29 Faces: 8,9

What a week...a nightmare at work. Toddler sick at home. Weather ever gloomy and cold.
I could not take pictures, because of the darkness when I left and came home, but at least I kept a measure of sanity by keeping sketching.

Today was finally sunny and I took a couple of decent photographs. Here are the characters from February 8 and 9.

Number 8 is maybe a follow up to 7...an evil queen? Or she could be a wiry ballerina...she has an unusual look for my standards, with lots of sharp angles...I am not sure she is exuding malice...she could be just a very energetic and decisive lady. What do you think?

Number 9 seems to have made a wondrous discovery...or maybe she is the wondrous discovery herself (we were still watching Fringe, at this point and I guess she could be Olivia displaying some of her hidden powers)!

Number 10....coming next!!

29 Faces

Paper Saturdays

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!

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...

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!