Because working on one thing at a time is boring.

News - I've added a contact email to the "About" page.

First of all, some finished scribbles from ages ago.

And now for more WIPs to add to the WIP collection (if anyone is keeping track, please don't tell me how many there are).

This is the third sheet of watercolours that I keep talking about. It's progressed quite a bit since this photo, but it's still in progress. Convincing purple and green to blend together can be quite soul-destroying.

This is part of the latest thing to be added to the WIP pile. I finished the skirt and her hands, plus it's had a few light washes since this photo. I'm using this book as inspiration.

Then there's also a male character design that I haven't photographed, but I might scan that and try doing it digitally. I can't get the level of detail that I want into the drawing so I'm having to draw details enlarged at the side with arrows pointing to where they go (his necklace for instance). Digital painting is proving very difficult without a desk, though, so if I did do that then I'm pretty sure it'd never get done. How people do traditional character designs on A4 I will never know.

EDIT EDIT EDIT I almost forgot: the little A6 sketchbook that I was using for horrendous plein air paintings and ONLY horrendous plein air paintings has had a change of purpose, starting today. It just isn't possible for me to do plein air paintings here - I don't have a car to drive myself places or to shelter in and paint out of during horrible weather (like it will be until summer, pretty much) so if I leave that book as wanderings-only it'll never get used. It's going to be for daily disasters instead, of whatever the hell I like. I may or may not post them here: I've never posted the plein air ones, so don't hold your breath. Plein air was a brilliant exercise and I wish I could do more of it but it just isn't going to be possible while I'm staying here. I'm hoping that regular little paintings and sketches will help me to improve

Anatomy Practice: Horses - 2

Might as well post like this. Just pretend that the bad iPhone photos are scans, okay? My iPhone doesn't rotate images when you take landscape pictures and I have no idea why, so here's three really bad pictures instead of a nice clean scan. Anyway.

I used one of my million horse books as reference for these. The first one is the first time I've bothered to try and add a rider/tack. The horse's legs and neck look too short and the head looks too small (to me anyway) but yay half-rider.

The second one is the first time I've drawn a horse jumping, but I didn't really have space to add the rider properly so I just did lines. The reference was TINY, probably less than one inch across, so I was more interested in just getting a general outline done.

The third one is the first time I've drawn a full horse without it being completely side-on. There's a bit of actual 3D going on there, but I didn't draw the fence in and ended up not drawing the front legs as high as in the reference. Oh well. I also couldn't get the head right to save my life.

The fourth was just me cheating because I couldn't find a full-body one to draw that I thought would fit the space. I still can't draw in bone structure etc in my sketches and they're still ending up as just outlines, which isn't going to be as helpful when I'm colouring. There's an art to proper lines when drawing and I'm nowhere near it. I enjoyed doing these though. I'm hoping to take a lot of photos of my model horses soon to aid me in drawing from different angles (they're very anatomically correct so it should be fine), but now I don't have a laptop I won't be able to see the photos for a while anyway. Grr.

Two equine WIPs.

EDIT: WIPs both look really pixelated, they aren't like that normally. Odd.

Two things I've been trying to work on. One is a painting from a screenshot of A Knight's Tale (I love that movie) and I started it a month or so ago, and the other is my attempt at painting a horse sim of mine from The Sims 3.

There's still a lot of work to do on the face, armour and bridle ... plus I need to quickly throw a background together. Most of the work I've done is on the eye and I don't think that's finished either. Painting a close-up image when I have a broken tablet was a horrible idea.

This is Sandy the simhorse. He's a Welsh Cob stallion with very weird colouring - I have no idea what to call his colour. Been a while since I bothered studying horses properly. It's pretty either way, and dappled (which I probably won't even try). Here's a screencap of him stuffing his face. It's dusk here but you can kinda see his colouring.

The painting is from a screencap as well. It's a really cute one of my simcat staring up at him. I'm not sure if I'll paint just Sandy or the cat as well because it's kinda tiny as it is. I'm making the image larger as I go so the end result will be decently sized, but while I'm working on basics it's not a giant image to work on. I prefer getting basics down on a smaller canvas so I can just sketch and scribble. At the moment it's been doubled in size once already and the WIP here is the current size.

Plenty more WIPs to come, nothing finished I'm afraid. Current work in progress is another painting for my mom and my blog isn't allowed pictures of that because she checks it. I'll try to get some more things up soon.