Last Embrace

I created this piece as an attempt to join the Month of Love creative movement.  This was supposed to be for the 2nd week’s theme, Innocent.  The idea was that the love was forever locked in an innocent embrace.  Even as the lovers fade away, they are still forever embracing.  I wanted to try a different process than I how I normally pull together an image, which is a brief sketch followed by intense detail starting at the figure and working my way out and around until the piece is done.  I want to try other artist’s process that I’ve read about or seen in their video demos.  

I started out with some small thumb nails of the idea that I had in mind.  

Then I sketch the thumb nail on larger paper with a red col-erase pencil.  

I added some darker value with brown.  

I transfer the rough sketch using my light pad and finalize the detail on good paper.  

Using a 2B pencil I then go over all the areas that I wanted shaded.  

I slowly build up the dark area with darker pencils.  

As the dark areas got darker, the details emerged, some on their own, others are planned.  This is a simple image but I hope in working this way, I can build a better composition.

Up Coming Shows

I’m so excited to be showing in Artomatic 2017, an art extravaganza in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C.  This show is free to the public and will be running for 6 weeks, from 24 March through 6 May 2017.  My artwork is hanging in Space #4403, on the 4th floor, right across the hall from the large performance room with the bar.  Come by, have a few drinks, view great art and enjoy great performances.

More event info can be found at www.artomatic.org

A Slightly Delayed New Year’s Resolution

My last post was in the middle of December last year.  I let January and February slip by and today is the first day of March.  Being an independent artist, I found, is pretty hard, but can be quite challenging and rewarding.  For a while I did not meet that challenge head on.  I was flailing, unsure of myself and how I want to pursue my art.  There was a time when I would step up to any challenge.  I have not done that in a while.  I was taking all the safe routes through life.  I want to step up to the challenge again and I hope to continue to share my experience and journey here.

Fundraiser Auction

I was accepted as one of the artists providing artwork for The Changeling Artist Collective’s Operation Gaia, a fundraiser auction for the National Audubon Society.  I was fascinated with John James Audubon when I was younger.   He was the subject of my biography in 6th grade.  I loved reading about all the birds he documented and loved his drawings.  Although the theme for this fundraiser auction is open, artists are encouraged to create work that have an emphasis on nature, fantasy and folklore.  I think I can do this.  This is the first time I feel like I’ve been accepted as part of something because of my art.  I’m very excited to start working on a piece for the fundraiser.  

Pen and Inktober

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here on my blog, not that anyone really misses me.  I’m still trying to level up my drawing and also trying to find my niche in art.  There are so many techniques I love from pencil to ink to painting.  I feel like I’m all over the place.  I see a lot of the established artists becoming very consistent in their style and technique.  I still feel like a student finding her way in the art world.

The month of October offered a great opportunity to refine a specific skill: pen and ink.  For the entire month of October, most artists participated in Inktober, where an artist creates an ink drawing once a day and posts it on a social media.  I enjoy working with ballpoint pen and have done so in the past to include sketching, doodling and creating an entire artwork in ballpoint pen.  This month I created some small drawings in ballpoint pen, micron pens and brush and ink.  I also wanted to practice using pen and ink the way comic and manga artists use them.  I’m sure this is a common art technique but it is new to me.  JetPens blog offers a lot of articles about pen and ink.

I did not create an ink drawing each day but I did enjoy creating one every 2 or 3 days, which is more than I did before.  Next year I will try to do better.  Here are my 10 Inktober creations.

Broken

“   Afloat, yet I still drowned

    Illuminated, yet I am in darkness

      I am 

      Broken

   Spoken, I cannot be heard

   Crowded, I cannot be seen

      I am

      Broken

   The wind lifted me

   The spirits carried me

   The trees heard me

   The angels guided me

       Broken

       No more    ”

I usually take a long time to develop a piece.  I made a sketch for this piece around the fall of 2014 from an image that just popped into my head.  

I drew the angel first, then came the tree and the moon some months later.  

The image was going to end up much larger than I was used to working up to at this time.  I scanned the piece and shrunk it down a bit to fit in a 12 x 16.  After transferring it to Strathmore drawing paper, I thought it was missing something.  A year later, the phantoms appeared.

This is the second piece where I didn’t worry about how the image would turn out.  I just let go and drew what I was feeling as I went along.  I had a lot of fun with drawing and developing all the details.

Painting Study

I wanted to finish writing about my painting study.  After the painting swatches, I continued by attempting to paint a print of one of my pencil artwork.  There are artists who love to draw but hate having to redraw the detailed drawing for the painting.  How they overcome this hurdle is by - painting on a scanned and printed version of their drawings.  Now I have a couple of more steps to get right before the painting begins, scanning and printing.

Recently I bought a Canon Pixma Pro 100 but unfortunately I did not read the specs carefully.  It turns out that the Pixma Pro uses dye based ink instead of pigment based ink.  I learned that the difference is the dye based ink is water soluble and is washed away with water.  The pigment based ink is not water soluble.  Thus the minute I lay down a light wash on the print, the ink is washed away, and the resulting wash is muddied from the ink.  I can spray the print with workable fixative to seal in the printed ink.  The problem with this solution is the paper is also sealed and the acrylic/ink/watercolor wash will not soak into the sealed paper as quickly as non-sealed paper.  I was able to make the painting work but I did not enjoy the process too much.

I did end up selling this picture at Otakon.  I’m excited but at the same time a bit apprehensive because it proves that art appreciators like artwork with color or paint, rather than black and white pencil art.  I still love working with pencil so I have to figure out how to make this work.