More painting practice, still working closely from an photograph. I’m okay with that… for a little while longer. Pretty soon I’m going to have to start building the entire picture from the sketch on up, but I have a bit more to learn about creating a palette first.

The original picture is here. I chose to work from that particular picture because of the limited palette and because of the luminosity.  (Hey, just ’cause I’m a little scared of color doesn’t mean I don’t prefer intense color.) Also because it’s a picture of me that I like, which is rare. Using the photo for color reference and layout, I made this:

Not so great, right? I’ve never had much trouble getting to this point in a painting, (photoshop or actual) but then I hit a wall called ‘I dunno what to do next.’ Which is why I never really got into painting until recently.

This time when I started flailing, I called in my guest expert *coughfiancecough* and had him take a look.[*] As usual, he made me face what I already knew:  I wasn’t done yet, and he wasn’t about to let me pretend this was ‘good enough’.

So I did this:

and this:

and this:

And then played with opacity and layer order for a little while. Plus a few tweaks, I now have this:

Much better. Hopefully, I’ll remember how I did it for next time…

[*] A word about letting someone look at your work before it’s finished: Don’t do it lightly. Particularly don’t do it if you don’t have a strong sense of your direction in this particular piece, or if you are at all dependent on praise. Sometimes you need to see something through to its end in order to learn, even if you’re pretty sure it won’t work. That’s doubly hard to do if someone’s sitting on your shoulder saying it won’t work give up now. (Sure, they’ll actually say something like ‘I think I’d like it better if you smoothed the edges a bit’, but that’s never what you actually hear.) An extra eye and a careful word can give you perspective when you need it. But it can also totally derail your process, and your trust in yourself as an artist.

Guys! Guys! Lookit, look what I did!

Let me explain why I’m so excited.

I have a historical problem, loosely referred to as line addiction. I draw edges. I draw them first, and hang the rest of the picture on them, like scaffolding. When my college painting teacher told me to build the image from the inside out, my first thought was literally “but- it doesn’t work like that.” [*]

More recently, this has meant that I’ve been doing line drawings before making digital color images. Which shouldn’t strictly be necessary. If I’m making digital paintings, shouldn’t I be able to do an underpainting as my laying out and on-canvas ‘thinking’, rather than a line drawing? (Trust me, this isn’t through lack of trying. It’s part muscle memory, part training. It’s like putting an accomplished downhill skier on cross country skis and expecting them to not go whup!SPLAT. [**])

Last week, inspired by Three Panel Soul, I decided to give this ‘painting’ thing another try. Miraculously, something clicked. I know what I want to do differently next time (bigger brush, for one thing) but this is an encouraging start in a direction which has previously been mostly blocked to me.

The subject is a Wolpertinger. I was surprised to learn from wikipedia that Wolpertingers have a historical basis, and were not simply created as an amusing Brewfest pet. (Dear non-WoW players: Brewfest is an in-game holiday involving a lot of drinking. When drunk, you can see Wolpertingers. ) Apparently, “The Wolpertinger is not a typical cryptid, as local people likely never believed in its existence. Rather, it is some kind of traditional prank belief, as is evident from the many stuffed Wolpertingers displayed in village inns along with real hunting trophies, which have been fabricated deliberately in order to make fun of gullible foreigners who may want to go hunting for this remarkable animal.” I find this hilarious.

[*] Convergently, I listened to a TED talk after I painted this which suggests that edges (and motion) are the foundation of human vision. Very interesting stuff for visual artists, video here.

[**] whup!(SPLAT) is the direct transliteration of the sound you make when your skis fly out from under you for no reason, and you land on your back. For people from warm locals: Downhill skis have a rigid connection between your ski and your foot, plus your ankle is mostly immobile. You walk like a flatfooted duck, but the ski does not slip out from under you while you’re standing around. Cross country skis, on the other hand, have soft boots and connect to the ski only at the absolute toe of the boot. This greatly increases your independent mobility, but also that of the ski. Which occasionally chooses to exercise its freedom when you’re standing around not paying enough attention to staying centered over the ski.

Just a quick Murloc for you all. Quick being the operative word- this was done as a deliberate speedrun, and took me maybe three hours in total.

For those who are unfamiliar, Murlocs are a race of unfriendly amphibious humanoids. They come in several pretty color patterns, and have a tendency to run at you waving weapons and yelling “Mrglmrglmrglmrgl!”

I don’t know if it’s done or not, but I know I’m tired of looking at it.

Don’t get me wrong, I think I did a pretty good job, I just let it drag on too long. I was making the sketch for this drawing a month ago, and have been working on it fairly steadily since then. It works much better for my brain if I work on something intensively for a week or two, let it sit for a week, and then do finishing touches after I’ve gotten it off of my active working rotation for a little while.

To translate for you people who don’t play World of Warcraft (and seriously, what’s wrong with you people?) this is a Night Elf Druid. Which is kind of like saying someone’s an intellectual who also likes to read. It’s not directly analogous, but it’s such a stereotype that it’s beyond stereotypical territory and into expected land. Night Elves are not to be confused with Blood elves, hence the common abbreviations ‘nelf’ and ‘belf’.

So while I directly stole WoW clothing designs, quite a bit of it I made up.  I enjoy drawing clothing in the WoW vein, and I think I match the genre pretty well.  Can you tell what stuff I came up with, and what the WoW designers did? (WoW people, lets give the other kids a chance to answer, okay?)  The skirt, belt, and staff are mine, and the corset bit is what one might call ‘inspired by’ a WoW design. The background is basically a slightly modified screenshot, but I only got to that part after I wanted the whole stinky thing to go away, so don’t judge me.

I kind of like the staff. It’s all pumpkin-y.

Sylvanas, after she was all blue and dead and stuff.

This one I really like. I might be getting a handle on this coloring with Photoshop thing. For real this time. Maybe. In any case I’m making a serious effort to be less precious, i.e. look, you can see brushstrokes this time!

I had a bit of a struggle with the background, trying to figure out how to make it contrast without washing out entirely. (No contrast wasn’t an option, as it led to visual overstimulation/confusion. But I also didn’t want her standing there in a totally neuter background either.) A bit of blur plus some desaturation did it, even if it did hurt my soul a bit to wash out what I had so carefully colored.

Like the dude said, ‘murder your darlings’. It applies as well to visual art as it does to writing.

Orchids are my favorite flower.

I’ll admit, some of the love is because they’re edible. Really. Slightly sweet in the middle, but mostly just a neutral or an extremely mild bitter leafy crunch.  When they’re a garnish on your plate in a fancy restaurant, you should totally eat them. It’ll freak your date RIGHT the fuck out.

I’m really happy with how this turned out. I managed luminosity not only of the edges, but of the thin middles of the flower petals as well. The color and composition works great at the intended distance, but the color is also intricate up close, so it’ll be engaging as a poster.

Oh hey. I said poster didn’t I? Well. Cat’s out of the bag now.

I’m investigating ways to allow you guys to buy prints of my work. I’ve found a on-demand company with print quality I like, and I’m about ready to put up some pieces for sale.

You guys get to help me with the hard part. What should I choose to print?

Tell me what your top three favorite illustrations are! No WoW stuff though… Blizzard would stomp me flat and eat my hat.

I’m not really happy with this, but I’ve found that’s a recurring problem whenever I try to draw a character that really matters to me: I obsess, I still can’t get it right, so I overwork it. (if I were working with regular old pencil and paper for example, I’d have erased a hole in the page.) The result isn’t bad exactly, but it is overwrought, and it looses some of the natural grace of the original idea.

Oh, that’s Agatha, by the way. She belongs to Phil & Kaja Foglio, and lives over at Girl Genius. Girl Genius has an artistic style that perfectly matches the thematic content, which is… Hmm. I’d tell you what it’s about, but I won’t because I don’t want to give anything away, it’s all too awesome for me to risk messing it up. Suffice it to say that it’s relentlessly silly, (though with some serious themes about identity) manically detailed, and there’s always a reasonable likelyhood that someone will throw a bomb at you.

So I gave in to my tendencies and made a very, very blue dragon. Well, I guess he’s sort of violet, but it’s balanced by the super-cute teal belly.

And he has pads! Eeeeeeee!

*Cough* Sorry. Regulations require at least one squeal per use of adorable paw pads.

Okay, so I’m probably out of inventiveness as far as titles go.

I’m playing with texture a bit here. It’s subtle (and what do we know about subtlety?) but I like the concept anyway. I was trying to get the skin of the body to have a different taste than the armor scales. ( Due to my synesthetic brain, taste, textue and color are all very closely intwined. Actually, there’s a sound component too, but when I get that far in a discription most people start to get incredulous.) I don’t think I quite have it here, but it’s an interesting thought anyway.

I think this is my best expression so far. The face is cute, sure, but it’s the pose that really does it.

This one went through a few different color changes. I knew I wanted the spots, and I wanted the tail to fade to red, but everything else was up for grabs. For a while he was a sort of grey/blue. But I use blue too often, and I know it.  So I decided to go a little more…vibrant.