WIP Wednesday: Feathergirl

A friend's hired me on to do some more Kokeshi Girls, like the ones in my shop*. Which is awesome, because I love that style; but sort of spooky, because I'll be working on much much bigger canvas than I usually do and didn't really have a feel for it.

So I decided to do a couple practice pictures, of hideously cute monsterpeople. And also I haven't played with acrylics and mediums and color theory in way too long, and wanted to get my glazing on. Digital's fun, digital's fine, but there's something exhilirating about a project where one wrong move can permanently wreck hours of work and also potentially ruin my clothes. So first up, a skysnake:



Woah, that's red! And not just because it's against white main figure, either. But that's ok, I'm doing underpainting here, because my secondary practice in these is to experiment with glazing and acrylic mediums. This time I'm going for a sunset-ish sky, seeing if I can't hint at all those colors with a fairly flat and uniform background. Oh, the times I will have! Loong, looong, wait for it to finish drying times...

Because I have to add in color, like so:



And admittedly that is a fantastic, fiery background. But I don't want fiery. So time for another thin layer, along with more detail painting on my Cloudsnake:



Now that's pretty close to being done-- in fact, I could just do some highlights and touchups call it done, at this point. It would be ok. It would be pretty. But it could be *better*, I think, though I can't quite see the right thing to do to push it there. I don't like the all-pervasive blue in this piece, for one thing; my idea was to have it be high- contrast, like the others in the series (yes, it's going to be a series) and this isn't it. I also wanted it to look like she's against a sunset, sort of-those gold-pink tones I put in and all-- and this really isn't working for me. And I want something to break up the background.

I want a lot from a pretty simple piece! And I also don't want to experiment and totally muck up my lovely complicated background color. Playin' with software to the rescue!


Hmm. Yes, something with gold I think. This is probablya Bad Idea, and I bet I will look back on it with regret, but I look forward to trying it out! Stay tuned to see how dumb I turn out to be!


*Remember my shop? I have a shop. I forget it a lot. It has stuff in it! You should probably go look. I might add more stuff to it sometime! Any day! I am a woman of mystery like that.

The Problem With Painting

The problem with painting- and, I suspect, with any craft- is that it takes so darn long. So for instance, I spent alllll day Friday plotting out pictures, and allll day Saturday painting, and I have...this:

...which is to say, a scannerbed full of embryonic paintings. Two, actually; I ain't even showing half the work I cranked out. I know some people out there are saying "Well, why not focus on one painting until it's done, instead of making a whole bunch that aren't", and the answer, dear darling readers, is that paint needs time to dry. Especially for the stuff I'm doing, here, which is a lot of playing with textures and overlays. So the best use of my paint-time is to do a bunch of work in a setting, rotating pieces as they hit the dry-and-wait stage.

The deeper problem, with me, is that I have a brainspan of maybe a day. I can always come back to a project, yes, but my working time before a migraine/seizure knocks me flat is 8-16 hours. And if I can't get a project to a pretty good level of completion before then, I'm liable to forget what the heck I was trying to do, and unlikely to remember in the next couple weeks. I have projects it took siz months to finish, just because I totally forgot about their existence or purpose.

This is why I don't drive, by the way. "Huh, that light's red now! Pretty! Wonder why it changed..."

Anyway, I'm staring at these now, and I think I know where to go with them. But only because I made some detailed careful sketches and notes along the way. So today's question for you, gentle readers (and violent readers too, of all people I want the violent ones on my side) is: How does your internal art department function? Can you work on a thing daily for weeks? Do you need a deadline? Can you crank out whatever you need whenever it's asked for?