The puppy and the cardinal

After almost two months of hiatus, I am back! What happened? I had a baby! I am finally getting my act together and finding time for myself again (every once in a while... ;)).
So, the other day I finished this small drawing of the young lady with a puppy and a cardinal that I started at the end of January, right before I gave birth. Somehow I also managed to take WIP pictures for this one...Hope you'll like it.

 You probably remember this line-art...Right before entering the hospital, I started coloring the dress but after a couple of layers I had to take a long break, as more important matters became priorities...;)

 As always I started with the face. I was trying to give it a lot of light, like in the 18th century paintings that inspired me in coloring this. Later I figured out it was too flat this way and I decided to add deeper shadows.

For the dress, I wanted a happy blue color, so I started with B01, I think, and then added a bright B24 and B28 for shadows/depth. I also a combination of violets for the ribbons.
Immediately, I disliked the effect: too bright...my old bad habit, which I have tried hard to avoid for a while now. I wanted happy blue, not headache electric blue!

Well, at this point I stopped drawing for a while, but I was still bugged by the bad turn this little piece was taking. I had planned to hang it in my baby's bedroom and was sorry I could not make it nice for her...

After a month from my little one's birth, I picked it up again and started tinkering with it to see if I could fix it.
A generous addition of grey (a combination of C2, C4, and C6) started improving (in my eyes at least).
As you can see, to prevent a super-saturated red effect on the cardinal, I started putting down my shadows in grey on it too (I learned my lesson...;)).

Here I kept going deep with blue-ish and grey shadows for the face and the hair (I was having fun again!).

Here the hair is completed, and so is the cardinal. I was not sure what color the hair should be. I wanted this young lady to have my daughter's colors. Would be nice to have guessed right. Mommy has brown hair, dad blond and the eyes colors in our families range from black to grey, green, blue, golden hazelnut, and chestnut brown...so baby could be almost anything...I decided for blond with grey eyes. We will see if I was right in a few months (right now she is light brown with grey eyes, but she will most likely change).

More depth was also added to the face with more greyish and lavender blues.

Now to the background and frame. I had fun with light tones of beige and light greens and blues.
You probably can't tell from the picture, but there are a gazilion layers there, as I experimented with different markers: a little more green, no too much...a little more beige..better, hmm, what about some blue here? etc...I would not be able to tell you exactly what I did here!

Getting close to the end, I used my Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils to refine things here and there.

And this is how it looks now!

Coming soon, the three faces I tested the Prismacolor marker's skin tones colored with copic markers...

Mini projects WIP

These days, I am often tired when I come back from work. My only desire is to eat and go to sleep or watch a movie or read a book. I still want to draw, but I seem to lack time and energy to start a big project. So I decided to start a few smaller works.

I am preparing a new doll, which should have slightly bigger limbs than my previous ones (I always have the impression their head is a bit too big compare to the rest of their bodies). I am not showing her here because she is in very preliminary stages and I still have to make a few decisions on her....

Another mini-project is "Little Lady with dog". The idea for this came from watching the miniseries "Aristocrats", a BBC drama bout the lives of five sister great-granddaughters of Charles II in 18th century Britain.It's a very nice production with great costumes. The one for the characters as children were particularly cute...

It was also time for another mermaid....this one is in a bit of trouble...will anybody help her?

Finally, I have the floating heads project. Some time ago a bought Prismacolor markers, but I have not had a lot of practice with them. I mostly use the neutral tones and greys for large surfaces to spare my precious Copics. These days a practically ran out of the colors I rely most upon for skin tones and shading . I ordered them online, but while waiting I got bored and thought I should study which Prismacolors would work best as substitutes. This is why I drew these 3 "uncompleted" girls, The Diva, The Martyr, and the Gypsy.

Next post I'll show you my Prismacolor choices. Meanwhile, I hope the inks for my exhausted Copics will arrive soon. ;)

Madame Mayple

Dear friends, how are your vacations proceeding? I went back to work a couple of days, but things were pretty slow, as you can imagine and so it was not too bad. Today I am back on holiday and I take advantage of the free time to catch up with you.
Christmas was fun and pleasantly spent celebrating with the Italian friends that have become our family here in the USA. Now we are getting ready for New Year's Eve. This year nobody felt like cooking so we decided to try for the first time to go and eat out...I'll let you know how that works out for us...

Going back to art, I wanted to show you this WIP and final drawing. It's my gift to my friend Mayple (Monika Victoria) of The long lost wood. She is an amazing professional artist I met on the Enchanted doll forum and I greatly admire. This year, she is having the adventure of a lifetime: she left her native Australia to tour Europe. She is now living in Hungary where she is working full time on her art. Her paintings are delicate and daunting, ethereal and full of life. Go have a look if you don't know her already. She is also on flickr.
It has been a particular Christmas for Mayple and I wanted to make her feel she is not alone, although far away from home and her dear ones. I also wanted to thank her for the art she has sent me (still in the mail I am afraid...as soon as it gets here, I'll show it to you all  ;)...sometime snail mail is maddening...). Anyways, since she loves 18th Century costumes and she is now in Europe, I thought I would make an attempt to portray her as a lady in costume with a backdrop of the land of her ancestors. Therefore, I referenced one of the pictures she has published on her blog and that I like a lot for the beautiful light and for the sweet  and intent expression of her face, which I thought well represents her character, even if we never actually met in person. It must have been a good choice of reference because for once I did not have to struggle to reproduce the feature of my subject. In a matter of a couple of hours, I had the pencils and inking done...I know that's not fast by any means, but for my standards it's like being Speedy Gonzalez!


Then the fun began. I wanted to show her as if she was standing on the balcony of a palace overlooking a Hungarian landscape. Thus the drapery on the back and the flowers on the left. At this point I had not yet researched ideas for the background, but I had very clear ideas about the colors of the dress and the flowers in her hair (the latter being a typical feature of real life Mayple...her up-does are adorable. :)). So I quickly worked on these aspects and on the floral composition. I am not sure that the amount of work I put in that vase was called for, because as you will see in the final product, it becomes kind of lost in the background. Alas, you have probably noticed by now that I cannot resist focusing on tiny (and often irrelevant) details...

As I started working on the drapery in the back I realized that more depth of color-shadows was required by the character skin, so every once in a while I went back and add a new layer of color, although i was always a bit concerned about overdoing it. And in truth, there was a moment when I decided to use a particularly dark blue violet shadow on her cheeks and forehead that made me fear for the worst...Immediately after the sudden defection of the beige I was using to smooth things up put me in a panic. You should have see how terribly scarred by diagonal stripes was poor Mayple's face...My husband heard a desperate scream and wanted to see what I had done but I could not bring myself to show him....and I feel I had to act quickly...so I looked for alternatives in the palette and fortunately found a couple of earth tones that saved the whole thing (after tons of layers, of course). Too bad I don't recall the details of what copics I actually used (I worked on this piece before Thanksgiving), although I remember that Brick Beige was the one marker that stopped working and created the whole mess.

After fixing the skin issues and having completed the foreground, I started looking for a background. I found a beautiful picture on Google that depicted the Balaton region and I decided to reference it. I tried to figure out who took the picture but could not...it's a very popular image, used in a gazillion sites...if anybody knows the author I'll be happy to give her/him the due acknowledgement.

The background was more relaxing of a job and everything went pretty smoothly. As you can see in the picture above, I first used a light shade of grey to set out the outlines of the landscape and to prevent the colors of the sky and the fields from becoming too bright and dominant. Despite this precaution, the business of the clouds in the sky was a bit distracting, so I used my Derwent pastels pencils (mainly white) to tone down the contrast there....

And here is the final result:

 

Happy New Year!