Works in progress: snakes and stuff

I woke up one day and felt like painting a snake. Luckily this is a dream I'm quite capable of fufilling, so I jumped right into it:

This is a terrible picture full of glare (it's glarrible!), but it gives you an idea. I wanted something up close and personal, sweet colors, a snake that's fierce, beautiful, captivating.

 You can see here that the snake begins to grow up, gets more definition, less of a shadow and more of a living thing.

After coating the snake with another layer of paint, I start adding scales.

This was really quite tedious.

But really quite worth it, I think.

I got a little frustrated trying to change the eye around, messing with different colors and things, so it lost a little bit of its luster as more scales were added. I'll get back to it. The scales, now that they're all more or less in there, will now of course need to be refined. And I don't know what'll be happenning in the background. Or what color the snake's eye, or even the snake itself, will end up being.

I based the snake's look on Atheris squamigera, a bush viper.

Photo from wikipedia. More here!

I knew I wanted to paint a viper of some sort (..I just like vipers?), and a search of viper species led me to squamigera, an exceedingly beautiful and captivating snake.

Next in line:

Flamingos! This is a considerably smaller painting, and it's not nearly as far along as its snakey roommate. Right now it's really no more than a rough sketch. We'll see what happens to it in a few weeks!

Next up is a really fun project: tape art!

The assignment: recreate a classic masterpiece of art, using a myriad of decorative and practical tape. I chose to work from this piece by Joan Miró. It called to me. So lively! So weird! So much detail! And cool shapes.

You can see I chose to zoom in to the little bug fellow. At first I was a little baffled by how on earth to work in tape, and thought, "goodness gracious, this is going to be tedious and insane." And yeah, it is kinda tedious (and maybe kinda insane), but as I got used to it, it became really fun, and really satisfying, too. Multiple rolls of tape, cutting, cutting, and more cutting, sticking and resticking, hands full of tape and scissors and multiple funky little pieces. There's almost a sort of rhythm to it.

I'm enjoying it way more than I thought I would at the beginning, and I love the subject I chose. This painting is really fun to explore, and recreate in my own way. And the tape itself is so charming.

Finally, we've got some colored pencil work:

If you give a rose to an artist, you can almost guarantee the artist is going to draw it, right? Isn't that some law of nature? Wouldn't nine out of ten artists agree? I dunno, but if you give me a rose, I'm gonna draw it, that you can say for sure. The color's so rich and vivid, the sentiment's so sweet, and if you stare at it for a week or so, well, how can you resist?

I hadn't worked in colored pencils in a long time! I felt rusty. They seem like they should be very simple, but I don't think they are. Lots and lots of layers, slow and steady work, building up the color and the form.

I think it's coming along really nicely. If I do so say so myself. Don't know what I'm going to do with the background yet, if anything. I do have a lot of colored pencils, so its nice to put them to use after they sat around for a while (I mean - vacationed for a while, in colored pencil land!). Good to remember the fun stuff they're capable of.

It's very motivational to look back and see how artworks have progressed!

cats and birds all across the sky

Some of you may remember that commission I was working on! It's finally finished! And safe and happy in its new home. It's up on the website right here, where it shall be preserved for all eternity.

I've also been struck by a fit of the crazies, and decided to go back and do some small edits on a painting that's been "finished" for over a year. For all that time, I let it be, even though there was significant work that could be done to it, because I didn't feel motivated enough and no one else seemed to care that it was - technically, in my view at least - unfinished.

I must simply cross my fingers and hope that everyone agrees with me, and thinks the new one is better.

I just simply couldn't stand that the birds didn't have ANY FEET, and my goodness gracious just, just -- look at that old branch.

This was all I saw when I looked at that painting and I didn't like what I saw. Everything in me screamed that it wasn't right. I didn't care that my family was all "hey, it's cool". It gnawed on me like a persistent beaver. One day I just cracked, I thought "I can't live with this anymore, I can't live my life knowing I just left it like this" and I did something I never normally do, which is go back to a piece a year later and change it.

Isn't this better? So much more solid? And it makes some semblance of sense, too? Some still say it makes no difference, but I can live with this. So I'm happy.

They were always supposed to have feet. I just never put the feet on there. Now I have, and all is right with the world. Here are some extra pictures to celebrate:

Aaaand, here's a bonus picture! It's the next painting I'll be working on:

Painting in progress: commission

I'm putting these pictures under a cut, as the lovely individual who wants this painting may or may not want to see in-progress shots. Sometimes its preferable to avert ones eyes from the gawky, awkward teenage phases of a painting. I, of course, don't have the option of such luxury, so I like to take photographs that showcase my trials against rebellious and unruly paint on canvas!

In other news, I drew this in five seconds on a whiteboard and I'm weirdly fond of it, so much so that I haven't wanted to erase it even though it's taking up valuable space. Every time I look at it, I'm reminded of how much I like drawing eagles.

Anyway, onward to oil painting!

Birds of Lightning!

*wipes dust off blog* *coughs slightly* I've got another painting to show you! Friends, family...strangers?

chillin'

It's a bird made of lightning or with the power of lightning or something like that, you know, the sort of thing writers come up with when they start wading into the realms of giant talking sturgeons and angsty neon pink squirrels. You might even recognize it from a sketch a few posts back. A sketch that I actually did finish, woo hoo!

You can CLICK HERE to read more about the Lightning Bird, see a different picture, watch me question my life choices as per all the usuals.

Also, here on the blog, you can now sign up to get an e-mail alert whenever I make a new post, I know at last one person wanted such a thing so there you go, look in the sidebar. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds and browse posts via topic, if you are so inclined. I'll leave you with a very beautiful picture of my very beautiful cat:

so gorgeous

Works in progress: cardinals and falcons

Hello, oil paintings I've been chipping away at for the past two months! How are you doing?

Clearly, the lighting did not agree with my camera, so there is a great deal of glare, but you get the idea. Northern Cardinals, a bird you've probably seen many times! I certainly have. So when I paint them, I find I usually have to put some kind of spin on them! Like black and white, or strange patterns. This painting is reckless frustration finally breaking through its chains. I can't say much more, because right now I'm just staring at it and thinking about what I want to change when I work on it again!

Speaking of black and white paintings! I've had this idea since I finished my previous black and white piece. A vision of a bird in flight against the night sky, with a cartoon-ish crescent moon. I finally got around to painting it. Black and white's fun, so I was excited to return to it. The bird's a falcon, though viewers have called it a dove, which is perfectly alright. Again, I'm still just thinking about what I want to change!

These paintings are both nearly done. I've been alternating between them, switching whenever I get tired or want a change of pace. Between the two of them I've put in a good 16+ hours of work, spread out over those two months. Sizes are 24x30 and 18x36.