Week 2 Slides Along

For some reason my recent approach to digital art is to start on a dark background and draw with bright colors on top of that. Maybe my screen-canvas is less daunting when it's not all white. The background will (hopefully) be a sort of ghostly dead forest when all is said and done.

I do realize that the arrow is off now, but it's more of a guideline for me. His legs are also a bit strange but that will also be remedied. This will probably be the last overly complex Weekly Art for a while, since I have two studio classes this semester and it's already time to start working on pieces for those.

Week One Fades Into Week Two

 Today was the first day of my last semester at University of Idaho. It was almost surreal, probably because I hadn't slept enough and even this morning's coffee wasn't enough for me to feel wholly awake all day. It wasn't a bad day, honestly. The first day seldom is because most of the classes consist of "Here's your syllabus, now get out". The rest of this week should be similar so at least I'm being eased into having to be up and moderately coherent before 9 AM.

The painting and I finally came to an agreement that I would spend a great deal of my time after work fixing it and it would cooperate as long as I set it in from of my space heater occasionally to help it dry at least a little so the colors wouldn't completely mush together. It's not perfect, but it looks a far sight better now than it did last night. I would now be alright with framing it and giving it to to my grandmother.

Not since my Lord of the Rings obsession days of high school have I really tried to draw much in the way of archery. A few pen scribbles in my sketchbook proved that muscle memory isn't everything, so I found a great archery resource and worked with that. That web page is going to be open in Chrome quite a bit in the next six days.

Week 1: One Step Back

I didn't know it was possible, but this looks even worse now than it did yesterday. I'll either fix it when I come home from Home Group tonight or finish it tomorrow after my first say back at school.

Week 1: Something Spotty and Something from '12

First I'd like to show off the last painting I did last semester, which couldn't be posted until after Christmas as it was a gift for a couple of very close friends of mine who are also the proud parents of this little cutie. His name is William and he just turned two! I'm his honorary aunt and think he's the cutest thing. I'm gonna steal him. Shh, it's a secret.

Also, until I came to the face the spots weren't nearly as horrifying as expected, but after attempting to paint the bricks in a wall I suppose anything's easy. Tonight it's being set in front of a space heater to help it dry and by this time tomorrow it should hopefully be finished. The whole face will be re-done, as well as some of the neck spots so they shrink at a more believable rate.

Week 1's Baby Steps

The painting went untouched yesterday, since it was one of those days. You all know what they're like. That's just as well, however, since it really needed to dry more before I added anything else to it. The background's done now, partly to prevent me from messing it up. The painting's actually much brighter in person but was sitting in a different room when I took the photo.

No work was done on the other piece, but this is top priority anyway.

Week 1: Different Strokes

It would have been smarter to stop before trying to lay any paint down on the cheetah since it's a bit of a smudgy mess now, but come tomorrow it should be dried enough for more work. It looks like the rest of this won't take too long, which is fine with me since I was fool enough to start another piece yesterday evening. Hey, school's not in session. I'm bored.

Make Way, It Has Begun

The year 2013 has come despite some paranoia about the world ending on 12/21/12. It looks like Time makes fools of us all, including those who misinterpreted the Mayan calendar. Despite the hopes of some, we're all still here and life continues on.

From the day that the world was supposed to end until yesterday I was up visiting family for the holidays. Now Christmas and New Year's are over and it's time to resettle the chaos that comes with them and fall back into the routine that I've set for myself. Of course, this includes Attempt #3 at the Weekly Art challenge. Considering that there's only one semester of school left for me to trudge through, I expect that the whole thing will flow much more smoothly once there's a sweet, wonderful lack of homework in the way.

The first piece of 2013 will be a small painting for my grandmother. She recently moved in with my aunt and uncle as she can no longer live alone. She's trying to give her bedroom an Africa look and mentioned to me that she needs another wall hanging with a cheetah on it. So why not? A painting of a cheetah she shall have.

Of course, while looking at reference photos I began to question my sanity for tackling this. Just thinking of all those spots is daunting...

Also, I just listened to "Over the Misty Mountains Cold" from The Hobbit soundtrack. Repeatedly. Hey, Dwarfs sing pretty!