We have chickens!

We now have 4 Rhode Island Reds, 2 Barred Rocks, 2 Buff Orpingtons and 2 Ameraucanas.

Daily Monsters

I swear I really do draw every day. I just don't scan every day.

Illustration Friday
"Breezy"

I took the easy way out this week. At least I didn't dig through old work to find one that matches the theme...

*Stepping on soapbox*
C'mon people. The whole point of Illustration Fridays is to ILLUSTRATE and to create something new each week. It doesn't do you any good to just recycle your old work. You're not getting any better and it's lame as hell.
*Stepping off soapbox*

Daily Monsters
Had a little catching up to do...

Illustration Friday:
"Instinct"
I believe love is the greatest instinct Humans have. We don't have many so we should make the most of the ones we have.

Daily Monsters
Someone started a Daily Monsters thread on a forum I like and since no one who reads this blog will ever see it I thought I'd share my monsters here.

Illustration Friday:
Celebrate

I thought I'd combine Daily Monsters with this week's theme.

Illustration Friday

"Time"

Illustration Friday:

Flawed

I decided to try and commit to illustration Friday (http://www.illustrationfriday.com/).

The poor bird is always going the wrong direction. Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing but I can relate.

Step By Step
Christmas Painting

I had never done a step by step before and thought it would be interesting. This is basically how I do every painting.

It always starts with the sketchbook. Usually I just sketch whatever I feel like and the cool ones turn into paintings. In this case I needed to come up with a layout that showed a family of 7 people. I started with thinking about a family tree and did a good amount of sketching at work on yellow notepads during meetings. I seriously fall asleep if I don't sketch during meetings.

I found that the tree thing just wasn't working and went in the direction of individual portraits on a wall.

Here I'm flushing out layout and background etc.

Because I wanted to get all the frames to line up correctly I did a digital layout. I usually don't do any part on the computer prefering to just work out the drawing right on the board.

I primed a board with gesso and did my under drawing in pencil.



Next I erase the pencil until it's very light, then paint in all the outlines.



The follies of doing most of this very late at night is that I get dumber as it gets later. Here I've reduced the number of frames to seven from nine. You'd think with a college education I could count. You'd be wrong.

Pencil drawings of the family. When doing a portrait I always struggle with trying to make them look like the individuals while still being me.

Again, I erase the pencil until it's very light then paint the outlines.

This shows the tinting where I use some type of earth color. Raw Umber here I think. I also like Burnt Sienna. If any of the board shows through on the final painting I don't want it to be the white gesso. I think it looks much better for an earthy color to be the ground as it were. White showing through looks cheap.

I've painted the first pass of the wallpaper and fleshtones. I also made a correction to Lisa's hairline.

Second pass on the wallpaper as well as a color glaze to "tie it all together".

Working on individual portraits. Background, hair and flesh. I'm well into the "ugly phase" where I hate the painting.

More hair/flesh/backgrounds/polka dot hat and frames being worked on. I'm coming around to not hating it so much.

Added final tweaks to flesh/hair/eye color/shadows and put my name on it. Finished painting early morning on December 24 and Lisa picked it up later that morning. There is something to be said for working in acrylics and fast drying times is probably on top of the list.