The Vanquisher of Evil...bushes...

I'm doing another project for a parent.  this time it's for my Mom.  She has been asking me for over a year if I would illustrate a favorite memory.  She likes to laugh about when I was a young tyke I would run around beating bushes with sticks and play swords.  I was really in to He-Man (still am) and I guess I had picked up some curse words on TV or something, and swore at the bush -- much to my Mother's dismay.

at any rate, here are some full sketches after about a million thumbnails.  I emailed them to Bill Carmen, my illustration instructor, and he wasn't amused that I split the composition in half vertically.  When he pointed it out, neither was I.  I'll admit I was pretty embarrassed.  I know better!

I was still hung up on what to do about the extra space as shown here, it is still empty.  I have a new set of compositional sketches that are in the approval process.

Oh and this will be an acrylic painting as well.

Hallway

This is a "thumbnail" of a project in my drawing II class.  It is going to be roughly 50 x 42" completed.  We had to come up with a "space"  and put some object or creature element in it.  no humans allowed.  I found a cool photo online of a hallway in Prague and couldn't think of anything interesting to put in the space that someone else wasn't already doing.  I decided to change a few things from the original photo of course and add a tree and some vines in photoshop to get a composition.

Once I start roughing the actual one in I'll add more details, but at least I have something to start.  This could be a cool painting project as well!  we will see!

right side is my original sketch.  I erased a ton so you can see a lot of ghost images.  I got yelled at by another student for trying to render it too much...it is a preview sketch after all, says they.  :P

anyway, I like the composition.

Acrylic Portrait studies

I decided to do some acrylic studies of some portraits.  A friend of mine inspired me to do so because he has been practicing with acrylics on his free time (even as school).  It made me realize how much of a slacker I am.  So I decided to do a couple (although not as successfully as his).  I used liquitex because I didn't feel like experimenting with my Golden today.  

these are both pictures i found on the internet.  the left is a green ground underpainting straight out of the tube.  It gave me some interesting colors as I was using an underpainting technique.  the one on the right Is a black/white/yellow mixture that is supposed to be a verdaccio type color, although I don't think it is.  what do I know tho, I've never known what that even is until I tried to do some research on what grounds some of the Masters used in their paintings.

apart from the inaccuracy of the illustrations themselves, I tend to still use some thick paints even when i am trying to do glazes.  And I can't seem to leave the line work alone so I put some of them back in at the end.

Over all they aren't very successful maybe, but there are elements that I really like about them.  I find underpainting really gratifying.