Saturday, April 30, 2011

Old-Timer


It's been so long since I've done anything on this painter program that I completely forgot how to do the simplest things, and had to get my books out. It seems that one has to keep in practice to not have to keep learning the same lessons over and over again....

(This really looks much better enlarged--click on it twice).

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Illustration Friday: Journey


(Ack--since when do the new topics get posted before 10 am on Friday? I was going to get in on the tail end of "journey"--)

It is of course nonsense to call this a "journey" picture, when it's obviously the companion to "duet" from a couple weeks ago, but it is true, though, that the making of this picture has been a journey. I made the sketch (on watercolor paper, because I'm way way too lazy and impatient to do sketches on other paper, and heavens, transfer them to the good paper) at the same time I started the "duet" picture, and as soon as I finished the first one, I started with the pen on this one, and was pretty happy with how it was starting to turn out when I left it on the diningroom table one day when I went to work, and the dog, who has outgrown eating kleenex out of the trash and chewing the fingers off gloves, still has a proclivity for watercolor paper (he didn't touch any of the other piles of paper on the table) and did a job on it.

Well, I found all the pieces (fortunately he didn't eat any of them, unlike the last time he took a drawing, and I never did find even a scrap of it) and taped them back together, and wasn't entirely displeased with how it looked, so I made a few addition tears for effect and worked on it some more.

But it was missing....something, so I put some watercolor on it, and then it looked....garish, so a couple days later I painted over that with a wash of ink which helped some, but still.....

Much pen-work later I'm declaring it done, though I'm not at all happy with it. It's better than it was after the dog first shredded it and after I put the water color on it, but still....

So that's this picture's journey.



Friday, April 8, 2011

The Real Duet

I'm going to cheat on this one. I made it for the "duet" topic, but I'm going to link it to the "bottle" topic for Illustration Friday. Here's my excuse. How do you "bottle" a song that someone sings? You record it, obviously, which is all well and good, but unfortunately, in today's society, far too many people only listen to recorded music, and not live music, or even worse, don't make music themselves at all. So perhaps these things SHOULDN'T be bottled..... Well, the color is all whacky because this is way too big for the scanner (it's just black ink on whitish paper) and thus taken with a camera with the white balance evidently off, but here is the REAL duet. I played hooky from school yesterday, and took the dog running through the woods, and worked on art projects all afternoon.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Illustration Friday: Duet



This has been the most beautiful Illustration Friday topic yet. I have absolutely LOVED the illustrations--both the musical ones, and the nature ones (owls, bales of hay, etc.) and the abstract ones. Being someone who makes music pictures, I was really wanting to make a really nice one (and perhaps may), but instead I'm posting a quickie little funky drawing, mostly just to post something. I'm not done with this topic--either making something or looking at people's marvelous postings, but alas, it's already Thursday.....