Who Are You Again?

Hi!  Welcome back!  To me, mostly.  I've been deep in the throes of starting my new career over these past two months, to the point where I actually took about a month off from the 365 project just to stay functional.  But today is the day I get back to it, and to celebrate that, I wanted to share what I did from 04/22/18-05/19/18 (which is when I accepted things would need to be put on hiatus).  I took pictures of pages rather than individual pieces, in an attempt to actually get this whole thing done today, so commentary will be shorter than usual (although, obviously, the entirety of the post will be somewhat longer).

Greenbreathing.

I spent several days trying to capture the way that being in the woods brings me peace.  There's a poem in the left image, and here's how it goes:

Steps slow and burdened/Searching for the way I’ve lost/I pace the leaf floor

Following the path/Dark and light and dark again/Deep into the wild

The weight of sorrow/Pressing on my lungs: exhaled/Gathered up by Them

The Ancient Ones, still/Breathing with me in silence/Lifting my burden

From poison to life/In the space between heartbeats/They transmute my pain

Out and in and out/The one becomes the other/The other the one

My balance restored/Light and dark and light again/I find my way home

Sweet Things

I'm super into The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.  You should be, too.  And then I found a pretty pittie who had wandered away from her home, and she was so sweet I called her Dulcinea.  Happy ending: she was reunited with her family after I took her to the Humane Society.  Also Happy Ending: I painted her without drawing first.  Progress!

Unfinished Business

I love what I've got going here, with my maenad and her satyrs, but I spent several days on it and it refused to progress.  I'll probably come back to it, someday.

Blue

I finished the first sketchbook on the last day of April.  I'd been reading a book that dealt with whales (Deep Wizardry) and it inspired my doodling that day (and I quoted it up there in the upper right corner).  (The lyrics in the lower left corner are from a song by Young Summer called "Waves That Rolled You Under", and I highly recommend you go listen to it right now.)

X Factor

Just a little green study of Madame X, because I was still working on painting without drawing first.

Jackalope Got Me Down will be the name of my first album.

More paintings without drawing, with limited success.  The Jackalope thing is because for some reason TLG took it into his head that anytime he fell down it was appropriate to say, "Jackalope got me down!" We have no idea where he picked that up from, but obviously we find the idea of blaming things on random jackalope attacks hilarious.

Damn good appetizer

Not much to say about these, except that I put a million layers into that cherry tomato and I think it looks awesome.  Also, the quote "He's my Wade and I'm keeping him!" is from the last time I played DnD (waaaay too long ago, now), and my character Severan sort of accidentally picked up an NPC squire and basically he's the Podrick to her Brienne now.  I'll hear no arguments.

Rainspheres (as opposed to bows) over the Grand Canyon, and also some Geese.

Red lips and purple ties.

Feet silhouetted in the pool at night, Super Professional Face.

These are all from my trip to Tempe at the beginning of May, where I had maybe five minutes each night to sketch something out before I dropped into bed, exhausted.

Love Undying

This last one, you'll notice, has a whole lot of dates next to it, and no color whatsoever.  That's because after nearly a week of making incremental progress, and feeling super stressed out about it, I realized that I needed to give myself a break.  So I did.  Which brings us to today, and this blog entry.  And once I finish this blog entry,  I'll start laying in some colors.  So stay tuned, Gentle Readers, and thanks for sticking with me for this long.

A Study in Contrasts

I just noodled around yesterday, trying to paint a portrait without doing any sort of drawing first.  It was a horrible, horrible failure.  It was so bad that I'm saving it for the end of the post, so that I can start out with the one I'm really, really proud of- the one I drew and painted this evening:

I love braaaaaiiiiiiiddddds!

I was feeling sorry for myself after yesterday's debacle (you guys it's so bad, and the more I tried to somehow salvage it, the worse things became, until it was like maybe being awful was the only true reality, one that I must accept or go mad...) so I decided to draw something that I enjoy drawing, and something I enjoy drawing- really enjoy drawing- is hair.  I had thought, vaguely, that I might be doing Daenerys Targaryan (especially since I was using a promo shot for hair reference/inspiration) but after I started painting (which I hadn't intended to do tonight, but... well... I got into it...) I realized that actually I was illustrating the Lady Amalthea.  So maybe I'll draw a unicorn tomorrow night, or a red bull, or Prince Lir, or hell, even King Haggard.  We'll see.

Oh, speaking of horrible soulless monsters that are bent on destroying everything innocent and pure in this world:

Yes, this really was painted by the same person.  AKA me.  Please don't rescind my art degree.

Well then.  That's humiliating.  And I've got to get back to studying in the morning, but before I do that I need to work out, which means that now?  Now it's time for bed.  Past, even.  Here's hoping the unicorns keep the nightmares at bay...

Storm Tossed

Quick update tonight- so quick the paint literally isn't dried, and I am planning on going back into it.  But we had company this evening (eee!) so I only just now threw pigment on paper... and it's way past bedtime.

Linework- I wanted to get more intricate, but I was running out of time and really wanted not to skip a painting.

Too impatient- more bleeding than I'd like.  And we'll see how it dries down.  But for now, I really like it.

The point, of course, was to once again try my hand at using natural black hair as a decorative element, like swirly silky hair.  I think this is proof that it can absolutely be done- and probably much better than this hastily-thrown-together attempt.

To bed!

Revisiting Savah

I decided to revisit the fluttery green silk of Savah's robes today, and try a few different things.

Now that's yellow!

I started off with a yellow wash, thinking to get some nice glazing in, and while it was nice, I think I should have toned the yellow down a bit, because it was just a smidge too neon to match my vision.

Nobody talk about angles.

I wasn't displeased, per se, but I also wasn't pleased, so I tried yet again, this time with many many pale layers.  And as I waited for each of the many many layers to dry, I worked on a doodle of my hair, which was cooperating with a fetching updo.

Both Unfinished.

I think I'll just have to keep keeping at it.  Like so many things in life.

The full sketchbook page (for now).

I'm thinking of painting the little portrait tomorrow... we'll see how I feel.  It's definitely my favorite thing that I did today, but alas... not actually watercolor... sooo... as much as I like it in black and white, I might just have to remedy the situation... plus I want to put some more linework into her face (shading-wise) so we'll just see.

Afrodite

Last night I was watching a tutorial on drawing hair (I actually have a pretty good grip on that, but you never know when you might come across a new tip or trick that hasn't yet occurred to you) and it struck me that the hair in question was all very, very white-girl-ideal-type hair.  Like, long, and silky, and manageable.  And I'm pretty damn good at that kind of hair.  But.

But.

That is not the only hair in the world, not by a long shot.  And while yes, it's very easy to take hair like that and turn it into a decorative element, it seemed to me that there's no reason other textures couldn't also be decorative, if I spent as much time noodling with it as I had over long silken locks.  Which got me to thinking about how I'd played with wet-on-wet to do yesterday's hair, and how much I'd liked the effect I got with my clouds on Saturday, and I thought to myself, "I'll bet I could make a really gorgeous afro using that technique," and then it was stuck in my head so hard that I decided that's what I was going to try my hand at today.

And then there was a lot of careful consideration over what I wanted my black lady to be wearing, because exoticizing, etc, which brought me back around to a conversation with my boss (who is black) about how his community needs more awareness of black professionals (outside of the realms of sports/entertainment) so I thought to myself, "Hell, I'll put her in a suit," and I did.

Don't adjust your monitor: the photo is blurry.  But it gives you the idea of how the hair looked wet...

...vs dry.  So soft!  Such gorgeous texture!

I loved how her hair came out (very close to my vision- I can see how I'll tweak it next time), but when it came to the rest of her... well, once again my lack of patience bit me in the ass (turns out I do need to literally remove myself from my desk during drying-time, not just read-a-book-until-I-think-'it's fine...'), but I really think I managed to salvage it, in the end.  Except for her nose (it's killing me that the plane break ended up so much higher than I'd intended) but I'll cut me some slack.

And, obviously, I'll give it another try in the future.