Muses: Erato
Size: 7x11 inches
Medium: ink on bristol board
From ancient Greek mythology, Erato was one of the nine muses. She was the muse of love, and lyric and erotic poetry.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Aerial silk dancing sketches
Sketches for another Dreamdance Oracle card. This one's called "The Precipice", with aerial silk dancing. Spent a while this morning watching videos on youtube of various performances, and doing some gesture drawings as I watched, to get the feel of it. I've actually tried doing it myself once, and I can say it's one the hardest things I've ever attempted! My whole upper body was sore and feeling like jelly for an entire two weeks. And ropeburn. Oh my, the ropeburn! Gave me new appreciation for the people who do this and make it look so serene and effortless.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
The Still and Silent Places
Size: 18x23 inches
Medium: Watercolor on illustration board
Originals, prints, and closeup views available -here-
From the sketchbook:
And some more:
Mixture of stuff in the sketchbook. It's because I had two separate painting ideas floating around in my head at the same time. For this particular piece though, the initial inspiration came about from an impromptu ink sketch I did in someone's book. This piece:
The shape of the tree in the page, and the birds crowded into the hollow of it started tugging at my brain, and so I wanted to develop that concept some more. After a couple days of sketchbook scribbling, I pulled the disparate parts together digitally to create this composite sketch:
Refined, finalized sketch that was transferred to the illustration board. It took about 7 hours to do this. The size is 18x22 inches. Changed the girl's face a bit, but aside from that, stuck pretty close to the initial sketches.
Color rough. Playing around in photoshop with possible colors for the
piece. Set the sketch on a top layer, set to Multiply. Then I paste in
some background watercolor textures from other paintings, and fiddle
with the color levels and balance to get the tones I want. This took approximately 3 hours.
Early stages:
About 7 hours into the painting process. Still building up the background tones.
After painting most of the background, I used Daniel Smith Watercolor Ground on some of the branches that had gotten too obscured with blending background colors. This is the first time I've used the watercolor ground. A blog reader recommended it to me some time back, and I bought it, but hadn't had the opportunity to try it out until this piece. Unlike other white options for watercolor (like using gesso, or whiteout, or acrylic, or my favorite gel pens), using the ground essentially gives you a white paper-like surface to paint on again. It takes the pigment as paper would (the main purpose of the ground being that you can actually use it to prepare non-paper surfaces for watercolors. Like a canvas, or glass, or wood. Something else I do want to use it for in the future!)
The palette:
Finished:
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
Where the Shadow Used to Fall
Size: 19x29 inches
Medium: Watercolors
Detail views, original painting, and prints: -here-
This was the original tree that inspired this piece. It's an Italian stone pine. You might notice that the final painting looks nothing like it.
At first I stuck pretty close to it. Had the title in mind already. And a vague concept of the piece. But it didn't quite gel. This was the initial sketchbook scribble:
I was actually all set to go with this composition. Wasn't 100% satisfied with it, but I figured I'd been noodling around with the sketches long enough; best to just try and paint and see what happened. But then Dragoncon happened and distracted me for a couple of weeks, so it got set aside. And then I got caught up working on the first few cards for the Dreamdance Oracle, and it got pushed aside some more.
A few months passed.
The permits finally came through and the tree did get chopped down. I miss it. And in the intervening weeks, I had also somehow gotten embroiled in an effort to save a huge grove of redwoods, oaks, and other trees in our local park from being cut down. "Why is everyone around us so intent on chopping down trees??" Dana sighed the other day.
One night, I was lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, and the approach I was looking for finally hit me -- to have the night sky showing through the silhouette/portal/shadowform of the tree. Hopped out from under the covers (trust me, the idea had to be good, to convince me to leave the warm sheets for the chilly air in my office) and ran to scribble the thumbnail and words down in my sketchpad.
We walked once where the shadow used to fall:
watched the eclipse
blot out the sun,
and the streaming
beams between the
pinhole gaps of
leaves became
a cascade of
glowing crescents across the ground.
Where the shadow used to fall,
the rain did not.
Dense, dry, fallen
carpet of the years
pooled at the
Giant's feet.
Blanket of
crisp leaves and needles. Sap and compost.
My shadow falls, where its shadow used to fall;
and when the sun
fades to my back,
I stand upon the
hundred rings.
I reach my fingers
up up UP to a ghost canopy.
The sunset melts
amber sap down my shoulder blades,
down my spine.
And I watch as
my shadow grows tall,
then melts
into the shadow-less evening.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Where the Shadow Used to Fall Sketch
It's to be a painting for a fallen tree.
We walked once where the shadow used to fall:
watched the eclipse
blot out the sun,
and the streaming
beams between the
pinhole gaps of
leaves became
a cascade of
glowing crescents across the ground.
Where the shadow used to fall,
the rain did not.
Dense, dry, fallen
carpet of the years
pooled at the
Giant's feet.
Blanket of
crisp leaves and needles. Sap and compost.
My shadow falls, where its shadow used to fall;
and when the sun
fades to my back,
I stand upon the
hundred rings.
I reach my fingers
up up UP to a ghost canopy.
The sunset melts
amber sap down my shoulder blades,
down my spine.
And I watch as
my shadow grows tall,
then melts
into the shadow-less evening.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Sketch
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Etsy update
Sunday, November 4, 2012
A sketch
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Dreamdance: Harmony
Size: 9x13 inches
Medium: watercolors
detail closeups and prints: -here-
Basis for this one is Chinese classical court dance. According to Satyr:
The image is drawn from the tale of the esteemed poet Shangguan Wan’er, who judged two of her fellow poets from the top of a tower in order to find the one who best captured the essence of the coming night. “No need to worry that the bright moon will fade,” said the wining poem; “the pearl of night is soon to arrive.”
Some of the initial sketches.
Couldn't decide between the two poses at first, so I tried them both out.
Settled on the left image. Refined and transferred the sketch to the illustration board.
Color rough digitally, to get some of the basic tones and a general concept for the colors of the piece.
In progress painting:
Final
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Defiance
Medium: Watercolors
Prints available: -here-
Basis for this card is krump. Started with watching lots of krump dance videos on youtube. Freeze-frame sometimes to try to capture certain poses. Did a series of quick gesture drawings to get the feel of the body and the movements of the dance.
The other aspect of this piece was the lion that would be on top of the wall. Again, a few quick sketches. Also some thumbnails for the composition.
Got the idea to have dancing shadows along the wall.Tried a few of those. Another version with the main figure just walking, along and the only the shadows dancing. Not active enough for Defiance though.
All the pieces came together. I scanned all the sketches, then played around with the position of everything in photoshop. Enlarged some pieces, shrunk others, moved the shadows around on the wall.
Finalized sketch on the board.
Did a rough color thumbnail, as I described in my previous post about Joy. Bright sky blue door to really pop out from all the other colors.
In progress painting shot. Worked from the background to the foreground. Started with the lion, because that was the easiest part of this piece for me. The grungy darkness comes hard for me!
Final painting.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Joy - In progress sketches
Medium: Watercolors
Size: 9x12 inches
Prints available: -here-
Each of the cards for the Dreamdance will be based on a dance form. For this one it is a veil bellydance.
The very first sketch. I liked the flow of it, but was not initially happy with it. Funny enough, it ended up being the winner, with a few tweaks.
Tried scribbling a few random thumbnails to get some concept for a composition. Liked the figure on the lower right, so tried expanding on that one.
Attempted to see where that one would take me. I liked where it went, but it didn't fit into the framework of "Joy". Set it aside for possible future painting. But not what is needed here and now.
Went back to the first sketch. Didn't like something about the head position, so tried resketching it with a slightly different angle for the head. Ding! That was it!
Fleshed out the rest of the composition. Wanted the "veil" to be wispy clouds and wind, as she's so high up. Satyr was worried initially after seeing this sketch that it might look like smoke swirling up from fires down below. But I had colors vaguely in mind for it already and didn't think that would be a problem. Set the horizon at a wild tilt, for a less static background.
...because it would be bright green! So, I tried something a little different here than usual, technique-wise. I knew I wanted a green-ish tint to it all. But it's a delicate balance if making the whole sky greenish too, not to take on a sickly hue. I wanted some bright spots of red as well. And, personal taste, I generally try to stay away from circling the whole color wheel. As in, I like to try to stay within a 2/3rds section of the color wheel, to avoid a rainbow look. Contrasting colors also good. But if I wanted red and green, I didn't want blue. So I took the sketch into photoshop to try to see what I could do about striking that balance.
In the past, I've just scribbled in photoshop brushes to give myself a rough idea of colors. But it's hard to get a real good idea of what that looks like for watercolor, because I can't get the color shifts and irregularities. So instead of just painting directly, I took a big section of sky from one of my other paintings (I think it was Wind Machine) and pasted it into a separate "multiply" layer. Then I fiddled with the color balance of various selections on that layer, until I was satisfied with the overall color scheme.
I used that photoshopped thumbnail as a guideline for my colors as I started to paint.
Turned out, it worked fairly well in helping me press to some color subtleties and interactions I otherwise would not have done!
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