All Hope Abandon, Ye who Enter Here!

I was only able to do few illustrations this last time and I thought I'd do something a little different. Knowing that I'm not overly fantastic with watercolours, I thought I'd experiment with one of the illos I had to do for an upcoming HARP product. Although I think I did reasonably well, I had to tweak it digitally to adjust values in certain areas of the painting. It's destined to be a b&w piece, so when I converted it to greyscale it showed the weak areas of my values. Overall it was a good learning exercise for me and it'll make me a little more aware of my values in future attempts.

Colourful Thumbs

Its been awhile since I've posted but I haven't been lax in drawing everyday. I've been preparing a painting for an upcoming exhibition which I'll let you know about very soon.

ArtOrder Story Extraction Challenge WIP 6-7

I have finished off the womans details and I have let it dry for day or so. Now comes the interesting part of adding the stars. Knowing that the white paint that I have is slow drying and the deadline was very close, I decided in the end to use goauche. I had a brush that had some thick bristles, I think it's used for craft glue. Anyway, I masked up my painting with some ordinary baking paper with cut away areas....see below. I then watered down my gouache a little dipped in the brush and used the handle of another brush to fling the paint around. Have to say it was over in no time and the effect looked really good. I then used a soft make-up brush dipped in water to clean away any unwanted stars. I used a really small watercolour brush to add in the blank spaces to eleiminate any black holes.

Tiara of the Phoenix

Here's another gouache I finished last night. It's 4x6" on 300gsm w/c paper.

Vulture

Here's another gouache study I did last night.

Lion's Pride

Nymph Reflections

Here is another postcard art in gouache. I'm finding that this medium would be good for colour studies for larger projects. Still, there is a far road to travel before I could say that I'm at least proficient at gouache. I still prefere it to watercolours and a lot more than acrylic...blah! ;)

Spitfire

Red Riding Hood

My family and I were at our local art store and my wife showed me a Daler Rowney's watercolour postcard pad. She suggested that I give them a try. I was a little apprehensive about it as I have not like watercoulrs...or is it the other way round;) Anyway, I used gouache instead as I've heard its easier to work with. I did a pencil sketch and then seal the graphite with some Crystal Kote spray. One thing that I didn't like is that the postcard warped quite a bit. The paper is A6 100% cotton at 300gsm.