New Year

Woops, I haven't posted in a while. Happy New Year and all that jazz... Anyway to get back into the flow I'm posting a painting that's nearing completion:

I started at the end of last year, then came the holidays and the Christmas period which naturally meant it was put on the back burner. But it's nearly finished. It still needs some touch up work, some flowers don't look like flowers and the table is a little flat, otherwise it's pretty much done.

I have another canvas which is begging to be painted on... I just need to decide what I'm going to put on it. I wanted to do something graffiti-based, but it's not easy to emulate the style with paintbrushes. I could use spray paint but I decided that I'm not going to splash out extra on a bunch of cans when I have a ton of oils and acrylics, plus my can control isn't that good. Ahh, decisions.

I'm thinking about changing this blog's colour scheme. Dark greys and blacks are easy on the eyes and blue is one of my favourite colours, but it's not exactly a "happy" overall look.

I also plan to post more sketches and other ideas, rather than just posting final pieces. I need to get back into a sketching/doodling frame of mind, regardless of how crappy I think they'll turn out. If the Mayans and other wacky prophets are correct this will be my last year to ever post here, so I might as well take advantage of the time we have left :P


Roll on, 2012.

Good hair day

I know I'm not good at portraits. I also know that I'm not too good with oil paints. So why I combined the two, I don't know.

I used painting knives instead of paintbrushes because I wanted to experiment with creating texture this time around. I spent a lot time on her hair, where all the texture was. I started to paint her face and upper body with a knife as well but it wasn't translating well. By the time I decided to use paintbrushes, the paint already began to solidify and so the textures have stuck. I'm not too fussed, we'll call it 'character'. Anyway, I'm not going to pretend that this was going to turn out like a portrait from an Old Master. It was just me moving a load of thick paint on the paper.

Bumpy...

Illustration Friday: swell

 Water, water, everywhere:

 (oil paint, A3-ish)

I thought I'd break out the oil paints and try to paint water. This photo came out a little bit too bright though. The paint was still wet when I snapped it (I stopped painting about 10 minutes ago) and the wet paint reflected some light in a few odd places. I still need to fix some parts, like the background water and especially the breaking wave which, for some strange reason keeps coming out square every time I paint it, but I thought I might as well post now. After all there are only a couple more days until this week's topic is done.

I'm also determined to actually finish this rather than call it a WIP and then forget about it like I did with my first few oil paint attempts. Hooray for me.


(Only after I chose my "water water" intro line did I decide to look it up and find out that it is actually a line from a poem called "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I didn't even know the poem existed until now. Hmm, you really do learn something new every day. Thanks for that, Google.)

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Update, 17th August:
Photos don't seem to do the painting justice. Either the colours are wrong, light is reflecting off it and creating different effects, or there isn't enough light (damn you, English summers!) My first photo (up there) included a few details that aren't actually in the painting but enhanced the image somewhat. So I painted in some of those artifacts and, thanks to a great tip in the comments section I repainted the breaking wave to look less square. I changed the background water as it was too busy and repetitive and the shade of blue right in the distance seemed artificial. This is how my painting looks a day later. I retouched it slightly in Photoshop to get the colour levels as close as I could to the original painting.

It's getting there.
I plan to repaint the sky next. The blue doesn't feel right.

Another WIP

Yet another WIP. Good grief, this painting seems to be taking forever to finish:

I didn't want to post this until it was done, but right now I've lost the enthusiasm to continue and finish it. I stopped painting this about a month ago and there's still a lot of stuff that needs to be done to it, most notably "make it look less crap". So, I'm hoping that by posting it here and seeing it on my blog as an unfinished mess that it'll encourage me to pick up a brush and finally finish it off :)

Looks like rain again WIP

Last night I overcame my artist's block :O
and I began painting :O :O
With oil paint :O :O :O

(oil paint on paper, A3, WIP)

This was inspired after I saw a mushroom cloud. Not in real life, otherwise I'd be dead and typing this out would be really difficult. No, I was just link bouncing on the net and saw a picture of one. And as I like juxtaposing different things together, I introduced a lady with an umbrella. I like the calm and the chaos being played out here.

I'm only 2 days deep into this piece so it's not finished, but I had to post it even if nobody sees it because I'm quite happy with how it's turning out. I still feel like taking it down in tone a little. Make it darker, a little more sinister. Oil paints take longer to dry fully, way longer than I'm normally used to with acrylic, but what is nice is that it was still wet and workable after leaving it for 8 hours while I went to sleep. Blending it is fun too, I like being able to blend the paint when it's already applied. What's doing my head in at the moment is cleaning the paint brushes and then wiping them down so they don't thin out the paint I've already applied. If only I could just run it under the tap like a water based paint. Oh, I also can't just rush through it like I normally do with acrylic. My palette looks pretty though. Messy as hell, but pretty :)

I am painting this on paper. I know, I have a canvas just itching to be blessed but I really didn't want to mess it up with something that is essentially just an experiment with a completely alien medium. Let me get a few more of these done before I commit.

Today is the hottest day so far in London. BBC news said max temps will hit 31°C. Looks like rain again...