WIP December #6: Merry Christmas! & Something Festive?

WIP: Snowy scenery at sunrise, a.k.a. I’m still painting.

Comments: First things first: Merry Christmas!

Today is also the last post for WIP December. I’m a little sad that I’ve reached the end of this but also relieved, because now I can move on to another project for the blog. Plus, there’s a chance I will do this again next year. So, it’s all good.

Anyway, today’s WIP was inspired by sunsets and snow. It doesn’t snow in the part of California where I live—except on very rare, unusual occasions—which is the complete opposite from where I used to live in Virginia where winter felt like winter. Admittedly, the rest of WIP December wasn’t very Christmas-y, and I couldn’t end this without something appropriate for the time of year. So, here’s my something-festive.

Here's a better explanation for this painting: I’ve always loved the colors of a sunsets and sunrises and how the light can affect the landscape. In my opinion, one of the coolest effects is when the trees are turned all dark and shadowy, and the snow has a bluish quality to it. It puts an emphasis on the color of the sunset. I love it! And, I also wanted to paint it. So, I did. Enjoy!

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What's the best gift you gave or received? Or, what are you working on today?

WIP December #5: Still Painting

WIP: Painting; original character without a name.

Comments: This painting is the product of two factors: I wanted to work on another face and continue painting. Both things happened to work in conjunction with each other. So, I pulled a sketch from my sketchbook.  This is the result. I had so much fun with this painting. Faces/people are one of the things I’ve struggled to paint using traditional mediums. Through trial and lots of errors, I’ve realized that it was time to upgrade my supplies with ones that were better suited for my needs. Changing the type of watercolor paint and colored pencils I was using made a noticeable difference in my process. Reeves works for what it’s worth—landscapes in particular—but going forward, I much prefer Sakura Koi because of the way the paint works when layered. It still took some time to achieve the look I wanted; however, it was much easier. Also, practicing faces helped a lot. I found it easier to get the contours and shadowing the way I wanted.

There are a number of old paintings that I want to redo, and there's one in particular that's already at the top of my list: the Padme Amidala painting from the Halloween Post .

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Are you working on anything interesting?

WIP December #4: New Paint + Another House

WIP: I've returned to drawing houses.

Comments: The simplest explanation behind this painting is that I got some new art supplies that I needed to get comfortable with. I haven’t done a proper review for them and figured that I might as well go ahead and talk about them, since I will be using them regularly. The first item is a new set of colored pencils: Prismacolor Premier. Second, Michaels had a 60% off coupon on the Saturday after Black Friday, and I got new watercolor paint: Sakura Koi Pocket Field Sketch Box. I have used products by Sakura before—including the white gel pens and the fine liners—and have wanted to try this set of watercolors for a long time.

Sakura Koi is very different from Reeves Watercolor. The colors are vibrant, and I disn't feel like I had to try as hard to achieve the shades I wanted. The finish is smooth. It’s not chalky once it’s dry, which is what I was expecting since this paint is a little more expensive than Reeves. I also love the colors, and I'm especially a fan of the olive green. I’ve tried to mix paint to get that shade before, and it’s never been exactly what I’ve wanted. So, having the shade already there—no mixing required—makes me absurdly happy because I know that I’m going to get a lot of use out of it.

This painting was more of an experiment than some of the other pieces of art I’ve talked about on the blog. So, I also wanted to see how white gel pen and my new set of Prismacolor Premier colored pencils would look on top of the paint. Due to the colors I was using, you can’t really see the colored pencils. That being said, the white does standout.
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WIP December #3: Faces

WIP: Faces.

Comments: I’m halfway through this series of posts and have decided to temporarily switch gears and work on some faces, because facial features are one of the things I need to work on. So, here are two pages from my sketchbook.

I’m trying to challenge myself so I don’t fall into the habit of being too comfortable with a limited set of features, because I don’t want all the characters I draw to look the same. It’s something I tend to keep in mind, particularly when I’m going the digital route. With traditional mediums, I'm more conscious of this.

As I finished the first page, I realized I just wasn't done with this yet.  What should have been a quick drawing exercise ended up creeping onto the next page. Once I fell down that rabbit hole, I ended up finding  too many unique faces that I wanted to sketch. I just kept going when I knew I should have moved on to something else, but I was on a roll. And then there's that one lone doodle. It looks so out of place next to the other faces on the page, and more than once, I wanted to add more and more detail to it. It also didn’t help that I was working on the same two pages across multiple days and had to remind myself that it was just doodle.
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Are you working on anything interesting?

WIP December #2: Houses

WIP: Houses.

  

Comments: At this point, I have committed to drawing a few buildings before moving on to something else. Around the time I started working on this post, I watched Minnie Small’s video on how she draws buildings—she has a lot of good advice, and I highly recommend checking out her channel if you have the time. You can check out the video HERE. I was inspired by it, and decided to just take the plunge and draw buildings without overthinking the process. I had a lot of fun just playing around with pencil. I originally thought that I might try to also work on my lines with Fine Liners—or even colored pencil—but it didn’t work out that way. As I moved from one sketch to the next, I quickly discovered that I liked the look of it as is, which prompted me to leave them in pencil. Also, apparently I'm a fan of houses with panel exteriors. It was something I notice when I was looking for references. I was drawn to houses with interesting architectural details and exteriors—particularly wood and vinyl sidings.

Story time: I used to live in a house that had a combination of red brick and vinyl on the exterior. I remember a couple of occasions when the wind actually damaged and tore down the vinyl. I can't remember how many times that happened, but I'm sure that it was more than twice.
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WIP December #1: Introduction + Mini Paintings

I’ve been having a lot of fun with art related posts, and I got this idea at the end of October to do a short art series in the month of December. I wanted to end of the year in a way I haven’t done before. So, starting today and scattered throughout the month of December, I will be posting somewhat random pieces of art including sketches and paintings. I'm calling this WIP (work in progress) December. There will be six posts in total.
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WIP: Mini paintings (waterfall; barn; lake).

            

Comments: If you follow the blog on twitter, you might have caught the tweet about the barn and lake paintings. And let me tell you, I’m having an inordinate amount of fun painting on small pieces of paper. I found that it’s a good exercise because the limited space has challenged me to think about what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and committing to each color choice and brush stroke. Fun fact: when I paint water, I don’t typically do reflections on. It’s a weird habit that I’ve developed and hope to get away from. So, I wanted to switch it up for the lake piece and actually work on some reflections.

Fun fact #2: waterfalls aren’t that difficult for me—neither are most basic bodies of water like beaches and coves. When I started mixing in traditional painting with digital painting, oceans, waterfalls, and lakes were the subjects I started on and got really good at. I’ve done them often enough to memorize the key features and colors. Water turned into a subject I enjoy painting. It's kind of relaxing.

I’m probably going to be drawing more buildings for WIP December, because I want to get to the point where I can draw from memory instead of relying so much on references for simple things. I need to stop painting bodies of water, and get to work on buildings.
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