Month of Fear:Week 2

Watercolors on Bristol

This week's challenge is 'What is your reoccurring nightmare?'

I would have to say that mine is probably the nightmare of loosing someone I care about. Sometimes I have dream snatches of the possibility of loosing someone close to me, be it my mother from a heart attack, or my husband from any number of things from a car accident, to being deployed somewhere and not coming back home. 

Of course none of us can escape from Death when he finally comes for us. But the idea of him coming is no less unsettling. 

Trying to end this post on a more positive note: according to my dream dictionary to dream of someone dying actually isn't that bad of an omen. It means some sort of a rebirth, or some sort of a good omen for things to come. 

Until next week.....

Month of Fear: Week 1

It's been a while since I posted anything to my blog, and a lot of things are changing for me. 

I recently attended Cincinnati Comic Con, which was kickstarted by Tony Moore. I had a great time in Artists' Alley with the rest of the crew from Surreality, plus Andrew Day, R.C. Young, and our beloved Amanda Bolin. It was my first time setting up behind a table and selling my art, and I plan on attending more conventions in the future as an exhibitor. 

I have also opened up shop on Etsy, selling pin up prints and offering commissions as well. Check that out here. 

But now onto the reason for this post. There is an online challenge going on over here that I have decided to participate in this month. I first saw this blog when they were doing a Month of Love earlier in February, and decided for me it was a bit too late to join in on that. 

Week 1's challenge is 'What Lives Under Your Bed?' 

This is something that I was afraid to consider as a child, and something that, from time to time, also haunts my thoughts now as an adult. I am afraid of many things, namely spiders. And so I thought that would serve as inspiration enough for this week's challenge piece. 

And so here you have it, a young girl creeping to the end of the bed to investigate that weird bump in the night that your parents try to tell you is just normal house noises. Or perhaps investigating that there are no Ghoulies hiding under you bed, because you stayed up late on Saturday night watching Svengoolie on the boob tube. 

11 x 14 watercolor doodle

Looking forward to the next challenge idea. 

#monthoffear

Private commission. Watercolors on 140lb hotpress watercolor paper. This came out very well for a piece entirely out of my comfort zone, not just for the use of green and blues in my pallet, but overall. It was fun and tricky. I need to work more on foliage. It's good to work outside the box, and frustrating. 

Ch-ch-cha-changes!

I'm posting this to let you know that I will be planning a revamp of my work, which will most likely include this here blog of mine.

I think that I have been totting around a whole lot of baggage since college, perhaps before then too. I realize that now is the time for me to maybe take a step back from a few things and try to sort things out. Find out my likes and dislikes of my art making, really take a moment to go over and practice a lot of things that art directors and fellow artists have been telling me to explore.

I am not sure when I will have a chance to come back to this blog, but be sure that I will, with much better work.

With that, I leave you with this pencil draft for a private commission....

Coloring for Surreality

Hello world, it's been a bit since I posted anything on here.

I wanted to take a little time out to call attention to the web comic Surreality, created and inked by fellow alumni Caleb King and Carla Wyzgala. This coming April will be the mark of our first anniversary of releasing our online web comic.

The image as sent by Carla

I like to throw some color in  with the borders

Laying in the foundation colors

Adding in simple layer tweaks

Finishing up with some detail

Above is a quick look into how I apply colors to the comic. This is my first time as a colorist and I think that in the last year of working on this I have learned a lot (especially about cheating with layers). Caleb is a wonderful writer and artist as well (not to mention a pretty relaxed slave driver). Carla and I have been wanting to collaborate on something for a while, so I was her first choice in a colorist, and I am happy to have not let them down. 

Our comic has been a great success, and last summer we were pleased to reach our goal to fund a special anthology comic featuring the works of Andrew Day, Lucas Durham, Nicolas Giacondino, David Pauwels, and of course ourselves. Could there be another anthology in the future of the comic? We'll have to wait and see. 

Post Gen Con

So I'm back from Gen Con, which was a total blast since I took a big step away from volunteering to run much for my game group, which freed up my time to do some other things. I got to walk the floor in the dealer hall and chat with people a bit more as well as hang out with a good buddy of mine when schedules allowed.

Mighty Muggs on Display

I got a chance to stop by to visit my mighty mugg that I did as a design challenge for ArtOrder, and checked out the others there as well (everyone did a smashing job!). I also had a chance to sit in on some paint overs by Todd Lockwood, and while my USB wouldn't work I was still able to pick up a lot from the experience and hope to have a chance to meet up with him again at a future convention. 

There was also the Brimstone Drawing Club, which made it's debut at the convention. It's ran by Natanya Rubin and Kyle Bice, and featured some awesome models! I hope they come back next year and I hope they have at least a later session to see if they can snag any of the artists from the hall to come in and draw. 

Little Alice

I also had ad double portfolio review from WotC's Jeremy and Kate, as well as a later one from Zoe from Fantasy Flight. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that despite my own doubts (which were many) that my art is really coming around. I still have things I need to work out, but for the most part they seem fewer and far between. Zoe mentioned that if I can polish off things a little my work could get accepted for publishing, and Jeremy pushed me to delve deeper into my watercolors and gave me a lot of very helpful advice. 

So my focuses will be narrowing down quite a bit in terms of portfolio work, and widening in terms of working with my media. I have to say I feel great about being encouraged to work more on my traditional watercolors rather than digital. 

And last, but not least.....while I was away at the convention my buddy started up a kickstarter for the web comic that we are all working on. So check it out, and donate! And stay tuned for some WIP work on a new painting and possibly an inside scoop on my color work for the comic!

Mighty Mugg Wrap Up

Original Design

So I know that it's been a while since I updated this, and now with Gen Con just a few days away I realized I ought to get on with the wrap of the Might Mugg Challenge (Which has been a challenge and a blast!)

So when I last left off it was when I had started to go into the actual washes of paint to the figure after all the prep work to get there. 

Using the original design as a ref

I apologize for having skipped taking pictures after this point in the process, but sometimes when you get your groove on you just get caught up in the moment when it comes to painting. I decided I didn't like the yellow for the gold in her outfit so I applied a few coats of Golden paint's gold acrylic to give it that shine.  Once the figure was done I spray primed her with a protective coat.

Now a word about the protective sealer. I had bought it but wasn't going to use it once I had the paint job done because I was afraid she would be really hard to photograph. However I ran into some issues with the sculpy acting weird so I used the sealer to try to keep the problem from getting worse. I guess that sculpy III has some change to the chemical base as opposed to the normal sculpy, and despite following directions to boil it to harden as opposed to baking it, there were a few places were it became very tacky. 

Creating the Whip of Fangs

With the Mugg out of the way it was onto her accessories. Again, I kinda got lazy so there aren't any pictures of the process. For the whip I used a bit of a dowel rod, some thin wire which I braided, and some more sculpy....oh, and superglue. God, yes, superglue.

Again I primed and sanded this down before painting it and sealing it. I decided at the end to add a bit of sewing floss to the effect of tongues coming out of the snake head's mouth. For the skirt I just used a piece of faux leather from an old skirt and cut it out after futzing around with it to see how best this would work out. I sewed a bit of wire into the hem to help it hold it's shape to the top and used some velcro to keep it around her waist. I also cut a slip to add as a belt and just used cardboard which I painted as the buckle.

Oh yeah!

You can see how she turned out above. Overall I am quite pleased with how she looks though in hindsight it would have been cool to give her some hair from a scrap of wig or something. And the best thing...?

Quenthel with her comrades on Jon Schindehette's desk!

The best thing was seeing the picture that the AD of WOtC took of her and some of the other muggs from the challenge on his desk! Gen Gon is only a few days away now, and I can't wait to see how all the other muggs turned out. If you'll be at the convention, make sure to stop by and check these babies out!