You will be pleased to know it’s official!  We have formalized Rebecca’s membership in our family with a 5-month portrait which will take it’s place on our wall as soon as the oils are dry.  There’s no getting rid of her now!

Daniel asked me to draw a monster for him so I sketched this quick Trolloc boy…I sketched a bit more…Daniel went to bed, I sketched a little more and my once lonely little Trolloc found himself in a pet store full of odd creatures and the gloop that would soon become his closest friend.

Back in October Daniel would go around the house saying “I love owls, and owls love me.”  I thought it was really cute and decided to paint an owl for him.  I got this far:

Then made the mistake of asking Daniel if he liked it.  He said, “No.  It’s too scary.”  So I never finished it.  Still, I thought it was kind of fun so I decided to post it anyway.  My poor little unfinished owl with no feet 🙂

Here’s a sneak peek of a new project I’m working on that Daniel DOES like (although he has recently decided the dragon ought to be blue):

The photo of Daniel is just a placeholder, I’ll use it as reference to paint him in later, once everything else is right.

I had fun experimenting with a new Photoshop technique as I worked on these card characters.

I scanned my pen drawing and after adjusting the levels to get rid of background noise from the scan I set the pen layer’s blending mode to “multiply.” 

Then I painted each object a solid color on it’s own layer.  This allowed m to use the hue/saturation slider to easily play around with color schemes. 

After I had the right colors I created a layer for the shadows  by painting the shadow areas with a single dark color and setting the layer’s blending mode to “color burn.”  If your image has a white background this blending mode works extra well because the shadow color will disappear on white, which means you don’t even have to stay in the lines!

I created the highlight layer by painting the light areas with a single light (almost white) color, and setting the blending mode to “soft light.”

Add a few little details here and there and viola! it’s finished!  This is SUCH an easy method for quick digital art.  I should have tried it out ages ago.

It’s been far too long since I’ve touched this blog.  So just to prove I have been doing artwork I thought I’d post a few sketches from the last few months. I’ve also started a couple of paintings, but I’ve found it difficult to finish anything between moving to a new house that needs a lot of work, pregnancy, and having a two year old who’s decided he no longer needs a nap time…

These guys are characters from stories I like to pretend I’ll write some day…

The rhino is for a children’s alphabet app Eric and I are thinking of creating for Windows 8.

And this is a stump.  I like it.

Every summer my mom produces and directs a Shakespearean play performed by community high-schoolers.  She puts so much work into these productions, making the sets, the costumes (ALL the costumes, which is a BIG deal, and they are fantastic!), casting, directing…she does pretty much everything except the posters…because that’s my job of course! 

Here is the poster I created for this year’s performance of Romeo and Juliet:

I was a little rushed on the color work, but I think it turned out pretty well considering.  What I’m most happy with is my initial line drawing:

To me it seems to have a life, elegance, and confidence that didn’t quite make it into the color version.

This is a head painting of another friend of Sala’s, the lovely Rachelle.  I actually had her dress up for me over Christmas break and we had a photo shoot.

I did a basic pencil sketch to start out with then scanned it into the computer to paint it digitally.

This was just supposed to be another study, but I was having so much fun that I ended up creating a mostly finished painting.  She reminds me a bit of Maid Marian so if I were to name this piece it would be “Dreams of Sherwood.”

Here are some close ups, I’m rather pleased with the clasp design I created:

Sometime I may come back to this piece and refine the border on her hood,  but I’m happy with it for now.  Thanks for posing for me Rachelle!

Sometimes I like to sketch people from Facebook, anyone is fair game (watch out, you could be next!).  Last week I did this sketch of one of Sala’s friends:

I liked how it turned out, so like any good sister would  do, I turned Sala’s friend into a Slytherin from Hogwarts casting an illegal spell.

The one on top is more saturated and higher contrast, the one below is duller.  I’m not sure which version I like better so I included them both.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the core of his wand is the heartstring of a teenage girl 😛

With nothing to go on but sketchy descriptions, it can be a tricky creating the picture my client has in their mind.  These trees are an example of that… It took a long time to find the right tree, but I have a whole forest to show for it!