Office Characters - "Gossip"

As I should probably start every post... long time no blog!

I started what I'm hoping to make a new series called Office Characters. I feel like there are certain "characters" that appear in every office, the gossipy in-the-know people, the too-perky-for-Monday people, people who like to play games and pull pranks, the NEED-coffee types, health food nuts, etc. etc., so since I work in an office (and enjoy watching re-runs of The Office), I thought this would be a fun series.

I decided to start with "Gossip" because I thought it would lend itself to characters with interesting gestures and facial expressions. This painting is digital, painted in Photoshop.

This was really fun to paint so I'm hoping to do a few more in the near future. I found some brush stroke settings that make the tablet act MUCH more like a real pencil or paint brush and it made the results much closer to what I was looking for. I'm hoping that will help speed up my process so I can get more of these done and hopefully some Irish dance paintings too.

That's all for now! Thanks for stopping by!

Banshee Painting

Long time no blog!

Just finished a painting this afternoon, so it seemed like a good time for an update!

Banshee, gouache 2015

This painting depicts the legend of the Banshee. There are several versions of the myth so I decided to combine a couple of the lesser-known variants instead of painting the typical "wailing hag."  In one story I read, the Banshee was a young woman who kindly ushered the dead to the other world, in another, she was an omen of death appearing as an old washer woman.  I thought these had interesting contrast (and would read together as Banshee-themed :)), so these are the two I decided on for this painting.

This is my first full gouache painting since taking a workshop on watercolor and gouache a couple years ago, and although it took some practice and tutorial videos, I'm happy to say gouache and I are no longer enemies!  I actually really like it, it doesn't require mediums or smelly "odorless" mineral spirits, it can be diluted like water color, it can be thick and opaque like oil or acrylic, and with some water, you can even adjust dried areas of the painting.  Overall, I think it's pretty fun to work with!

Thanks for reading, more paintings to come!

De-Stress Sketch

This is unfinished and there quite a few issues, but today was a bit of a stressful day at work, so I thought I'd try what I read other artists mention in their blogs, a quick "de-stress" painting. 

Massive Update!!

So... it's almost the end of February...

It's been a crazy busy (and embarrassing long) time since I updated this blog!  So since I'm online for the first time in a long long time, it's well-past time for blog updating!  Believe it or not - art has been happening!

Here's what I've been up to...

In November my work asked me to design and illustrate their company holiday card again.  Here's what I came up with:

This is the web-blast version so it's single-sided, but you get the idea.  Just for fun, these are my alternate thumbnails. I did three designs and the company chose the one they wanted illustrated for the card:

Then... in January I did a commissioned portrait of this adorable dog:

 

Which brings us up to present where I'm working on a project that is still top-secret (because it's not done yet), but has been in progress since late December! Hopefully that will be done soon so I'll try to add it if I get permission.

In the meantime...

Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, Happy Valentine's Day, President's Day, Anna Howard Shaw Day, Groundhog Day, and Happy Chinese New Year! 

Hopefully more to come soon!  Thanks for stopping by :) 

Early/Late Holiday Cards

It's been a busy November already!  I can't believe tomorrow is the 10th already!

I recently started working on the designs for this year's holiday cards for my office.  Since I just finished the thumbnails and they haven't seen the designs yet, I thought I'd post what I came up with last year (it was well after December by the time I got this blog running... it just seemed out of season, so I saved it ☺).

2013 Holiday card design

I work at a tech company, so snowmen with network and telephony gear seemed like a fun theme for the holidays!

I'll post this year's card and work in progress after the final cards are sent out in December.  For now, I'm working on coming up with the theme for my next (un-related) project!

Thanks for visiting!

Finally Finished!

It's been a long time coming, but I finally finished this painting!

 

I learned a lot while working on this piece, most importantly: don't go crazy with the eraser unless you are absolutely sure you're on the right layer!

OK, maybe that wasn't the most important thing, but I think I'm finally narrowing in on a good process and technique so I'm excited to start the next project!

Thanks for stopping by :)

Still Working and Painting Backwards

Still not quite 100% on this painting, but definitely closer than I was before.  It's been a busy couple weeks so progress has been slow.

In other news, I finally understand why people flip their paintings upside down or reverse them horizontally - it's like a magic mistake-finding trick!

Rotating a painting is something my professors suggested when the class was working on oil paintings.  I did it a few times but eventually stopped because I wasn't seeing the benefit.  But, after watching a few videos on digital painting technique, I noticed that nearly all of the artists flip their work - usually several times during the process - so I decided I must be missing something and gave it another try... They were right, it works wonders!

Today I worked on this painting entirely flipped this way:

  

 

This is the current version flipped horizontally so I've fixed some of the errors, but it allowed me to see that the paint on the mountains was splotchy, the waves needed some work to be more defined, and the ships were blending in to the ocean, along with some lighting issues on the figures that needed to be addressed.  Clearly, I should have tried this a long time ago!

Here's the current version in the correct orientation:

  

And, here's last week's for comparison:

The differences are probably pretty subtle, but hopefully there is some noticeable improvement.  There are still a few more adjustments I want to make, just to tighten everything up, but should be done soon!