Art Challenge 5 - 15th-28th March - "Vicious"

This is an unfinished one, I'm afraid. I want to be able to put a lot of time and effort into painting this and the art challenge doesn't really allow for that unless it's all I do, so this is just the drawing, pre-watercolour.

It's a fanart piece of the Fallout games. I couldn't think of the word "vicious" without "deathclaw" coming to mind. They're renowned for it.

I used two screenshots as reference - one for the main pose which was a deathclaw in the quarry in New Vegas (the alpha male, I believe), and another one because I couldn't make out what the hell was going on with their teeth, which I think is from Fallout 3. It's still not very accurate, probably, but I'm past caring. They don't kill with their teeth anyway and it still looks mean.

I apologise for the utterly awful photo; it's too dark here to get a decent one. If I remember I'll retake it in daylight. Unfortunately it's too big for me to bother scanning it until it's finished. It's the biggest thing I've done so far (still not huge by art standards but the largest I usually work at is 10"x7") and will need to be scanned in parts and then put together digitally. I don't fancy doing that twice.

The painting will be completed for a goal in April. I'll probably upload progress photos to Twitter, as per usual. This is half my blog title - the broken dreams half - but I hardly ever draw things that aren't pretty flowers these days, so it was nice to exit the comfort zone and do something else. It's actually been quite fun to do.

The next art challenge starts on the 1st of April, so we have a little break from art challenges now, and the word is "ruin". End of the month recap in a few days and I'm still preparing a monster art post!

Art Challenge 4 - 1st-14th March - "Colour"

I finished a traditional version of this yesterday (I know, a day early! Weird!) and then decided that actually, I'd rather do a digital version as it'd be "cleaner" (and "much better"). So, this time my art challenge submission is a digital piece, which I don't think has happened before. I don't think I've put a digital piece on my blog for ages, either. The label must be covered in dust.

I used the traditional painting to get the rainbow colours: cadmium red, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow, emerald, ultramarine, dioxazine violet and mauve. I used Photoshop to paint over everything except the umbrella and the blending in the sky, where I switched to a very temperamental Corel Painter. I used to utterly adore using that program and now it seems to be a million miles away from what I need it to be, which makes me feel a bit sad.

I have a HUGE draft post in progress with EVERYTHING that I haven't bothered to post over the last two years or so. It's going to be a monster, so don't hold your breath on me finishing it soon. There's a lot of things to scan and photograph!

Next art challenge is "vicious" - at the moment I'm thinking "deathclaw fanart"...

Art Challenge 2 - 1st-14th February - "Village"

DONE! One hour-ish early! YAY! Art challenge 2 complete!

It's been a while since I painted an aquarium scene and I LOVE painting them, so I did a little fish village thing. If it isn't village-y enough for you, just picture the tank sitting in the local doctor's surgery.

I made the mistake of using watercolour pencils because I wanted to try them out. It was a disaster, so this image has had some minor touch-ups in Photoshop. Watercolour pencils are not the most accurate things in the world, and the colour went on so thick that there wasn't much leeway for me to do anything much with it after that. I so wish I'd just used watercolour paints, but I've learned for next time. Watercolour pencils = not much detail, much larger space. Got it.

Don't get me wrong, the pencils were really nice to use (and there's 72 colours that I didn't have to mix, yaaaay!), but they clearly weren't suited for so much detail in such a tiny space. The paper is the 10"x7" block as per usual, so you can imagine how tiny the aquarium gravel is. Also, hand drawn and individually coloured aquarium gravel? NEVER AGAIN.

Next art challenge starts tomorrow, and the theme is "supernatural"! I have so many ideas in my head already that I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to go with. Should be interesting!

Art Challenge 1 - 15th-28th January - "Music"

Art challenge 1 COMPLETE!

Painted on 10"x7" Cotman watercolour block with Cotman watercolours (because I'm still too scared to use my artist quality stuff).

Art Challenge

I was talking to Derf over at Canned Comics yesterday and somehow the conversation turned towards this. We're going to do a kind of art challenge, starting on the 14th of January, where a person chooses a keyword or theme or something and anyone doing the challenge has to paint or draw something based on it. It doesn't have to be a finished piece and it can be any style or medium (including literature).

The deadline is two weeks later on the 28th, then the next one will be on the 1st of February to the 14th, then another until the 28th, then again on the 1st of March, and so on and so forth. This way we'll get a few days off and it's also fairly uniform for anyone who wants to join later on.

Fanart will be allowed for it but not specific keywords in case other people don't care about the fandom - for example "Assassin's Creed" wouldn't be very fair, but "assassin" would be fine. That gives people who would want to paint fanart the freedom to do so while also catering for anyone who doesn't care about Assassin's Creed in particular.

We have very different art styles so it will be quite interesting to see what we come up with off the same prompt, and obviously the more people who want to do it, the more variety we'll have. The person who decides the theme will probably be based on alphabetical order of names: that way if anyone wants to join in for odd ones or bow out because they're too busy, it'll be easy to slot them in again. 

Let me know if you're interested!