The Bookish Owl makeover

Well, I think I've had the most productive day in a while today! For once I put the computer games away and forced myself to sit down and do some work for my portfolio. One thing I made was this bookish owl, who will be a part of this blog's new design! Hopefully I'll be able to get it up tomorrow. I'm very proud of this one - for once, out of all the pieces I have archived on my computer, I can point at this one and say, 'yes, that's my style, that's what I do'.


Earlier this morning I completed this one. I think the lineart on the tiger may be a little overdone but overall I quite like it. I was going for a silkscreened look wth parts of it, and you might be able to see the parts where I have coloured outside of the outlines where the registration is off. I don't think this bear is all too thrilled by the tiger's attempt to gain his attention, but maybe he'll warm up to it sometime ;)

Blake's Bear

A while ago I was asked by a friend's partner if I could do a commissioned painting for their nursery room, in time for the birth of their baby. I had a lot of freedom - they wanted something to go with their teddy bear theme, and something unique and in my style. So to start I drew them a bunch of bears and they picked out the ones they liked. They were very fond of the bear playing with blocks, so I drew that one out again and did a few colour roughs for them to choose from.









After we worked out some colours that we liked, I set up my painting stuff and began! Here's some progress shots of the painting, and the final is at the bottom. They were very happy with it, and they've gotten a few comments about it apparently. I was certainly happy with how it turned out, I would say it's my best painting to date!!

The Deceit of Zeus

Sorry the scan isn't very good. For drawing class, we were asked to pair together two phrases from a small list to form a title, and create a piece to go with that title. When I was looking through them the first two that stood out to me were 'The deciet of' and 'Zeus', and I immediatly thought of the story of Zeus and Europa - probably my favourite tale from Greek mythology.

Zeus becomes enamored with Europa, and transforms himself into a white bull and mixes into her father's bull herds. Europa became fond of this white bull's gentle and playful nature, and one day she climbed onto his back. Zeus took this opportunity to take her away with him, he carried her on his back and swam to the island of Crete where he ravished her.

At first I started out with a more realistic looking style, but eventually it evolved into a more simple, graphic look. I think the final is sort of a mix between the two. The final piece was painted on toned pastel paper with a limited pallette of gouache.

I think I am getting closer to what I would call my style!

A few of my favourite artists

Today I decided to share some work by a few of my favourite artists. Hope you like them as much as I do!


^ Bill Presing


^ Becky Dreistadt


^ Mary Blair

^ Alice and Martin Provensen




^ Tim Biskup





^ Alberto Vivanco

Foxy

These are some studies for a John Wolseley inspired drawing. For this I wanted to do a character in my own style, and put it in a Wolseley-esque environment. I chose the fox because it's an introduced species, and around it will be dead leaves and plants indicating the result of allowing a foreign animal to thrive in a new habitat. Or something like that!

Boarish

I didn't go to class today because I was unwell again, but I did this cute piggy when I was a bit boared. Get it? Boar-ed? *guffaw*

Dragon!

I play World of Warcraft. I drew this dragon, which is called the Red Proto-Drake, for our guild website. Hooray!

Kitty

So after posting all that other stuff I did this... which is my usual style. And I feel good about this. So... maybe I dont need to change anything at all, just have some more confidence in myself!

Sketchs

Here's me trying to experiment with my drawing style. I feel like I have a lot more freedom drawing this way, and I enjoy drawing loosely but... well I need to do a lot of work on it.

Kittens n Crocs

Arggh it's been too long since I last posted. Not good enough Mel!!

I've been working busily on my crocodile character paintings but it's been, well, an annoying and frustrating exercise thus far. I did this painting in gouache first, and I am not happy with it at all.

Horribly painted and the values are terrible. Also, you can see my fail attempts to do drybrushing. Gah!! This made me think a lot about what I was trying to achieve with my drawing and painting styles, and what I wanted to do after Tafe is finished.

I figured I want to do something involving doing art for children's things. Picture books, educational publications, and maybe things like greeting cards and mascot characters and stuff. So I turned this assignment around and tried to make it really 'children's picture book'-like and here's what I ended up doing.


Not really very happy with either of these two, but I am happy I sort of branched out and tried something different. They're done in watercolour - good watercolour painting is so hard to do - once again, the values are horrible in these and I need to learn to paint flat, even areas of colour with watercolours properly. As for the style, I'm not sure if I really like the dot eyes, but then, they're kind of cute.