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Wednesday, September 12, 2012

WIP Wednesday & a blast from the past!

Dagger finished, started working out the mehndi  (yes, I usually start out with scribbles like this until I stumble onto a shape I like). Like everything else, I'm going for a shell/coral design, all whorls and swirls.  Listening to the How to Train Your Dragon soundtrack while I do it - music distracts my brain so I don't overthink the patterns too hard.


I also stumbled across something while I was tidying out some old folders. My high school sketchbooks used to take a real beating, being carried about to ever single lesson (for that precious 3 mins drawing time before the teacher arrived), to and from my friends' houses, on holiday, and pretty much everywhere else I went.  When we got a scanner I started "saving" some of the drawings I liked best by scanning them before the sketchbook fell to pieces entirely. I remember doing this while I was still in high school - about fourteen or fifteen, I think.  So that makes this at least ten years old!


Anyone guess what book they're reading? :)

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

WIP Wednesday (Bouguereau Study)


Study of Faneuse (The Haymaker) by Bouguereau.  Started while I was playing around with a friend's iMac (if I ever win the lottery...), never got around to finishing it.  It's not my favourite Bouguereau, so I'm in two minds over whether I should just suck it up and finish it or move onto a master study of a painting I really like.  At the Edge of the Brook, for example.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

WIP Wednesday

Slowly but surely getting there. Finished flimsy transparent bits.  Begun work on dagger (many, many revisions and reworkings and deletions not pictured).  Added Very Important Sparkles.

It's technically an hour into Thursday here, because of a rather long day at work pushing a game app to the finishing line, and my boss treating us a late pub dinner and rather a lot of alcohol to thank us/celebrate.

(Look, I'm Scottish. You should be amazed I'm not tipsy every time I post.)

Thursday, August 16, 2012

WIP...It's Probably Wednesday in a Parallel Universe, Right?

So last week's WIP did not go up on account of plague. I came home from work early on Wednesday, collapsed into bed and completely forgot about it, until somewhere around the weekend when I stopped feeling like the living dead. 

This week...honestly, I'm pretty sure it's still Tuesday and the calendars are lying to us.

Anyway, I've made a little progress on this. Not a huge amount, but some. I thought I'd show it without the rough details scribbled over the top, and a close-up to make up for missing last week.



Wednesday, August 01, 2012

WIP Wednesday

I'm a huge fan of Marina Bychkova's Enchanted Dolls. Every single doll is unique, and the costumes and accessories she creates for them are exquisite - she creates every detail painstakingly by hand, and there are a LOT of details!  I would kill to own one, but they justifiably cost a pretty penny, and are way out of my budget.  However, every year she holds a contest for her birthday and the prize is an Enchanted Doll.  One year, the challenge was to create a piece of artwork based on one of her dolls, and I jumped at the chance to enter.

Unfortunately while I was halfway through my painting, I had a surprise trip to hospital to have surprise emergency surgery on a surprise ovarian cyst.  Needless to say, I was out of commission for a while, and that deadline for the contest blew past me.  I was pretty damn disappointed, and never found the drive to go back and finish the painting.  But I still like it, and still want to finish it. After all, there's no reason why I can't send it to Marina as a little token of my fangirlism, contest or no contest.

The doll I picked to paint was Cinderella, but I planned on sneaking references to a couple of others in there.  The mermaid is the first.  The others I never got around to adding.  I'm pretty sure only die hard Enchanted Doll fans would spot them anyway.


This is the composition I eventually decided to go with.  Originally I started working on the one below, portraying the moment Cinderella approaches the castle, but something about it wasn't working.  There is still something about her posture and expression that I love here, but ultimately I decided to go with a different moment - fleeing the ball as the clock strikes midnight.  And yes, her dress IS supposed to have a top half. An incredibly complex top half that I wasn't even attempting to start until I was sure I had the underlying anatomy down correctly!




Wednesday, July 25, 2012

WIP Wednesdays!

The more time that slips away between blog posts, the greater the pressure. The next post must be epic.  Awe-inspiring.  Witty and dazzling in its brilliance, otherwise the long wait is completely unjustifiable.  Unfortunately unless someone is holding a gun or a paycheck to my head, my response to pressure is to run away into the arms of Tumblr or Pinterest, because checking out other people's pretty pictures is 1) vaguely passable as "research and inspiration" and 2) way easier than talking about my own.

It's very easy to succumb to inertia when your mental energy is low - which happens, and often, when you are lucky enough to work a job when you have to be creative for 8+ hours a day and then come home and KEEP being creative.  Then when your brain finds you again, suddenly inertia and bad habits are monsters that need to be slain. And then you need to write an Oscar winning blog post. And so you avoid it.  And then realise it was October when you last posted and there really is nothing in the world so awesome that you could realistically bluff and say, "Yes, this totally took me since October to write!" 

I probably could have summed up the above two paragraphs by saying, "Writer's block. Sorry." 

Anyway, I am so out of practice that I am not going to pretend that I am going to be producing rock-your-socks-off material on a weekly basis from this moment forward. That would be a fib. Also, I would probably never use the phrase rock-your-socks-off seriously.

But a weekly WIP post? I could do that.  That's a nice, realistic little goal. I can just throw up whatever I'm currently working on in whatever stage it happens to be in. If I haven't worked on something new in a week, then Thor knows I have a full "WIP" folder on my hard drive.  And it only takes a few minutes.

Plus, WIP Wednesdays has a fun ring to it.



If you've ever watched me on Ustream/Livestream then...you probably don't recognise this at all, because I keep changing it and it bears almost no resemblence to the original concept.  Mini-goal of the moment - getting this finished by the end of the month!