Pan and friends finished!

I know, this is a very bad picture, but I was in a hurry this morning and I wanted to share this with you. So, I laid the drawing on the coffee table in the living room and clicked away. As soon as I have a bit more time, I'll fix it...meanwhile enjoy! I had a ton of fun making this one!

Pan and friend WIP colors

I just thought to post a little in progress picture. Looks like it'll take a long time to finish, just because of the details of the city on the front. It's fun though and maybe the Thanksgiving break will give me some more time to progress with it.

For those who celebrate it, happy Thanksgiving!

Oak Spirits finished

I can't believe it! It's done..there was not too much work to do, but I was somewhat stuck...and busy, and stressed, and tired, and then away on vacation (thank goodness), and, for a few months now, pregnant. So I suppose I can console myself for being artistically dead for the whole summer.

I actually don't know that there is a lot of creative life in me right now, either. A hopeful sign is that last Sunday, while Bella and daddy were playing Lego upstairs, I wondered by the table where the dryads drawing had been laying abandoned for weeks and weeks, and I felt like I could maybe touch it up here and there. From there, and in a couple of evening sessions, I had completed it.

As I said in a previous post, the drawing is dedicated to the oak. According to ancient legends, oaks had not one but two resident spirits: a dryad, capable of leaving the tree and roaming into the forest, and an amadryad bound to the plant, united to it in life and death. Whenever a tree was cut, it was customary to call upon priests to perform rituals that would spare the dryad by sending her away. Things were sadly complicated in the case of oaks, whose amadryads could not be saved. Here you see the priests banishing one of the two creatures, while her sister is trapped and about to face the lumberers' axes. Sad, uh? What's with the black doves? That's a representation of another myth surrounding oak trees. Since oaks are sacred to Zeus and represent his power on earth, it was believed that the god would use it sometimes to communicate with humans. According to a greek legend, there once was a particular oak on  which two black doves coming from a far away land had made their nest. These doves would predict their future to pilgrims. Now, were the doves real birds like in this drawing? Hard to tell. One interpretation of the story is that the two black doves could have been priestesses that had reached ancient Greece either through a travel of their own or maybe by having been taken slaves from African shores. They were compared to doves because their sweet voices, as they were learning the local language, sounded strange, maybe difficult to understand, like the song of birds.

I found this tale quite intriguing, too, and gave the dove a central spot in the drawing...a tale of two couples of sisters, really.

Now to the next project, I think it will be the last one between now and the baby's birth, given my current productivity and the fact that I plan it to be a bit bigger than usual (adventure!). I'll keep you posted!

Ciao!

Yggdrasil or the Cosmic Ash

Small everyday life occurrences have delayed my posting of this picture. I am very happy on how this turned out. There are many colors but they are softened by the underlying grays.

I assume the most of you are familiar with the mythology of the Yggdrasil, but I am going to summarize it here just to explain what you see in the drawing. Yggdrasil is the great cosmic ash, three roots support it. Near one of these roots, the residence of the Norns can be found. They are in charge of mankind's destiny and they tend to the giant tree. You can see them here, kind of oversized, as spiritual superhuman entities should be, pouring water from a sacred spring.

Raskator, the squirrel runs up and down the trunk of the tree reporting the angry exchanges of the eagle that leaves on the top branches and the demonic snake that coils at the roots. Four stags also live in the branches and eat the leaves of the Yggdrasil. In the drawing the stags have become part of the tree...you can see just three of them because the fourth is roaming on the other side! ;)

Yggdrasil is the source of cosmic wisdom and that's to acquire such wisdom that. Odin chose to spend nine nights without food or water hanging from its branches. Here he has joined the stags and surveys the universe from the foliage....

Finally, Yggdrasil is considered the only tree capable of surviving the Twilight of the Gods. After the apocalypse, when a new hearth, sky and sun will be generated and life will start over fresh and renovated, from the wooden depths of the tree, two new human beings, Lif and Lifthrasir, will rise. They will eat exclusively morning dew and will be the progenitors of the new human kind.

I guess that covers it all! Enjoy!

Almost ready...

Here is the latest stage in the Yggdrasil drawing I photographed...in reality the picture is now finished, but I am waiting for a nice day and a little free time to give it proper justice.

Hope you like it and thank you very much for your support!

Coloring the Yggdrasil

Where has March gone? Away with the freezing temperature and with my ridiculously persistent colds, I hope. I've been so exhausted and under the weather these past two weeks that I could not bring myself to do art. All my strengths were devoted to the bare necessities (= work, eat, take care of a very sweet but energetic 2 years old), as I was also alone home, since my husband went abroad for business.

 Not much to show, therefore, in term of progress for my Yggdrasil. After my husband returned and the pressure from my daily duties returned to normal, I finished the grey tones and started very slowly to lay down the colors (I switched to Copics for this second part).

To tell you the truth, I am not sure I am improving on it. It was kind of neat in its neutral palette, but I can't live without colors, so I was compelled to proceed. Right now, I am somewhat stuck at the three Norns, as I cannot decide on a proper color for their dresses...a super pale blu would work but I am afraid I don't have it in my otherwise rather extensive collection of markers....watercolors here would be marvelously useful, I think....

Probably tonight I will make a decision. :)

Lotus...in progress

The Lotus of Creation is giving me joy and grief...part of it are coming our just as I wanted, part are driving me insane. Here is a mini swatch with tentative color schemes. I chose the fist, which was also the one I elaborated on more. You can see which Copic markers I chose for the composition.

All appeared perfectly simple when working on an 1x1" surface. The trouble came when I started working on the real drawing. I want to give the goddess figure in the middle a rich chocolate skin...after all the Indian myths and legends surrounding creation are the inspiration for this piece. However, my experience with deeply dark skin tones is practically non existent...bottom line, after putting down the greys (W3 and W5), when I began layering E39, I realized I was flattening all the face features and the 3-dimensionality of the body. So I frantically tried to repair the mistake using light tones (E02 and ultimately R000) to take away the excessive color. Then I grew discouraged and started to work on the flower, which I loved. Later, I went back and retouched some more the skin. This is what the drawing looks like at the moment

...well, I'll have to work more on this, I am afraid, probably with pencils, given that the paper has about taken as much ink as it possibly could. Things look much better now, though (believe me!...it's probably difficult to make out details, since I took the picture at dusk...).

There is still the upside down goddess, to deal with though...and I am not sure what to do, because ideally she is identical to the first one, but I am trying to avoid the mistakes I made there so....we'll see. :)

Dinosaurs...

Here is a WIP of a little pet triceratops for Bella.
She is head over hills for dinosaurs. We have  a funny pop up book about them and her favorite are triceratops and the T.Rex (lurking in the back). She likes the T. Rex, because of its sharp teeth that chomp chomp chomp...but she does not realize (because we are not telling her yet) that he would sooner dine on triceratops than with it. Ah, blessed ignorance....

Hope you all had a lovely Christmas. We were plague by the flu, but we managed to still have fun... 

Have a great end of the year and may 2014 bring you joy, love, and lots of happy moments!

Happy Holidays

I like to roam in Home Goods looking for pans, rugs and toys or books for Bella. Sometimes they have interesting frames. The other day I found one that is cute. It's square and powder blue and has a nice ribbon of the same color to hang it. For once, I decided to make a drawing to fit the frame, rather than go crazy  looking for frames that would fit my irregular drawings. It's been snowing and the holidays approach, so I though to make a festive little thing to share here and then add to our Christmas decorations.

It's a 2.5x2.5 inches drawing on my beloved Fabriano watercolor paper done with Copic Markers, watercolor pencils for the tiniest details (like the tree needles), and white gel pen for the highlights.

Of course, the Northern Europe celebration of St. Lucia (December 13) with a procession of children holding candles lead by a girl with a crown of candles is my inspiration for this piece. I have always been fascinated by this tradition. I must have seen it for the first time in some movie long ago. The image of the tiny lights in the darkness and the white little figures walking among pines and firs in the cold winter night has a dream quality that vividly impressed my imagination. That's maybe because in Genova we rarely had snow and Christmas was a rather grey-rainy day most of the times...not vey romantic or magical, really. So, the idea of snow landscapes was very appealing to me.
Needless to say, now that I have plenty of snow here in Illinois, I think longingly of the comparatively warm Decembers of my hometown. It's all a matter of perspective! ;)

I wish you all the sweetest, happiest holidays. May the love of your family and friends keep you warm and cozy this December!

Sub Rosa

It's done! I've been working hard during the holidays to finish it...here it is finally.

For once, there was no drama and everything went pretty smoothly: I added layer after layer of color, fixing things here and there as I went without stressing out too much. True enjoyment!

 Now I have a couple of small drawings in mind for Bella's room plus a new big project work related that I will not probably going to show here, at least at the beginning...but I'll come back to this series as soon as I can (taking advantage of the days off around Christmas).
Talk to you soon!

I hope you all had a fun Thanksgiving (or, for those outside the States a restful weekend ;)).

Weekend update

Getting there!

By the way, with all this painting of ordered gardens and roses, I suddenly felt the need to clean up the backyard rose shrub. It was a mess. It had not been pruned in years, so I snipped my way to the core of the plant. Now I am crossing my fingers in hope I did not exceed what's good for next year's blooming. The rose branches look rather neat, now, but my husband expressed a certain level of skepticism at my zealous clipping. I am more optimistic, though. This year we had very few flowers, so I figure next year can only get better.  Let's hope so! :)

Coloring....

Ok, here is the promised update. It's not much, but I am proceeding cautiously. To give you an idea, it took me a couple of hours (while watching Iron Man 3 with my husband...not very poetic or attuned to the theme of the drawing, but time is precious...;)) colored the central  more prominent rose. Now I am getting a bit faster with the other roses, because I figured out the technique I need to use.

I like my roses very much, for once. I liked the fairies very much too at the beginning, but I am not so sure of it anymore. Their skin color is quite flat and I believe I need to work more on it to bring the little creatures to life. BTW, notice that this time I started from the main characters! ;)

Have a great rest of the week!

Home Sweet Home...finished!

Here we go...I made it within the deadline!
Hope you like it (and Anna as well!). :)

Home Sweet Home 9'x12'

Slowly getting there...

An hour each evening...that's the time I can give myself to draw. It seems always such a short time! I can barely get into the "zone" that it's time to wrap things up and going to sleep. So I inch day by day, finishing some parts and realizing other will need to be changed.

Half way through...I did a bit more tonight.

I figured the color of the grass was too bright, despite my grey undertone and I had to use a Mustard yellow to darken in. I am happy with the trees, the sky and the background, but now looking at all the sweets, at the scattered candies, at the cookies and gummy bears, I wander if the children will be properly visible. The witch, with her dark garb, will be neatly cut against the light sky. The young bunch,  instead, has to contend with the crazy garden population, especially the Cookie man, looming just behind Bella...The main thing, I guess, is that I should have started coloring the protagonists first and build the surroundings to match them, not the other way around. That's a basic instinctive rule I have been following since childhood, when I cared nothing or not much for the backgrounds and only focused on getting the main character done properly. Of late, instead, maybe because I put so much effort in building interesting landscapes, I start coloring those and work my way backward to the protagonists. But, to do this successfully, I should either plan better or learn more control over my markers, because now it feels like the garden (particularly the chocolate walkway) is the main subject of the drawing and the children are completely lost in it, almost an afterthought. And that was not the feeling I wanted to convey...

...or maybe I have reached the usual desperation moment, when I think I completely ruined the drawing and wasted a lot of precious time in the process, but I will fix it in the end.

If not, I could flip the coin and rationalize that in this illustration, the children have subverted completely the Hansel and Gretel tale and have found pure delight and not dreadful peril in the garden, that they feel so comfortable, unafraid and in control that are completely part of what supposed to be a deadly trap. Meanwhile the "poor" witch and her crow and broom are sadly left out, displaced from their classical role in the story...now they have become the new protagonists, for which I feel sorry: look at how all their hard baking is being ravaged by the four little monsters!

Well I'll keep working on this and we'll see what happens in the next few sessions....I've learned another lesson, anyways. :)

Botanical Garden and another progress report

On saturday we visited theBotanical Garden. That's one of my favorite place to spend the day. The flowers are always so colorful and inviting, even during fall and there are so many fun activities for children. Bella has started appreciating the hay maze, pumpkin mountain and water fountains too. She had a blast running in the fields and looking at the fruit a vegetable gardens, laden with yummy produce. We took many pictures, as always...I am always scouting for references. I have a good library now and I should start using it for some art.

Meanwhile, I progressed a bit more in the coloring of the Gingerbread house. Here is a balance of Brick white, Barely beige, Tan, Dull Ivory for the walls of the building. All of these are Copic markers. While large areas turn our rather better in Prismacolors than in Copics, when it comes to details and front/prominent characters/elements, I still trust more Copics, possibly because I have more experience using them. I need to do something to make the cream of the cannoli fluffier...probably in post-production with pastels..

Challenge:29 faces (last day, #29 and bonus)

The weekend is almost over, we are sort of settling down in our new rhythms and, after spending an enjoyable afternoon in the sun, we are back home, looking at the pictures we took today and preparing for the new working week.

So, finally I have a little time to spend with the friends of 29 Faces and share my last 2 faces. I'll put this in my daughter's room...

#29 (and bonus) Pure Love

29 Faces

It's been great to play and explore new techniques and it's been especially wonderful to meet so many talented and kind people via the challenge. Thank you Ayala for hosting this initiative and thank you to the participants who shared their art and exchanged suggestions and support. Let's keep in touch!

Challenge: 29 Faces (Day 11: #27)

Good day everybody!

Yesterday night I decided to try something slightly different from my usual coloring technique. I set aside my adored Copics and turned to my Prismacolors. A couple of years ago, I did a small evaluation of how Prismacolors would work for coloring faces, but they seemed way to bright for my already rather saturated palette, so I abandoned the idea of using them for more detailed or delicate projects. Instead, have been using them mainly to cover great surfaces to spare the more expensive Copics

However, since I had made this drawing kind of simple, more catoonish than usual,  I thought I could give Prismacolors another chance.
Because I have been kind of obsessed with the inking dilemma during the past few days, in this case, I limited the inks to the minimum and created the contours of the face and hair just with colors. I did not completely follow my own intention, though, as I ended up outlining the arm and hand quite too much (even if I used the grey multiliner rather than the black one)...something to watch out for, next time

I wanted her hair to be fluffy and aqua-blue, and I liked how it turned out, but I had no precise idea about how to do the rest,, so I did a couple of trials (on the right). I picked a pretty yellow-green for the wall and chose to keep her dress and balcony neutral. How does it look?

 #27: Cotton Candy

Notice that while I was using watercolor paper for the main drawing, I did my experiments on an old piece of very smooth lower quality paper from my earlier works with Copics. The colors look so different! Also the feel of the ink going on the paper is different (it does not really sink much, it seems to stay mostly on the surface: I never liked it too much).

I'll try and make another attempt today, but I'll use a different watercolor paper and hopefully I will keep my grey outlines really light.

29 Faces

A big hug to you all!

Challenge: 29 faces (Day 8, #24)

#24 Just above the surface

Since I finally caught up with the challenge, I felt that today I could just take it easy and spend a bit more time on one piece, coloring it properly. Again, this is a post-it sized drawing of...a mermaid. Notice that I have already two of them in this series....although I cannot say that mermaids are my superfavorite mythological creatures or that I particularly like the sea, they pop up in my works over and over again, at the point that I have a mermaid in the name of my only blog. I really can't tell you why. Maybe it's that I am a terrible swimmer and I wish I could zoom happily in the ocean unafraid and free to roam?

29 Faces

Challenge: 29 Faces (Day 7: #21, 22, 23)

Happy Sunday everybody!
Have very little time today. Bella just went to sleep and I am about to follow her for a quick afternoon nap (my favorite thing in the universe!). Well...with the tiny amount of time that I had today, I made this new tiny faces. These are mainly sketches to try out some effects, but I hope you might still enjoy them. They were definitely useful and fun for me! :)

#21 Graffiti Goddess: A proof of concept for a much bigger project. I am not sure that's a crown or a complicated headdress....

# 22 The way she looks: A girl like many others walking in the city, unnoticed by all, but determine to hold on to her dreams...

# 23 The way she sees herself: ...yet, she is not unnoticeable, she knows to the core of her own been that is unique, strong and unforgettable. She has the power of making her dream come true.

29 Faces

These are mainly sketches to try out some effects, but I hope you might still enjoy them. :)

Challenge: 29 Faces (Day 1 = Setember 16!)

I have never participated to art challenges, but, perusing my friend's Tammie Lee's blog, I found this one that appeals to me and seemed fun. It's called 29 faces and it's been launched by Alaya Art.

I should have started at the beginning of the month, so I am entering the game late. I wonder if I'll be able to complete the challenge by the end of the month. I'll have to do a couple of faces per day to catch up...but that's fun and good practice, too.

Here my 3 mini faces for the day:

#1 Baby's got her wish.

#2 Student learning a new lab procedure

#3 Mermaid waiting for a pray

 29 faces

The originals are about 2-3 inches...the only way I have to make something quick!
Copics and random paper.

Many thanks to Ayala for this intriguing opportunity!