The last week and a half have been nothing but work – I got a new day job, so I have TWO day jobs until about September 6th. Plus there’s freelance work to take care of on top of that.
I managed to take Sunday off because I was celebrating my birthday! Technically my birthday was Monday, but I had to work that day. So the celebrations and trips were the day before.
Plus, just to add the panic cherry on top of the Work Stress Coffee Cake, an element of my website broke last week! A plugin I was using to display my images broke on my end of the website, so I had to uninstall the friggin’ thing and get a new thing in. It works, but the glitch took more time away from the art than I liked.
Thankfully it’s fixed now.
But that broken plugin? That’s why I wasn’t able to post a new update on the blog last week.
Anyway, I managed to scrape together some personal projects I started BEFORE the work tornado struck. Here’s a peek at them:
This lady is part of a new illustration series I started called Subversive Girls. It’s a series meant to show ladies whom people in general don’t think of as sexual (disabled ladies, fat ladies, etc), and show them in charge of their sexuality. Here’s a link to the first lady.
This is a watercolor sketch I started. I want to add light washes of color so I can draw in patterns in the costume on top of it. We’ll see how that turns out.
Ok, I was inspired to paint this after I went to the Carnegie Museum of Art on Sunday (the trip was a birthday present!). On display in their glass and ceramics collection was a vase made in raku technique – where a pot is fired and then removed while it’s still hot so it cools in the open air. It cracks the pot and the glazes and makes a beautiful mess.
There was a pot there made in this technique, with a visual explosion of glaze spots on its surface. It looked similar to the white negative space in the watercolor painting above, but it was black, shaped almost like a sorcerer working with starlight against the night sky…
So of course I had to draw and paint it.
Right now it’s in watercolor, though recently I bought a set of gouache paints – I have never used gouache before, so I would REALLY like to try it out once I have time to experiment.
I have a color scheme in mind which I’m keeping secret for now. However, I would like to experiment with adding a white border around the figure. My art pal Chloe does this sometimes with her sketches on Tumblr, and I love how they turn out. I also have a small container of white Copic ink which I use as correction-ink. Why not make it an outlining paint?
That’s all for now. Hopefully by next week, work will calm down enough that I can show you MORE new things.
Thank you for reading!
You. Are. Awesome.