Paint Post/Doodle Collection

Hey there! I'd like to show you a few new works.

---> This is Adam's paint-by-numbers project from last post, all finished by Shira. It was just taking too darn long for Adam to do it himself. I know that I didn't have much to do with this, but I thought it was nice enough to write about in my blog.

<--- Now this is something I did. Originally I just had a fancy sun shining on the forest, but it had too much color and it didn't go with the rest of the painting, so I turned my sun into a sunflower. Now the squirrel and the deer have a giant flower to look at! I wonder how big the seeds would come out? (I love eating sunflower seeds, unsalted) I think it may be one of the first watercolor paintings I've done that didn't involve a stick figure me (standing under a rainbow, holding hands with my mom, or in a giant flower garden. You know the way a young kid thinks. Or maybe that's just me).

Below are three instances of bishoujo manga experimentation. Bishoujo is japanese for "beautiful women", in case you didn't know. I love drawing manga, because it's like cartooning, only slightly more artistic looking. However I find it a bit challenging to draw all the hair and the big eyes and stuff. Hopefully if I practice I'll get better. In the future I hope to create more of my own original manga characters for my enjoyment.

---> I copied these out of a manga book by Christopher Hart. He has dozens of "how to draw" books to his name, and his writing style is nice. The undated one was made May 26. I like the way I did both of their hairstyles, even though they are copied. This kind of drawing gives me great practice for getting comfortable and confident in my hair and eye drawing abilities.

<--- Original character, coming through! I am both proud and slightly embarassed to show this to you. On the one hand, I pride myself on the hair, winking expression, and ruffled sleeves. On the other hand the arms are doing nothing, the proportions of the body don't look quite right, and the boobs are obvious. Of course in bishoujo manga, all the women have big boobs, but they only show on revealing costumes. I don't want it to be obvious under a simple frilly top! Oh well. What can you do?

If you like what you see (or not), please feel free to comment (or not).

1st Paint Post

I am so happy today! I just got my mom, my brother, my dad, and myself engaged in a morning of watercolor painting! Bettina didn't feel like painting, because she was busy reading Pendragon #10: "Soldiers of Halla", which she bought a few days ago when it came out. It's the last Pendragon novel ever, so she's way excited about it. ANYWAY...(ha ha, I'm saying it like Leslie)...Yesterday we bought a bunch of awesome art equipment at A.C. Moores, like tubes of watercolors, a starter brush set, a couple of plastic palettes, and 2 pads of watercolor paper. Me and Shira were really the ones who chose all the tools, while Bettina and Adam just tagged along.

After leaving the store, we were ready to begin our painting careers! This morning was perfect painting weather (e.g. cloudy, rainy, not sunny). Before I knew it, almost my whole family has a paintbrush in their hands and creating art! Benny and Adam are working together on a paint-by-numbers for the time being, but it still counts. Here are the beautiful pictures I took of the final paintings:

---> This is my first watercolor painting, called "Essence of Random". As you can see I did a whole bunch of experimentation, to get used to the new materials I had to work with. I've never worked with tube paints before.

<--- This is my mom, Shira's first watercolor painting. I love her style, all flowery and bright. She said she used a lot of water when painting, maybe that's why it looks different. Hmmm.

---> This is Shira's 2nd painting, a crack at pointillism. Beautiful, in't it?

<--- This is Adam's first watercolor painting. Just so y'all know, Adam is 11 years old, and has no previous painting experience other then paint-by-numbers. (Coming up next.)

---> I know, I know; it's not finished yet, but here's how far Benny and Adam have gotten so far. This painting was started three weeks ago, and Adam hasn't worked on it in about a week, so this morning was a nice boost in the productivity department.

My Doodle Collection #9

Time for some more awesome doodles/sketches/artwork/masterpieces! (Hey, it's more than just doodling, but the post-title's still nice, so I'm keeping the name.)

<--- I had a lot of fun doing these; I combined a bunch of different facial parts together into 7 distinct personas. Pick eyes from column A, lips from column B, eybrows and noses from C and D, and you've got yourself a brand new character! Once you've got the face, you could very well go on to choosing a head shape and funny ears too! I got all the face parts from a book called the Creative Cartoonist.

---> This little guy shown in two panels is someone I like to call Josky. You can pronounce it "Joe-skee" or "Jah-skee" if you like, but what matters is that I made up an imaginary animal that has an original name. Have you ever heard the name Josky before? I think it fits him. He lives somewhere in a rocky-mountain-desert, and he's searching for bugs or prarie dogs or something.

<--- Here we have a couple of profiles that I copied from the Creative Cartooning book. I relly like the one that has both eyes on one side of his face, because he looks like he was drawn by Picasso, but he was actually drawn by me! It was fun doing the other profiles too, but they're too "beautifully proportioned" to be funny.

---> Yesterday I went to Borders and got inspired by a dragon-art book to create my own fire-breathing beast. I made this totally from my own imagination! What do you think of that? I also named him Icarus, after the Greek myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus who made wings out of wax and feathers so they could fly out of prison. But Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings melted, and he fell into the sea and drowned. But my Icarus has fully-functional wings that make him keep his balance when he stands on two legs like this.

<--- This was made 2 weeks ago. It was really simple to create; all I did was draw my shadow, then fill in the background. The coloring in took a while, plus I had to make it nice and smooth looking.

Please comment and tell me which pieces you like and why.

Mother's Day Card

A picture of the card I made for my mother, Shira:

I believe that the Mothers Day card I made this year beats all the Mothers Day cards I've made before. Can you tell I worked hard on it?