Another Progress Report

This is a gift I painted for Val's Dad on his birthday in four steps.

Updates and New Things

Long time no Blog.

Not only did I manage to finish the painting from my last entry, but I've also managed to start a new sketchbook which has 9 (somewhat) impressive pages, make an oil pastel drawing, and finish another painting - the latter having happened just now.

Other updates:

• My portfolio evaluation at York is on the 19th of February, and I hope to make a grandiose impression on them, and beat that advanced standing out of them if it's the last thing I do.
• I have had an awesome new baby nephew born on January 20th named Janok (Yan for short) whom you can see on your right.
• I've opened a jewellery shop on Etsy, which you can find here: Uvellire on Etsy
• My jewellery is being used in a photoshoot which I am helluva nervous for, because what if [insert insecurity here].
• I found an old corset I was working on maybe three years or so ago, which I am now planning on finishing. It is horrendously put together with the plaids unmatching, but to hell with that, I'll finish it anyway, because it's a less useful waste of space otherwise.
  

On with the fun stuff though, here's the chronological order of the painting progress of the guy with the beer:
Ta-DAH! And to add to the artsy-fartsy flavour, I'd like to include a blurb about the making of the pastel piece and the latest painting.

Pastel landscape started with a dark purple gradient (adding more white towards the top) on a piece of paper in acrylic paint. Once that dried, I worked a lot on the background, making it as smooth as possible, and working as far back as possible, perspective-wise. first laying out the colour and mist, so on and so forth until I got to the very foreground. You can see the results on your left.

The Oil painting I did a bit more tracking in terms of photography, so I will be able to show three steps - essentially beginning, middle and end. I started out by squeezing the three primary colours onto my pallette from my acrylic paint set in order to do the underpainting. After making a VERY minimal sketch in pencil, I covered the entire canvas in red, outlining the general sketch in a darker hue. Then, when the red dried, I filled in shadow with black, and added the yellow (ochre) in the lighter areas, leaving the red as "neutral". I also used a spray bottle to spray it down a bit with water to create some cool runny effects, in case I might let them stand out for looking cool later. This resulted in the monstrosity you are witnessing on your right. After this dried up (with the help of my trusty blowdryer, for I am impatient), I applied my first, highly diluted layer of oil paint, to begin to somewhat match the colours on the original picture, and slowly but surely began to form the image a little more thoroughly. You can see what happened then on your left. I used a large, flat brush to do the initial coverage, switched to a medium flat brush to do the rest on this step. Finally, I formed all the cool parts I could using the medium flat brush for it's wonderful strokes, and moved on to a medium round brush to do the rest. The only thing I used a tiny brush for is to sign. Voila - the finished piece (in all its poorly photographed glory):
I shall update again when I have a nicer picture of it, possibly photographed in the daytime. The original image is the photo on the right, so you can get a look at what I used as a reference. It's an image I got off Deviantart called Winter Nights by deviant 9Kay3. As you can obviously tell, I put my own spin on it.

Ends and Beginnings and Quaint Irony

It is somewhat ironic that my first 2010 post is about beginnings and ends. It has nothing to do with the fact that the year ended or began or whatever else might be attributed to the celebration, as a matter of fact. Simply, I finished Heather's vest, and began a painting and would like to share.

Here is an inside and outside look at the vest before I sewed it together or put the boning in or did anything much more than pin it together really. Green is the inside, black is the outside.



That's the basic idea, and because I'm fond of visual data, here's a picture of me attaching the trim to the vest.

It was quite a feat, because this vest probably turned out to be the neatest (on the inside) piece that I've made to date. I tend to cut a lot of corners when I'm making stuff for myself so if someone were to analyze the internal craftsmanship they'd give me an E for effort at most. To make a long story short, I'm lazy if I know people won't be looking (that merit an opinion). However, this one came out good and tidy, and even pleasant to look at on the inside, and I'm quite proud of the results. Here's the final product at last, on yonder Heather:


And now, onto beginnings. Today, I painted what's left of my heart out for the first time in ever, and felt myself live!!!!... probably not quite so dramatically, but it did trigger the memory of myself being a decent-if-not-good artist. Not to blow my own horn, but sometimes there is a time and place for it, namely in a blog that no one really reads. [insert happy face emoticon here]. I am drawing a scene out of a book about London, England, where a gentleman gulps down a dark beer, holding under his arm a newspaper, all in sweetly amber tones, as you can see on the original photo on the left.

I painted for a good three hours, and tracked my work in progress, two of which photos you can see on the right. The last one best represents the piece as it was when I packed up my brushes and paints. It's being done in oil on a canvas of about... 18" x 24"? I'll have the dimensions when I'm finished, which should be this upcoming Friday.