Trading Post

My friends finally dragged me into a D&D game this weekend. I'll probably be sketching all sorts of scenes from it over the next while.

I quit roleplaying years ago when I realized I was only going to the sessions to sketch. But now I think maybe that's not such a bad thing. I wonder if I can convince someone else to roll the dice for me?

I Lied

I got a couple more paintings to post that I painted at ArtWalk. Here's a jellyfish:

I'm on a bit of a jellyfish kick right now.

The other painting still needs a touch of work, maybe I'll do that this weekend. Or maybe I'll just sketch at Heritage Festival while stuffing myself stupid with fried dough and meat-onna-stick.

Character Sketches

I think I'm painted out for a bit. Must be time for ink sketches!

Bolsena Gate

Something from a photo I took in Italy back in 2006 when we went on a bike tour of Latium & Umbria. We liked wandering around all the old hilltop towns. This one was a little resort town on the shores of a lake, and I think it was my favourite out of all the towns we visited.

The fact that it was a long downhill ride from the worst climb of our trip probably had something to do with that.

I think I need to work on this one a little bit longer. The gate itself is still looking a little flat. It was a troublesome painting. I thought I'd try doing an underpainting in warm & cool colours (you can still kinda see the pink peeking through the gray of the wall) but for some reason it didn't the effect I was looking for.

Poppies

Painted some poppies in my backyard to test out my plein-air setup before Artwalk. Worked out fairly well, barring an ill-timed phone call and some rain.

Hamster Bean

Not quite the next installment in the idol series. Doing a bunch of painting this week for ArtWalk, which is coming up waaay too quickly.

This one was trouble from the start. I put the design on the rejected pile partly because I wasn't sure about it and partly because it looked waaay too Ursula Vernon-ish. Not that I don't love her stuff, because I do, but y'know -- good for the Buddha to be Buddha, not for me.

But then my husband came running in with a batch of mineral violet he'd made up and you know how it goes. Gotta test it out. Can't test it out on a design you love.

Anyway, decided to use the mineral violet and some viridian. Turns out the mineral violet is also very transparent, so the initial stages of the painting were an exercise in frustration. Only after I came back to it with the dioxazine violet and cadmium yellow and the phthalo cerulean was I able to make some headway.

Eventually I got it to look pretty decent. Then it got dinged up because I decided to sand the other side and didn't protect the front well enough. ARGH. It is the disaster hamster.