fuzzy-edged brush and found the solution to this stupid, stupid problem.  I still wanted a hard edge for the highlights on the upper part of the shoe, so I had to use the hard-edged brush and do every layer perfectly in one stroke.  I'm not sure what the solution for that is, or how to even ask the question to find out the answer.  All I can think of is using white on different levels of opacity, coloring them over the base color, saving that image as it's own file, and then pulling colors from that new image and coloring with them at 100% opacity (which is what I did with my last piece).  That seems like an overly complicated and unnecessary process, so I can only assume I'm just really stupid when it comes to digital painting.  But I already knew that.  HA!

Digital painting.

Puzzled

I've decided to start doing work based on the prompts on Illustration Friday.  I'm not actually submitting this piece, but just using the prompts as an exercise.

My first ideas were about playing with the idea of puzzles, and then specifically crossword puzzles, but I ultimately couldn't really think of an interesting image.  Then I decided I wanted to do something more about a really quizzical expression on someone's face.  Then I thought of a sort of quirked-eyebrow, beard stroking sort of image and I really liked it.  I like beard stroking in general.

I changed the eye direction from what was in the reference photo to be more thoughtful and added the hand.  I'm not sure if the hand reads is if it is really stroking the beard, or sort of floating in front of it.  The irises are also a bit too big, I think.  I think the face reads as puzzled, but not that puzzled, which I would've preferred.  This isn't the first piece I've done digitally, but it's the first I think is good enough to be put on here, so hopefully I'm getting better at it.

Digital Painting.

Bird Skull

This is the first piece of art I made since graduating from art school last May and was completed March 7th. I wanted to start with something fairly easy and I also wanted to use a technique my friend had told me about. The technique is to make an image using shadow blocking, except you're blocking in the highlighted part. Then you cover that highlighted area with masking fluid and then do wet into wet over the whole thing. I was a little miffed with myself for not having thought of this on my own since I use masking fluid a lot and I love shadow blocking. I chose a bird skull as my image since I've always liked bird skulls. I think they're really pretty for some reason.

The drawing was by far the hardest part since the reference picture I was using didn't have very dramatic lighting. There was a lot of squinting and erasing going on. The wet into wet isn't the greatest since I'm so rusty and the paper I was using wasn't as high quality as I usually use. If I were to try it again, I'd put the masking fluid on thicker and give myself a bigger area to work with and just let the paint pool and splatter where it wants to instead of cropping in so tight with painters tape.

Watercolor on cold press.

Anatomy Triptych

So there was Aokigahara, and then there was a piece that turned out so bad it will never see the light of internet, and then there was my triptych. All of these pieces attempted to marry forms occurring in nature and human anatomy.

My triptych started with the idea that lightning was a very organic form and resembled similar forms I had already worked with, like blood vessels and tree limbs. I'd been wanting to work with bronchial tubes in some way for a while and I came up with the idea of replacing the bronchial network inside some one with lightning. After that I decided I wanted to make a triptych of the same image with different natural forms inside the lungs. I'd also been wanting to use mushroom gills and decided that that would be part of the triptych. Coming up with the third was a struggle and had originally been something else entirely. I thought that the bronchial tubes resembled coral and settled on that.

The color choices came from the subject matter of the natural forms. I imagined the lightning on a deep blue sky and blue became the palette for the first. Then I chose a brownish/green for the mushrooms since I thought it felt earthy and also kind of rotten at the same time. The coral I wanted to use the actual color coral, but wound up with more of a pinky/dusty rose.

I'm pretty happy with this piece. The coral lungs ended up looking just like what the bronchial system looks like anyway, except pink and speckled, so that ended up not being different enough. I also wish the color was more orangey/brown and less pink. I also wish I had a better title. When I originally thought of the lightning as bronchial tubes, I came up with the title "Rapidly Expanding" to refer to the way lightning makes air rapidly expand, and to the idea of lungs expanding with air. That title only referred to the first and therefore couldn't fit for the piece as a whole, so I decided on something bland.

Watercolor on cold press.