January Jellyfish Day 1-3

Last year I started seriously doing one painting a day giving myself a monthly challenge series, in January I did jellyfishes. So I'm going to throw my brush at it again this year, only this time I wanted to try and do it traditionally rather than digitally! So far is been fun/frustrating since watercolor is a faaar less forgiving medium than acrylic or oil.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit just how long it took me to complete this first one, it literally took me around 6-7 hours. Where as digitally it only took me 3 hours on my first day, I learned many times that there is indeed no undo button! This is the stalked jellyfish  info and ref found  here.

I did the deadly box jellyfish for day 2 and it was somewhat easier but deceptively complicated. Its mainly a series of flat washes, with acryla gouache used to do the jellyfish at the very end. I was shocked to finish this one in 3 hours! So some progress was made :)

Spotted jellyfish was my study for today, and it's definitely my favorite! I tried to apply the techniques I learned/used in the first 2 but I critically overlooked using frisket. I painted this one negatively and did the speckles with acryla gouache, but if I could do it again I would have used frisket, took waaay longer than it should have around 3 hours. 

Anyone who wants is welcome to join me on the #januaryjellyfish challenge, or share whatever art challenges you're doing this year.  

Inktober Day 2 - 5 2015

I did most days of inktober and I'm still doing a bit of a catch up ( 6 days behind) but so far so good! Its been a lot of fun so far, and I've learned quite a bit since I usually do mostly digital work. Aside from the no undo button tears,  its really helped me see the importance of a confident stroke + planning everything in advance. But most important so far is just accepting mistakes and working around them, whereas I'd just scrap or re-do something digitally. Here's days 2-5 the first few days I mostly did hatches over watercolor washes, Day 5 was purely accidental I spilled the ink on the page and it looked so much like a planet I just added the lines around the edges.

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Inktober Day 1 2015

     So I'm determined to successfully complete inktober this month, I've known about it since last year but was too nervous to try it myself. This time I not only want to do so every day but I also want to practice telling a complete story with it. Probably won't be a comic but I at least what to have a coherent series of illustrations. They'll start with Monday's illustration, this week I practiced some of the texture techniques learned in Yuko Shimizu's skill share class. Its imho a very short class but it is packed with use full information, and definitely helped me improve my inking skills quickly. One thing that I found useful was thinking about the texture of an object before starting, it seems simple but I've noticed that a lot of people seem to ignore that when inking (or painting really).

I tried doing a wash with the first drawing , you can't see it but it was originally hatched but I thought it looked too stiff.  This exercise really helped me to loosen up and stop being so afraid of accidents

With this one I really tried to emphasize the texture of the hair, fur and scarf. I'm not to happy with the fur (maybe I needed some correction fluid?) I think the hair turned out pretty good. Hopefully I can keep it up and do something the whole time. It seems like quite a few people are going to do it this year.