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.

Aokigahara

This piece is from the spring of '10 and was my first attempt at total creative control. I don't do well without an assignment. If I'm given parameters, I can flourish within them, but when I have no limits, I'm just completely overwhelmed by possibility and nothing's ever good enough.

Over winter break I did research in order to have some idea of what I wanted to do for the class, and I read about a forest in Japan called Aokigahara, which is apparently the 2nd most popular place to commit suicide in the world, after the Golden Gate Bridge. There's even numerous signs in the forest urging people to reconsider and seek counseling, etc. This forest reminded me of the forest of suicides in The Divine Comedy, which led me to woodcuts depicting the forest of suicides. I basically just fell in love with the idea of depicting the human form as trees. Unfortunately this is pretty well-worn territory and usually executed in the same way (person standing vertically, arms raised and becoming branches). So then it was a matter of seeing people in sad, twisted trees and not having them up and down with arms raised, blah blah blah. This then led to hours upon hours of searching for good photo references and lots of frustrated sketching. Then the sketches look better than what ends up painted, cause I kill my work just a little bit when I paint it. I even did a color study that was really close to what I wanted, but then I basically disregarded it when I went to paint. So yeah, color's bad and forms aren't as good as they were intended to be. It's far from perfect, but it's at least getting closer to what's inside my twisted little heart of hearts.

Watercolor on cold press.

Life Drawing

This is from Spring of '10. I took three semesters of Life Drawing, and this is my favorite piece. My professor liked to recycle old drawings left behind by painting over them with acrylic. He usually didn't do anything fancy, just black or sanguine paint. I think this one had been prepared by a previous student. The funny thing is that this drawing only took me 20 to 30 minutes. It was one of those rare times when your brain shuts off and everything flows out organically. I also really like how rough it is: you can see the under drawing in vine charcoal and then just a suggestion of form in white conte. The composition isn't totally stagnant as it usually is in my life drawings. It's very hard for me to let things just be rough and open and show some amount of expression in the mark making, and that's why this piece is a rarity and one I love looking at.

Vine charcoal, conte, and acrylic on cold press.

Pattern

This was a pattern assignment for painting class from fall of '10. I'm not really a pattern person, so this was actually a struggle until I stopped trying to make a pattern and just find a pattern that was already there and that I liked just fine. This is an extreme close up of frost on a windshield. This is another watercolor on canvas fiasco, but it was my first and I used less Gesso, so the paint actually soaked in somewhat.

Watercolor on canvas.