First finished 2016 project

I actually finished it January 31, but waited until February 1 to put it online. And waited a little longer before finally posting it on my blog.

This was the painting that took up the end of my 2015, so a lot of it was already finished. It still took another month before I finally fully completed it! Here is the text from the dA entry:

It’s been WAY too long since I last painted in acrylics (late 80’s – very early 90’s when I “regularly” used them), and in all honesty I didn’t know what I was doing. I switched over to watercolor/gouache, some coloring with markers, did some digital coloring over scanned inks… and then focused on b&w/ink as my main form of art, before taking a way-too-long break from art completely (the past few years, I’ve started adding a bit of regular pencil back into the mix). I’ve been craving painting again, so I thought it was time!

This started off as a little 3.5″x3.5″ blue pencil scrawling that was difficult to see and very vague. It went through a long process of changes until I was happy enough with it to start painting. I was very tempted to use watercolor/gouache, but they were all dried out and all my “nice” brushes were for inking — I had more supplies for acrylic, and needed to get back into practice for some upcoming acrylic paintings too.

I am not a photorealistic artist — I’m more stylized, with many years of comic books as my main focus (that’s actually how I met my husband, he is a writer). Also I am such a lover of inked art (brush), so I did use black to mix in with some colors, like the dark shadows/sections of his hair, to bring my style of drawing a little more comfortably into painting mode. This whole piece was simply practice, but also a fun experiment to see how I might like to push my way of drawing in new directions.

Acrylic paint on 11×14 canvas, and scanned with color and contrast adjustments — the scanner changed some of the tones, like the skin which is a little darker/redder than the actual painting, but taking a photo also doesn’t show the painting in its “true” form either. I also had to do a lot of scans, trying to figure out what worked best for my dark living room wall, yet also looked good enough on a digital scan without driving me mad.

I’m honestly not sure how long this took. The drawing was a drawn-out off and on thing, and when I wasn’t sick or had other things to do, I tried to push myself to work on it as much as I could every day. I also used natural light only, so I could not paint during cloudy days sadly. I just didn’t think to keep track of painting time closely enough. “Too long” would be my response, since I experimented, changed things if I didn’t like the effect, and obsessed a little too much (slowing progress even while working often on it).

Some links related to the drawing/painting and the process….
– The line art used to transfer to canvas
– Blog Entry about the line drawing
– Blog Entry about the quick/sloppy color test
– Blog Entry about the canvas transfer

The finished painting here.

Now I need to find a frame so we can hang it on the wall with some of the inked drawings, and I hope to eventually paint Thorin’s father Thrain in a matching style to include in the little group.

I have other paintings planned as well, but right now I’m enjoying NOT working on art. 😉