I’ve been trying to do a phoenix picture for a while, but none of my concept sketches were working. Late last night I started on this piece though, and quite liked it. The bird isn’t a phoenix but oh well. Here’s some pictures I took during the painting process.

After doodling some concepts for the painting, I choose one I like and working from that concept, draw the image straight onto watercolour paper. I’ve included some shading to give me some information about light and dark areas. I struggled with the face planes for a bit but was able to scribble tests of what looked good for the fall of light by scanning the sketch and putting shadows down digitally in a trial and error manner. Once I was happy with the stark shadows on the girl’s face I copied these shadows over to the sketch.

Here’s the drawing submerged in our laundry sink. This is to stretch the paper – something I don’t normally do but wanted to trial this time. The idea is to get the paper to expand by soaking in all the water…

…Then tape it down securely to a board so that it remains stretched. When reapplying water during the painting process, the paper will not warp, or at least if it does warp, it will subsequently dry flat as the tape is keeping the paper stretched.

Once I have the image taped down, I put down some initial colours:

Then I let the picture dry (well, force it to dry with some encouragement from a hairdryer) and work mostly wet-on-dry for the rest of the painting process. I have problems with my tape – the paper pulled itself free from the tape as it shrinks and ended up cockling. I use this opportunity to take a progress scan:

I then soak the back of the painting to make the paper expand again and try taping it to my board again. It works okay but the painting still gets unstuck from the tape as it dries. Guess I need stronger tape. I’m not a fan of the gum tape stuff but maybe it’s the way to go…

Here’s the finished picture:

My big mistake in this painting was trying to use bruising and scratching techniques to get the feathers done. It really didn’t work out and I spent some time trying to work out how to heal over the paper. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. I’ve also done a pretty dodgy scan, the colours and contrast really didn’t come out great on my scanner. Come visit me and see it in person some time!

No comic #4 yet, but! Here’s an arts I have come up with for a competition.

I had to draw an “epic” sword for a videogame (yes, that word is completely ruined now, but not my choice). To start with I thought:

well, we’ve gotten swords that are guns now, how can I take that further? And then thought that perhaps I could combine it with a mode of transport…

But it kept looking somewhat silly, with the airship looking least dumb, but… well, it looked too much like way too many other fictional airships and spaceships.

And then, an idea!

Pity I spelled poisonous wrong

Images from my class on Thursday.

2-3 minute warmup drawings:

Figure drawn using ovoid construction:

Figures drawn using planar construction:

Hybrid images using both ovoid and planar concepts (no I’m not explaining them because… I’m lazy or something)

Progress on the Lucian Freud reproduction, first posted about here.

Apart from just doing more shading, I’ve moved his eyes down a bit.

Connell got this one to me early, but you guys get it the same time as usual. Also, he hints that there might be a second bonus update from him this week…

I was somewhat hesitant to make this comic with myself and Helena as the characters (again), but it is always easier to use characters I am familiar with!

I originally planned a comic which would have shared the first two panels, but then the guy has himself frozen for fifty years so he can write “Twilight with Predators”, with the warrior aliens from the Predators films hunting down sparkly vampires. But when I explained the concept to someone, the response was “….OK”, so I thought maybe with snappier writing and a different punchline the setup could still work. Also, I like the comic instead ending with the rejection, and that could be an interesting running gag to go with, where my character is seen having one idea or another knocked back for being silly or offensive. Or both!

Also, I know not all english translations of the Bible are public domain. Pretend it is the King James Version, or something.

I’m making paint swatches!

These swatches are modelled after the ones described here. The basic idea is to test the paint’s behaviour and characteristics.

The tests are:

• Opacity – black lines near the top. The first is drawn before the paint is applied, the second after.
• Staining – the white band below the black lines – this area was swabbed after a day to see how much paint would lift
• Backrun – the band near the bottom was created by swiping a brush with clean water over the swatch.
• Tinting – The narrow band between the two blocks – tests the characteristics of a rather diluted pigment and can be compared against the main swatch to determine the ‘strength’ of the pigments.
• Wet-in-wet – the bottom band. The block is brushed with clear water then paint is applied in the left. The test is to see how much of the paint bleeds into the wet patch and how it behaves when it does so.

In addition, the top labelling indicates the colour code in its brand range and the pigments used in the colour. The bottom is obviously the colour’s name.

The swatches I’ve made so far:

These swatches aren’t totally reliable as they’re made from pan colours – so the ratio of paint to water can’t be controlled in a methodical manner as described in the handprint guide. It’s also why I’ve yet to put in the tint lines for the blues as I’m pondering a better way to control them. Even considering that they might not be totally reliable as a standardised set of information about pigments, however, the swatches are still useful as a guide to the way I use my paints.

This year I’ve been taking life drawing classes. Unlike still life setups from my general drawing class last year, life models aren’t able to hold the exact same pose for the entire time they’re needed as reference. Sometimes, they “sag into the pose”, and sometimes we come back from a break and they aren’t able to quite return to the same pose as prior.

So what do you do when a model hasn’t returned to the same pose? Well, the easiest thing to do is to direct them back into the right one. If the pose is only slightly off, then sometimes the differences can be ignored – especially if the drawing itself is complete and the artist is on to the next stage, like toning or colouring. This time, we didn’t catch the differences, and my nearly-complete sketch was quite off. With nine minutes left for the pose my art teacher advised me to redraw the areas that were off – mostly the arms and curve of her back.

Image previews tiny so you can decide whether they’re safe for work or not. There’s very little detail but it’s still a nude. In an artistic context! An artistic nude, if you will.

For our life drawing classes, we’ve been given a term-long project – reproduce a Lucian Freud work. The image that I am aiming to replicate is below:

The aim of this exercise is to learn about using line direction like contours – finding the planes of the face and so forth.

My progress as of yesterday is below. Curiously the image I was given to replicate is a flipped version of the image that I seem to be able to find online. It’s possible that one is of the original etching and the other is from images taken off that etching? Who knows?

Oops, didn’t have stuff ready for today. But luckily, Connell has put together an extra-special guest post this week! I feel really excited and privileged to be able to share this with you all.

So, today I thought I’d share with you the creation of the wedding cake for myself and my lovely wife Helena. We’ve been married 3 months already! Time flies when you have an awesome wife~

So, our wedding was very geeky in theme, but not to a degree that it overshadowed the importance of the day. But for the cake, we knew that traditional was not going to cut it. Looking online, we quickly fell in love with the many Mario cakes that people have made over the years. The idea we had was to make a custom wedding topper made to look like us, and place that on top of a cake where each tier had the appearance of a Mario level.

The initial design for the topper was Helena and I high fiving, which we thought would be a very cute idea. To account for our rather amusing height difference, Helena was to be standing on a Mario item box:

We have a friend who makes his own toys, and had hoped he’d be able to hook us up with someone who could make a specific resin toy of this design. Sadly, for size we wanted, it was going to be expensive and time consuming, and instead, we found a local cake topper designer who uses wooden pegs and makes custom clothing for each topper, which all looked incredibly cute. We sent her descriptions of our clothes (including Helena’s wedding dress, so I didn’t get to see the topper until the night of the wedding), and I designed faces to look closer to my art style than hers:

With this being made, we had to find a cakemaker who would be up to the challenge of making our cake. A local cakemaker Helena found showed some pretty amazing talent, and once we’d met her and tasted her cake (oh my god her cakes) we knew we had the right cake craftsperson.

So, I had to design the thing. I wanted each tier to be unique, and thought it would be cute if each level was as if they were connected via pipes, making the entire cake effectively one Mario level. Firstly came a basic planning stage, the cakemaker and I had to come to an agreement on what was feasible based on the limitations of icing. Here’s the sketch we started with:

Initially it was only two tiers, but the cakemaker recommended a third (who can say no to more cake?). With that, the top tier was also going to be a cliff rather than the sky and trees I settled on. While the top tier could have been made with a darker brown, it really wouldn’t have been as unique as I wanted.  From those decisions, an overall cake plan was determined:

With that worked out, I searched for as many Mario images as I could find. I ended up chosing the look of New Super Mario Brothers, the colours in that game have an almost… sugary feel to them already (for want of a better, more correct phrase). The first step was to create the building blocks that I’d be needing for all the tiers: blocks, goombas, pipes, pirhana plants, and so on:

And once that was done, I started building Mario levels, which was actually kind of fun! I made sure to keep in as many nods to classic Mario level design as possible. The final designs are quite large, as I designed to scale, so they’re linked below.

And with that, the planning was complete! And the result was completely and utterly worth it:

Video Link

In the end, the cake designer took some liberties in the design, but that was to be expected. I loved how the colours came out, and of course, the taste… As for the topper, I think it is so damned cute.

Helena and I still have the top tier with the topper on it kept in a case – the actual tier is Styrofoam, and the sugar icing will keep for a very, very long time. Best wedding cake ever? I think so.

Thanks Connell! I hope you’ll provide another post about the other awesome cakes that made an appearance on the night, too! Every table was graced with its own original cake and an accompanying story. Our table especially enjoyed our Pikmin themed cake, but I couldn’t resist sneaking over to the Tetris brownie table and playing some pretend Tetris… I mean, uh, congratulations to you and Helena!