A little splash of color

She's almost done!  YAY!  I have been working on this one for a LONG time and now she's finally in the home stretch.

And yes, it's a HORRIBLE scan...lol

For the past few days I've been revisiting 'Hold on Tight'. I haven't touched her since last Fall, but after looking at her for a while with 'fresh eyes', I knew she really needed something. I added wings and started to add spirally vines to take up some of the open spaces, but ended up adding too many and it looked funny. So to TRY to make it a little better, I decided to add little flower buds here and there. Now it looks like spirally, wispy grass/ plants as opposed to vines. I'm okay with that. It definitely has more of a spring time feel to it now. Maybe the season change inspired the additions...lol

I don't know yet if I'm happy with her, but I know I did the best I could with this version. I still have the line art, so if need be I could always reprint that and try painting her again.

Comments and critiques are always welcome!

I know, I know... I've completely fell off of Live Journal, FAE, Myspace, and a bunch of other networking sites, but things have been busy, plans are being made, and all that good stuff. Just a quick post before I ramble on later (perhaps tomorrow) as I'm making tile goodies right now.

I still have a lot of work to do on it, and I'll probably have to make some additional corrections is photoshop, but I think I'm going to be happy of her overall.

Comments and suggestions are welcome and appreciated :)





Added 1/22: Now that I'm looking at her online I need to go back and look at the end of her tail. It may just be the way the paper was leaning, but her tail looks all squashy and small now. Hmmmm.....

I started on this piece back in January or February, I believe, for the FAE forum's Dark Fantasy Art show. Well after about 9 months, I finally got around to finish painting her. She's not perfect, but I'm happy with her notheless. I definitely think it's one of my best pieces to date.



Comments and critiques are more than welcome!

I started this piece last January for the Dark Fantasy Art Show on the FAE Forum (http://www.faeforum.com). While she never made it on there, I'm hoping to have her done in time for the Beyond the Veil artshow over at http://www.fantasyartshow.com

Here was the initial sketch



After that, I did a 'final' sketch onto watercolor paper and started painting her - and hated it. I rarely start over on a piece. If I decide I don't like it, its usually because of design and composition, not color and feel. So I trashed it. At this point I was really thankful that I had done the initial sketch in a sketchbook instead of the watercolor paper, because I was able to go back with graphite paper and recreate the image. At that stage, I decided that there was far too much open space behind her, so I sought to fill in some of the negative space. That brought me to this point...



She sat untouched for about a month after that. In august I was determined to work on her so I got out the masking fluid and started masking the important areas to keep clean. And once she dried, she sat there until mid-September...lol Just as the masking fluid was beginning to yellow, I started working on her again only to discover that I didn't ink her before I laid the masking fluid down!!! D'oh!!!! So then the slow process of carefully peeling up the fluid so I could preserve all the graphite lines I could - because they were coming off with the fluid :( . I inked as I went and while she didn't turn out EXACTLY how the original sketch looked, she's really darn close. I was able to start laying down watercolor shortly thereafter, and I'm liking her so far. She's still far from finished, but she's off to a decent start :)



Comments and critiques are welcome :)

As previously stated, I put some more work into Hold on Tight as she was pretty muted color-wise. I think she pops much more now, but I'm not sure if I'd consider her 'done' yet.

Constructive comments and critiques are always welcome!

And I'm sorry for the bad scan. It's after 11pm and I don't feel like cleaning it up right now :-D