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!

Long long time....

I haven't posted in forever! There are so many things to do at work and home and now that the grass is green and the airs smells of flowers, earth and rain I spend all the available free time outside with Bella. When the sun goes down and Bella retires for the night, my husband and I just crash on the couch for an hour of relax in front of the TV. That would be my drawing time, but of late most evenings we use the TV time to fold our seemingly endless laundry or to finish eating dinner (the amounts of watermelon that we end up swallowing this way is just amazing!).

Bottom line, I haven't finished my oak dryads drawing. I haven't actually touched it in 10 days! Here are some progress photos. 

I want to finish this, because I am curious to see how it will turn out (so far I really like it...strange) and because I need to start working on a gift for my nephews...I am going to see them in September, so I have a bit more than two months to prepare it. Not much, given my current rhythms....well, we'll see...

Anyways, sorry for the long silence. I'll try to be here more often in the next months. :)

Linking to Paper Saturdays. Happy weekend!

Owls WIP

Following the inspiration provided by my daughter's passion for animals, I feel I have to make an attempt to draw owls, as she loves them so much. There are wonderful examples of owl-art online. I will just add my voice to the chorus of admirers of these majestic and interesting birds.

Here are a few WIP pictures...colors coming soon!

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!

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!

Almost done with the inking...

I am looking forward to color this...

Inking the roses

Little by little the secret of the garden emerges....

Fairies...in fieri

This is for a personal project, which will take likely years to be completed, but I am not in a hurry...

So far I am working on two fairies. I have a clear idea of where I am going with this but somehow I am stuck with the anatomy of these two little ladies, fighting with myself over hands, arms, and poses in general. I have taken pictures of myself as reference, yet I am still in trouble! The initial sketch is taking me forever....Yesterday night I actually spent one hour just deciding the angle of an arm and a hand (and it's not just a matter of deciding, but of actually getting my pencil to do what my brain clumsily tries to communicate to my fingers!).

Hopefully tonight things will go better...:)

Hansel, Gretel, etc.

My sister in law is coming to visit with her family (Pit will spend some quality time with Bella!). I am making a drawing to celebrate her birthday and the fact that we are going to have a new addition to the family soon. She asked for a Hansel and Gretel inspired picture, with the ginger bread house and the children, but without the scary witch.
Here is the initial sketch with some inking done...

Portrait of Bella in progress

Hei there! How are you guys? After my summer vacation, I came back to a ton of work, daycare-born weekly colds, and unavoidable evening exhaustion. The most stressful times are gone, though, so I have a measure of tranquility that allows me to draw again. In fact, I have picked up the portrait I started in June  and am finishing it.

Here is a glimpse to the work in progress:

I got stuck on the inks, because the lamp in the living room that I normally use to work broke and we needed to get a new one. That and the fact that after dinner I just wanted to curl up doze off while watching TV...

Once the inks were finished, the fun part began and coloring has been relatively fast.I enjoyed a lot coloring the dragon!

So, after coloring everything, I started working on the face, which is unusual. Usually, the face gets colored first, because I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I need to do and it's a lot of fun, plus I tell myself that if I make a mess I can start over by transferring everything and giving it another try without too much grief. Instead, this time I was so happy with the lineart that, modestly speaking, I had no doubt, the coloring of the face would be very easy. I started with the skin, with which I was pretty happy. Then I proceeded to the mouth and the eyes...which turned out way too dark...now she looked like a not-so-pretty vampire.  Plus, with colors, all the irregularities and symmetry issues that I could not see in the inks became very clear. Why do I always miss these flaws until the very last moment? Looking at it in the mirror (I know I should have done this ages ago!) showed all the problems even more obviously...how to fix them?

Ritratto di Bimba in progress...

Hi everybody! In little more than a week I will be going to see my parents in Italy! Finally...it's been two years since my last visit and it feels like forever. So much has changed and I have missed my family and friends enormously. I am looking forward to introduce Bella to all and I am curious to see how she will behave during the trip and in a completely new environment (actually, I am mildly concerned about the flight...we've been told to bring lots of little new toys with which to entertain her...I wonder if that will be enough or if she will try to take the airplane apart...my anticipated apologies to our fellow travelers).

I don't expect I'll have time to draw at all (it used to be difficult before the baby!) and my internet access will be limited. These are the last days when I'll be able to post anything. So I though to share the project that I have just started: Ritratto di Bimba. It's the counter part to the Ritratto di Bimbo from several months ago (you can see it here).

Let's see how much I will be able to advance in the next few days...there are so many things I have to organize before we leave...

In case I could not write again before the day of the flight, let me wish you a very happy and sunny June. I'll be back in July!

Pirates! (WIP)

My nephew Pit, has developed, like many children his age, a passion for "Jack and the Neverland Pirates" cartoon, so I thought I would make him a picture with my take on the theme.
Here you can see the (slow) evolution of the piece starting from the minimalistic sketch I posted weeks ago (yes, that's how slow I am!).

I imagined the "pirates" on a beach near the seaside town of Albisola (near Savona, Italy). The landscape is not very accurate. I actually think the beach is more stony than sandy, but I took a poetic license for the occasion.

I am not so passionate about going to the beach, as I am a pretty bad swimmer and I don't like sunbathing. My family has a country house and we always went there for the summer, so I grew to enjoy hiking and running in the grass more than building sand castles. Hence my poor knowledge of the beaches near home! ;)

For sure Bella and Pit will have a blast in June, when we go to visit Italy, though. Of course they are the two pirate-wanna-bes in the picture, although I realized I made them to look a bit older than they actually are.

Can you spot the mistakes I made?

My friends caught immediately the weirdness in Bella's left leg...I was hoping it would go unnoticed, but clearly it was not so inconspicuous. I managed to fix that while coloring, luckily.

The sky had me concerned for a while. I built up layer after layer of light greyish blues because I did not want a color that was too intense, but at some point I picked by mistake a marker, I don't remember which exactly, that turned out to produce the most in-your-face aqua effect ever. I spent the rest of my time that evening just trying to tone it down. I think I saved it in the end, but just barely.

There are also issues with the prospective, which I did not pay too much attention to, since there were no buildings in sight (how smart am I?). The perspective blunder became evident to me only half way through the coloring phase, so it was too late to do something about it. We will have to live with it! :D

Not having watched cartoon, I have only a vague idea of the content, which I assume must be tame and rather sweet, given it's targeted to small children. Anyways, since I am a pacifist, abhor the use of weapons, and dislike to see children handling toy-guns or toy-swords, I omitted them from the picture. Maybe this position is too strict (actually, as a kid, I would have loved to have a toy-sword) , but what can I say...it does not feel right to see little ones pretending to shoot or spear each other. Bottom line, my pirates are more bohemians of the sea, treasure hunters, than cannon shooting ocean outlaws.^^

The crocodile was suggested by my husband, to pay homage to the Disney's Peter Pan movie. Of course it's just an inflatable to help the kids swim and I really did not want to make it too realistic, because it's not supposed to be threatening. However, the more I colored it (bright yellow and green), the more my husband complained that it looked like it was going to attack the children. Hence, the bright pink scales...the definitive deviation from natural colors appeased my husband and, hopefully, will make sure Pit will find it funny, not scary. ;)

That's all for the moment. I have been adding a few more details and I'll show them to you, as soon as the sun is out and I get to take a decent picture of the final piece.

WIP (with a ton of descriptions!) for "Global fashion"

Premise: this is a long and detailed WIP report...so I do understand if you find it boring and skip all my babbling. ;) However, if you are interested in this kind of posts, let me know and I'll try to write more of them (you can also tell me if you think I should use my time better..I will not get offended! ;)).

I mentioned a few days ago that I intended to participate to a contest. It was about travel and the things we bring back or lose or we find different uses for. When abroad, I tent do by local clothes (so many pretty fabrics out there). Back home, I wear these items separately, to give an interesting spin to an otherwise plain or classic outfit. Here, I decided to pull all my "explorer" wardrobe out all together (ok the glasses are from Italy, and I am Italian, so technically they don't count, but, since I live in the US, I decided to include them too...;)).

You have see the sketch for this in the previous post...here it is again in case you had forgotten about it. ;)

The next picture is the inked drawing. I decided to adopt the mirror image to the one I first chose for the sketch, because I realized that I tend to draw figures with faces looking towards the left (it just comes more natural to me, for some reason) and I wanted to change for once.

Of course, immediately my husband pointed out that her neck is unnaturally long. In this case, I had been aware of it. It was intentional, as a matter of fact. ;)
 I wanted to give her a more "Modigliani-woman" look and focus the attention on the necklace, also separating the collar of the vest from the draping of the scarf.
Also, probably it's hard to see it here, but her face and hand have been inked with gray Copic Multiliner, to soften the line of the skin. I ended up correcting this detail to increase contrast with the background during the final stages of coloring.



In this next image, I put down the main colors of the drawing and started shading the pants and the tunic. I have to say that this is the stage that I am more satisfied of. I think that things went a bit downward from here. I guess I kind of liked the flat colors, Japanese print-style I had there. However, I wanted to experiment coloring a subject against a bright light source (the window), so I kept going, Typically my characters are in full light and I end up shading them in a pretty standard way. That would not do. In addition, a well placed shadow brings to life portraits and creates dynamic impression even in very non dynamic scenes. So, there you have it...I kept working with my markers.







I also used pencils more heavily than usual, to give more texture to the drawing. I have mixed feelings about that. I need to practice more...
Here, I am yet adding more shades, coloring the items of the room. For a while I was tempted to leave the flower motif black and white, then I came to my senses: the whole point of this Peruvian vest is that is so colorful and happy, an uplifting contrast to the winter greyness of the Plains.






In the following picture you see the main reason for me being unhappy about this drawing (good thing I did not have time to submit it to the contest!). You might have guessed that up till this point I had not really planned the scenery outside the window. Well it was supposed to be my garden, always there for me to copy, no? Yeah, but to improvise it directly with markers on an already blocked background was not a very good idea, given my present skill level. The more I worked on the spruces, the more I had the feeling I was messing up...and I was! They turned out rather ugly and out of sink with the rest of the piece. Too bad. Lesson learned: do not leave trees to chance.








My way of fixing it was to draw the glass of the window! I used diagonal strokes of white pastel to achieve the effect. Another advantage of this solution is to give the impression of light coming from the window and contrasting better the character (especially her arm). Oh, well...I'll do better next time! ;)

Here is a final cleaned photo of Global Fashion:

BTW, the sources of the outfit are as follows:

Head-scarf from Egypt
Sunglasses from Italy
Earrings from Taiwan
Necklace and alpaca vest from Peru
Dress from India
Ring from Chile
Teapot and cup from Japan

Enjoy!

Sketches

My preparatory sketches are usually bits of scrap paper or even post-its on which I jot down the bare bone idea of what I want to do. Not the best practice, as I end up doing most of the work directly on the paper and sometime I have to re-elaborate and correct details over and over, at the risk of ruining precious materials.Unfortunately, I find it hard to draw a full fledged piece and then transfer it on fancy paper. I mean, I am much more driven and focused when I know that I am working on the actual piece. I tend to be too generic otherwise...Yet sometimes I wish I would elaborate more in a preliminary drawings to translate the images I have in my mind more clearly: typically my final results don't look at all as I thought they would/should...
Anyways, here are some sketches for current projects...;)

 

And to say good night, here are a couple more pictures of my beloved magnolia.

BTW, in case you were wondering, the flowers don't really have a perfume that I can clearly perceive...

After almost a year of silence...

...and sleep deprivation, here I am again!

Baby Bella. is growing beautifully and she is the delight of my life.

A moment ago, while reading an old post in which I stated that I was getting my act together I laughed! I surely believed that at the time, but it was before I went back to my full time job! In reality, nowadays I have little time for anything non-family related, but I took advantage of the Christmas holidays to draw something for Bella's new bedroom (we also moved to a bigger house...what a year!).

It's a portrait of her little cousin, Pit, who is two year older than her. He is an adorable child and we can't wait for the two little ones to finally meet (he lives in Italy, we in the USA and unfortunately we haven't had a chance to visit yet...). Meanwhile, I thought  this would help to remind little I. of her family overseas.

Here is the process...in the next days, I'll try to take a picture of the finished piece.

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...