Art update, February 2019

A painting of a woman from the chest up, she has antlers on her head and long red hair, and has headgear that goes over her forehead, with tassles obscuring her eyes.

As previously mentioned, I’ve been enjoying the hell out of my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, and have been doing a whole lot more drawing/sketching/painting since then. I moved my Mastodon account over to a much smaller instance, mastodon.art, which as you’d expect is very focused on art and has a lot of extremely creative people on it, and I’ve been getting a daily dose of inspiration. (As a side-note, I can’t recommend enough moving to a smaller Mastodon instance as opposed to one of the huge ones like mastodon.social… it really does feel much more like a community, and the local timeline is something you actually can keep up with and interact with).

I found a really good series of tutorials on drawing people and facial expressions, and drew this!

Four cartoon-style heads: a white girl with long blonde hair looking unimpressed, a bald Asian man looking shocked, a black man with big hair and a goatee looking sleepy, and an Indian man smirking with one eyebrow raised.

After that were a bunch more extremely munted-looking people which I’m not going to post, but then I eventually got my proportions better.

A portrait sketch of a pale red-haired woman with green eyes, smirking and raising one eyebrow.

One of the artist-types I follow on Mastodon is Noah Bradley, he’s done paintings for all sorts of places including for Magic: The Gathering! He said he biggest piece of advice was “Use more reference!”, i.e. have an actual picture/photo/whatever next to the thing you’re drawing so you can get the proportions and such correct. I took that advice to heart, and painted this picture of what ended up as a queen!

A painting of a white woman from the chest up, lit from the left side while her right side is heavily shadowed. She has long braided blonde hair and is wearing a purple high-collared dress. Behind her and to her left and right are glowing red eldritch runes, giving a faint red tinge to her outline.

She looks nothing like the original photo, of course, but it really helped to get the angles of everything correct. I also really started getting the hang of lighting, I’m so pleased with the light from the runes that’s reflecting off her hair, especially on the right.

Lily’s Christmas present was the first-gen Apple Pencil for her own iPad and she’s been absolutely drawing her heart out as well. One of the things she likes drawing are My Little Pony characters… she’s never watched the show but enjoys making up her own characters. She set me a challenge of making a character myself, with the theme of “neon”, and I took that opportunity to do some more practice with lighting (see the linked image for the full effect). I found an outline online and traced over that for the shape, but the colour is all me!

A side-on painting of a My Little Pony character on a black background, coloured in dark blue with neon blue lightning at the top of her hooves and a dark purple tail with a purple neon light running down it.

We also took my old teddy bear Neddy out, who I’ve had since I was a year old, and used him for some lighting practice.

A three-quarter profile of a brown teddy bear on a black background, the edges of the left side of him are lit from a bright white light source to the left of the painting.

Then my latest work was Maria Franz from the band Heilung! They do epic pagan/folk music and it’s absolutely fantastic (see the video of their live show). I introduced Lily to them and she’s now completely obsessed. She sent me a picture of Maria Franz that she’d traced over and coloured in, and I realised that’d be a perfect bit of subject matter.

A painting of a woman from the chest up, she has antlers on her head and long red hair, and has headgear that goes over her forehead, with tassles obscuring her eyes.

I had a picture of her open in Safari in split-screen view so I could get the outline and proportions right, and Procreate tells me this was nearly 10 hours all up! I’m absolutely stoked with how it ended up, and just seeing the difference between my earliest stuff and now is great, even though it’s only been two months. The “Use reference” mantra is one that I’m definitely taking to heart.

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