Art Order; Hurakan 6 -- Final Book Cover

This piece has taken me through a fair bit of drama already; it has been taken to version 4, finished, posted, taken down, dinked with, evaluated, revised to version 7, and here it is again.  Finished, for a given value of "finished."

Here's the situation -- I have some pretty defined expectations about what makes a good piece of my own artwork -- drawing, value usage, hue choices and edge -- but this is my second digital painting and I have not mastered the tools yet.  Or even established detente.

This is normal.  There is no cure except watching tutorials and cranking out the 1000 pieces of crap that equate with the writers' 10,000 pages of shit that need to be written to make one a functional, dependable pro.

I'm posting the piece because it's better than the stuff I posted a few months back, and because ya can't work in a vacuum.  It's not a portfolio piece but it's the finish of a good learning experience, and today that's enough for me.

Monster a day 30/30 -- Oni Baba

The last monster in my month of monsters is a little lady that fell out of my pencil today.  I've been reading Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," orig. published 1871, but I don't know why she's a Naga, or why her face is stitched up, or why she's holding that box.  I know Mitford doesn't tell the story about the old lady and the box, it's not really a gracious or suitable tale by 1871 standards.  Or today's, either.

"Monster a day" was a fun challenge, and if I didn't have a house full of trim carpentry to paint, I might roll it on another month.  But!  Stir up the Zinser primer, I have responsibilities to get out of the way!  So I'll be cutting back on my Wonderblog postings thru Thanksgiving -- apart from Art Order and such -- and coming back in December to revisit the Monster a day pencil sketches by turning them into polychrome digital paintings.

Monster a day 29/30 -- running centaur

Andrew Loomis wrote somewhere, you should draw a hand from life or good reference everyday, and I have made it into a little ritual, like brushing my teeth after breakfast, because ya have to start somewhere every day, so why not a hand?  

If there is any good in this piece today, (and yeah, I've drawn worse this month) it is because of the hours of practice those hands have built up in my hands over the years, because my actual mind is somewhere between my ceiling and the moon and not actually doing anything useful today.

Somewhere along the drawing process today I got tired of making hatch marks and just shot a length of lead out of my draftsman's mechanical pencil and started laying in shadows with that, in broad swaths.  In this case it turned out alright, for a quick sketch, because (a) it nailed those darkest tones into the foreground to distinguish it from later, receding planes, and (b) the shadow slides down the figure in a single extended drape rather than a series of unsatisfying and inelegant lumps.  I recall from art class that this is a Good Thing.  Yay.

Monster a Day 28/30 -- Dog/Man

I read about this one in a bestiary but I've forgotten its exact name or which culture it's from.  It's one of the vast number of half-man/half animal (dog) fantastic creatures but one version of the critter has the two elements as actual halves joined down the middle, and having only a single eye in the center of the face.   I thought this would be a fun warm-up project this morning.

A good general rule of thumb is "Make the eye smaller," and I did start out with a very small eye, embedded in one of those 4-fold cyclops eyelids that you see on punked-up fetal pigs in jars.   But the shadows of its puffy eyelids kept merging in the bridge of the nose, and eventually I just put the eye out there so it would be easy to read.

Monster a Day 27/30 -- Dark Young

Today's monster is a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath (and I would not be surprised if I flubbed that spelling, no, not at all) and it's durned nice to see him.  The house is still in the grips of contractors during the hours of daylight but I recovered from my late night portfolio rush this weekend and drew through the sound of chop saws and nail guns coming up through the office floor.  It must be a Dark Young because Shub Niggurath itself is a major god of the C'thulhu Mythos and would have to be just plain old More Inspiring.  This is a conceivable horror, q.e.d. it must be a lesser being of the Mythos.

I also did some work on my website, www.studiowondercabinet.com, collapsing one page of fantasy art into another and adding a page dedicated to the sketch work people seem to be looking at.  If you'd like to check it out, I'd love to hear what you think.

Monster a Day (if only!) Day 26/30

I got no monster in me today, I was up too late last night cranking out sketches and up too early confabulating a CV and painting doors.  So here is a slightly used monster, drawn earlier but never before seen on teh internet, and tomorrow, as Scarlett O'Hara has said, is another day.  A day of Monsters, we hope.

The interesting thing about this fellow here is that he was my first stab at the "Flaming Coward" challenge that Jon at Art Order threw out a while back.  I liked this guy a fair bit at the time, but I didn't get a sense of cowardice from him; dumb, stupid, self-righteous belligerence, maybe, but not cowardice.  He's lurked in the pages of my sketchbook since then, waiting for his moment.

Also, while he is a cave creature to the extent that he's blind and navigates via heat-sensitive membranes behind his nose, he doesn't move like something that could duck and climb well, and the membranes look like they'd fry like bacon the first time his flamey self-defense mechanism lit up.

Art Order : Hurakan Challenge part 5

This is an busy weekend here at Studio Wondercabinet.  I'm pulling together a portfolio for someone on the other side of the lake, and simultaneously painting our new front door for the contractors to install.  Huzzah, both of these are wondrous and desirable things, but alas both missions must be handed off tomorrow morning.  As a result, I have not give Part 5 of the Hurakan challenge the focus it deserves.  Here is what I have done as of 11 a.m. Sunday.  I think it's coming together, but it's not done and good yet.  But it does indicate the overall color scheme of the cover, and it does present a more worked up version of the central figure, and today that will have to do.

And yes, there's a pause in my personal Monster a Day challenge that has five more days to go.  No monster yesterday and probably not today either, but that's how it goes when a larger scheduling issue comes up.  If I don't put up a new monster or two by 9 am tomorrow morning, I'll have to cough up 3 in the evening when the contractors go home for the day and I can get back on teh interwebs.