New stuffs! Huzzah!!!

Quick update:  New painting!!  For the same project as the first, but more DYNAMIC!  Sorry for the shouting, I just finished a big ol' cup of joe here.  What would you do if you were being portal-ed somewhere you didn't want to go?

What's more, be sure to check out www.timewarsccg.com and if you have a few bucks, donate to their Kickstarter.  It's gonna be an awesome game and donating now is the best way to get your hands on some limited edition cards and stuff!

Boy I'm bad at being punctual!

Allo, all!  Sorry for the absence...been doin too many things at once but hey, that's how I roll, yo.  Is that what the kids say these days?   I would rather like to come across as "hep."

But I have a new piece, so it's all good bro (hep?)!  It's for a (for now) undisclosed upcoming project.  But I can at least show you the art I'm doing for it!  And so I present....

.....this


And that's all I'm a'sayin for now.


Stay jiggy with it, y'all!!







Hep?

On improvising...

SO!  Been working with a painting recently, something a little more lighthearted than I usually go for.  But it's been a blast so far.  Here's a quick detail of the rough/underpainting:

Now...this whole idea did not come without it's....erm....unique issues.  Luckily, having spent all of art-making career incredibly broke, I've sort of learned to MacGuyver things together to make reference photos.  I'm not talking about making maquettes here, although that's a pretty great option if you're stuck, because, frankly, I can't afford to dish out Scupley money.  And Sculpey isn't so great for BIG props.  I needed a metal helmet for the reference, and although I have an ever-growing collection of hats (ranging from Victorian top hats to 40's style stocking caps), I actually don't own any sort of helmet.  Not even one of those Halloween, plastic Viking helmets I could pry the horns out of.  What to do?

This is when you sit down and think through what exactly is involved with the prop you need.  In my case?  Metal + helmet shape.  Well...tin foil is metal.  And it's the right level of "shiny" as far as what I'm looking for, so there's that.  And bowls are pretty helmet-shaped, right?  All I'd have to do is "build" on a lip to make it look legit.  Imagine my mother's surprise when she came home to find me rooting through her glass popcorn bowls, methodically trying each of them on head.  Luckily, luckily, one sat on my noggin correctly and I figured if I only needed to wear it for a little while to get the photo, the whole "this is cutting off my circulation" problem wouldn't be TOO big a deal.  

To make a long story short (too late), the picture above is actually me sitting with a tin-foil covered popcorn bowl on my head.  It looks much less goofy in the painting, which is good news for us all.

The lesson?  You don't need fancy, expensive props (most of the time-I'm not going to say always because I refuse to be held accountable for your results).  With a little ingenuity, and a lot of patience, you can pretty much make anything you need for a painting.  Provided, of course, you're not afraid of looking like a lunatic.

Illustration Friday: Obsession

Well, this is my first time participating in Illustration Friday and...and I just couldn't help it!  The weekly topic was "obsession" and I couldn't help but be reminded of my near-OCD checking for Silent Hill details.  Downpour is gonna be out soon, and I've been ravenously devouring every yummy little detail I can find.  I'm a survival horror junkie, I'll admit it.

I'm not dead! Really!!!

I'm aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!!!  I've just been tooling around the country and generally not-being-in-one-place, thus the lack of updates.  But I'm paintin' stuff!!  Lots of stuff!!  Just to prove I'm not a zombie, I'll even show you a rough I'm working on!!

More soon!

I'm sometimes shocked that I haven't been locked away

I do strange things on occasion, and I am completely willing to fess up to that.  I once ran away with a hippie to the suburbs to build a pirate ship bow and it seemed totally rational at the time.  Which is why I'm often astounded that my loved ones are able to take this oddness in stride so well.

For example, I had a near mental breakdown when I realized that the Tron: Legacy dvd had been released.  I LOVED Tron: Legacy.  The entire thing is basically a two hour long Daft Punk music video, and I can't imagine what could ever be bad about that.  When I went to buy a copy, however, I discovered that the store I was near only had it in Blu-Ray, that movie format that I will never be able to afford.  I checked another local store only to find they were totally out of stock.  And that would be when the madness and panic started up.

The following comic is the exact conversation I had with my boyfriend immediately following the aforementioned event:

So, in the end I DID end up with a copy of Tron (and a free poster to go with it which caused me to do a mini happy dance outside the store...people stared).  And the poor guy that was subjected to all that insanity was then forced to sit and watch the whole film with me while I bounced up and down like a crazed five-year-old on speed.

He's just lucky I decided at the last minute NOT to buy the celebratory glow sticks to flail around with during the battle scenes.

I just can't take it anymore

I've been playing The Witcher for about two months now and it's just....it's killing me.  Slowly.  Very slowly.  Yes, I know the game has been out forever and I've had it for two years now, but the 40 freaking minute opening cinematic always prompted me to walk away from the computer before even getting to the action.  This time, however, I said to myself, "Kelsey, you like RPGs, you will like this.  Hang in there until it lets you move all by yourself."  Mistake.

Once you get into the game, cool things DO start happening.  For instance, pretty soon you see a huge, terrifying dog-beast that happens to be on fire all of the time.  Which is cool.  And then the game informs you that it's your job to kill it and save the town.  Which is even cooler.  But...then this happens....

And I figured that if I just buckled down and kept going, it would get more intense.  I mean, that was just the beginning, right?  There's gonna be some meat and potatoes to this thing eventually.  But no.  No.  That right there?  Yeah, that's the game.  The whole game.  Just insert different voices with the same character models for different chapters.

Oh and speaking of voices, why does a white, Celtic-looking thug sound like he's doing a bad Samuel L. Jackson impression?  Anyone?

At any rate, I plan to spend the rest of the day deciding if I'm stubborn enough to grind through the rest of this monstrosity or if I need a new cd-shaped frisbee.  And then maybe I'll be able to actually paint something instead of worry how many monster brains I've collected so that I can get into a locked house in order to start that quest about the lost puppy which might allow me to actually progress in the story in about seven thousand more hours.

CAAAAAAAANDY!!

This is just a quick (~30 min) paint-y sketch I did for some promotional banners for the chocolate shop I work for.  Yay chocolate!

Finished!!

This is the final Icarus piece!  It took about 20 hours total, give or take.  Yay!!!!

More Icarus

Everything is basically roughed in now, time to move on to closer, more detailed work now.  The background is starting to be fleshed out and the wings have actual structure too (woot!).  I've also managed to fix most of the problems that I created for myself earlier!!  Huzzah!

Two steps forward, one step back...

Now comes the point in a painting where I manage to royally screw up half of the proportions that I very carefully drew out in the beginning.  No, I don't know why I do it, nor often how, but it happens.  I start to smoosh the paint around so much that my outlines sorta...well, migrate.  So as I rough in the color, I have to carefully re-establish the original outlines/proportions or the whole thing goes kitty wompus faster than you can say Corel Painter.  Here's the beginning of the color roughs with the original layout slowly being redone:

Phase 3

Starting to tighten up.....

Icarus

With everything mostly calmed down, I've gotten back into painting mode and a big 'ol thank goodness for that!  It's funny how you can sort of lose sight of the actual art end of things when you're focused on an actual show/installation....and the art part is the FUN part!!  So I'm getting started on a painting I've had in mind for a while and boy does it feel good to put virtual brush to equally virtual canvas.  I love the story of Icarus and Daedalus, I have since I was a kid actually, and it bothers me a little bit that images of pre-death Icarus are few and far between.  I wanted to do a mood piece of Icarus the night before he and his father are going to take flight.  I'll be posting this in increments, step-by-step, so first is the figure line work with simple blocking:

And starting to flesh out the blocking, heightening the contrast and sketching in his wings and the background gradient:

Also, just as an afterword...if you tell your boyfriend "Hey, would you mind um...taking off your pants, tying this sheet around your waist like a half toga and sitting in the hallway with an extremely hot light on your face while I take photos of you?" and have him just shrug and go for it...keep him.

Hullo

Until the gallery show is over this Wed, there will be little to say at all besides "DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS AND ALL THAT IS HOLY WHY IS EVERYTHING BREAKING OH GOD THESE MATS ARE THE WRONG SIZE AHHHHHHHHHHHH," so I thought that beginning to actually write in this here blog-o-space would be a little tedious, if not grounds to have me put away in a little white coat if you know what I mean.  But then I reasoned, hey, this here is a pretty blank blog-o-space (shweet logo aside) and not so interesting to look at.  And then I came up with a solution.

So, until I am less panicked (the title of this blog is not a joke.  really.  stop laughing.), here is a picture of a cock..