painting on old books

I've seen this a lot lately, and think it is really cool. So here is my 1st attempt. The drawing was just a quick doodle I did that was very similar to another drawing I saw. But this was more for trying to figure out how watery to make the paint, and things like that.

Dubya in Photoshop

More fun painting in Photoshop......

Painting in Photoshop

This is my first attempt at painting an image in Photoshop. I inked the lines with the brush tool in Illustrator, then imported it into Photoshop. I also got a little texture happy, but I still think it looks cool.

Fridays off!

I've started a new schedule where I work four 10-hour days with Fridays off every week. This means I don't have time to work on anything new during the week, but also that I will have an entire day to myself that I can spend drawing & painting. With nice weather fast approaching, I really want to spend those days off going out to different places around the city and just sketching for a few hours. Of course it rained all day on my first Friday off, so instead I spent the day finally putting pics from several trips into photo albums. I decided to sketch a few of the photos, so here is the first one. It is the California Lighthouse in Aruba. I went there several years ago....long before I ever thought of a travel sketchbook. The sketch is done using a Micron pen and my travel watercolor set in a moleskine watercolor book.

Painting

I've taken a break from designing baby clothes and logos and decided to get back to some more traditional art. I really just wanted to play with my some of my Christmas presents...a set of acrylic paints, brushes, an easel, and clayboard. I'm not much of a painter; I never have been. I'm really not good at anything with color - pastels, watercolors, colored pencils, etc. But I know I won't get better unless I practice, and if I happen to create a lot of crap in the meantime, oh well. So, I asked for acrylic paints because they seemed like the best of both watercolors and oil paints.

For my first painting, I was really trying to get the feel for how the paints act. I tried mixing up washes and painting right out of the tube. There are definitely a lot of problems with this painting, but also, some aspects I like. I thought I did a decent job of laying in the wash for the sky. I also thought the use of a little orange was well placed. The actual pier looks like crap...the lines aren't straight, they're too thick, and the colors suck. But I learned a lot in the course of this painting which hopefully I will carry on to future paintings.




The second painting I tried to do more like a watercolor painting. I used watercolor paper which reacts much differently than clayboard. Again, there are several things I like and dislike about this painting. I like the way the sky wash turned out. I also like the texture and depth of the sand. I really like how the different colors of the water blend together on the right side. I could have done a better job with the hobie cats, especially the body of the boats. For the sails I probably should have stuck with the more transparent glazes, but I went for the thicker paint. I also took a little artistic liberty with the coloring of the sails which did not turn out well. Overall, not TOO bad, but I need lots of practice!