40: Scenery at Last!

You read that right- I finally hunkered down and attempted some proper backgrounds! So many firsts in this post; first time painting water, first true attempts at a little town, first real attempt at a night scene...whew. All but the last image is work for my Illustrative Drawing class with Professor Tardino, in which we're required to write/compose a story and develop the visuals and characters. I got off to a rocky start, hence the lack of posts since I arrived in Columbus, but everything's starting to fall into place.

So far my story is geared toward something like 7 year old children- a fairly typical adventure tale about getting lost in the woods and finding unlikely friends...I'm purposefully keeping the story rather simple since plotweaving isn't my strong point. We'll see how it develops! The main characters are a young moose, as yet unnamed, and a young tortoise, Mabel, who live in separate allied villages on an alpine mountainside.

Our class has been going to the Columbus Zoo every Monday for the past few weeks, and last week I decided to try some field acrylics. It worked. Something worked. In any case, I'd love for something like this to happen again please. :'D I rarely post my paintings here, as they're incredibly subpar compared to my normal work, but this one has promise.

I ended up mammal-izing practically every limb on the tortoises' bodies- It was unbelievably difficult to make reptillian forearms look 'normal' without reversing the elbows. These are based on the patterns of the Indian Star Tortoise, and Mabel's design is going to be a combination of the two.

The three compositions above are quick color-blocks of landscape sketches. It was unbelievably refreshing to color these! Photoshop

And as a closer, some unrelated scribbles of my angel beings!

39: A few More Floating Things

My art has become the Menagerie of Floating Animals, so my next post will be filled with environments and backgrounds and all sorts of fun stuff. Hopefully. 8|