Commission WIPs Continued

I was finally able to get some better lighting for the pictures. Sorry for the horrible lighting on the others. See the previous post for earlier pictures.

I think the larger squares are working a lot better than the smaller squares, yes? You can't see it too well from the photo, but the small squares made a nice underpainting for the larger ones. And by the way, The pair of pieces (again, they are a bull and a bear) are done with a palette knife. It's so much easier, and more controlled, to spread the paint around on a large canvas with a palette knife than with a brush. I'm wondering if I shouldn't have bright colors in the back. They might distract from the bear.

Commission WIPs

I'm doing a commission for my mom's office. Since she works in finance, she wants canvas paintings of a bull and a bear (symbols of finance). She can be demanding and it's a little hard to imagine the finished product. However, I'm doing my best. I'm going to have to redo the background with bigger and less squares. That's the awesome thing about acrylic paint, you can repaint over it without seeing what was underneath.

Bear sketch. The actual colors will be different

The patchwork quilt mistake. It will be changed ASAP

Looking at both the sketch and the canvas together like this, I see that bigger squares or blocks would look a lot better.

More Citrus Project WIPs

As I said in the last post, I wasn't done with my citrus project. Here's the recent work I've done on them...

I think it's looking OK so far, I'm not too happy with how the grapefruit background came out. But otherwise, I'm liking how its turning out.

Citrus Project

I started my own little art project yesterday which I called "Citrus Project". I will probably be doing a few drawings and paintings where the main focus is some kind of citrus fruit. My first one is on really tiny canvases; they are about 2.5"x3.5". There are four canvases in all and I painted a section of a different type of citrus fruit on it. The whole thing took about 3.5-4 hours to do.

Yesterday, I thought I was done, but when I woke up this morning and looked at the paintings again, I thought, "You know, I can make each one a truly individual piece of art. I can paint around the sections of fruit with a different kind of fruit." You can see what I mean more clearly when you see the actual piece below. But, I'll start off with some WIPs.

As you can see, it still looks a little unfinished (although it does look pretty cool). What I'm going to do is paint slices of lemon with the orange, slices of orange with the lime etc. I'll probably finish it at some other time.

More portrait sketches

Remember my AP concentration? The first thing I posted related to art? Well I ended up getting a 5 (whoop-whoop!!) which is the highest score you can get. So I decided to post the sketches of my concentration so you can see the whole creative process.

The sketches are in no particular order. These helped me a lot with my concentration. I was able to experiment with the media before I used it on the final piece. I must admit though, some of the sketches I hurriedly did just for the sake of doing one. But, for example, the 3rd and 4th ones helped me a lot with chalk pastels and color choice; the final piece referencing them had the 4th sketch's pose with the 3rd sketch's colors.

Sonic Drawing

Today, I'll show you a drawing that I'm currently working on for a fellow art buddy of mine. His name is Greg and he is a big Sonic fan (so Greg, if you're reading this and don't want to see it, don't scroll down). I promised him this drawing last Christmas and I just kept putting it off, and I'm very sorry Greg. It's not done yet, these are just the works-in-progress up to yesterday.

As you can see from the pictures, I'm using colored pencils to draw Sonic. You would be correct in thinking that it takes a while to color with colored pencils. Getting a deep color does take a while; that's why I like using Prismacolors. They're waxy and they have a nice color. But colored pencils are fun to use no matter what.