Dandelyon's Worlds

I know I snapped a picture of the background, before I added all the flowers and stuff.  But I must not have saved it.  Grumble.  Oh, well, it looks better now anyway!



And I forgot to take the hair clip off before snapping the photo too.  The upper right corner's not really that shiny. 

Oh, well. 

Sketches aren't supposed to be perfect, right?

If you enjoyed, or if you want one of my quick paintings for your very own, please let me know! I love comments, even ones like "that hand is shaped all wrong and is too small".

But I'm sleepy. This is the last one for today. However, it's set up to keep going for 24 hours from when Ellen started it; there's artists in places like Australia who will still be up and working! But here's my progress on the faerie carousel prompt:

So, I ran out of time on my attempt to paint Lalya, and hit a point where I wanted it to dry well before continuing too, so, I actually started looking at the prompts.

Hmm...Lalya looks better in thumbnail than he does in the original.  Usually it's the other way; it's one of my favorite uses for my cell phone, because I see stuff that's all dreadful with my paintings, and then I can fix them...or at least try to.

Anyway, I started with the "moon blossom" prompt.  And too much flesh-tint paint, that I'd squeezed out of a tube with a broken lid, so putting the extra back before it dried out was not an option.

I think it would be cool to make this a Torn World plant, but my brain is now in visual mode, and I have no idea what kind of flower it should be, or where it grows, or if it's edible or poisonous or used for dye or medicine...or what.

That done, I had still more of the flesh tint paint (sheesh, I sure overdid that!), so I looked for something that I could start with a face or body or something...the prompt that snagged my brain was "save your soul".   Nothing was said in the prompt about who was saving the soul, or for what...

For the flower, I added mostly purples. 

For Preserved Spirit, I added mostly browns, with a little bit of white and blue for contrast.

Now I have to decide whether I want to return to Lalya, who needs a lot of work, or try for a different prompt. 

Do you folks have any advice?

I reset my appointment to try on a new CPAP mask for earlier in the day so I could attend #scifichat for the first time in months. They were discussing post-cyberpunk fiction, which was fun.

Then I started to try to get set up to do some painting, and got dragooned into doing yardwork. True, it needed to be done, and also true, it's supposed to rain for the next two days. So I went with it.

Finally, now I'm sitting down to start.  Starting is generally a blank page, so:

And then, since I'm painting with acrylics, I either sketch in a pale paint color, or lay down a background.  Sometimes the background is quite elaborate, but today I'm supposed to be finished (or at least ready to move on) in an hour, so I'm going for a plain background.  It's a start.

So, a whole bunch of other artists are also participating in the sketch fest.  You're welcome to stop by and participate, either by leaving prompts or sketching.  Or both, of course. 

It's over here.

And now you can see the same notebook page, with the first layer of color on it. 

More later!

One of our talented writers over at Torn World has drawn Lalya! Go take a peek!

Lalya's Dress by Lorna Cowie  Doesn't he look great?

If you leave comments here, I'll share them with her, but if you leave them there, she'll see them directly!

Tomorrow is Sketch Fest; I think one of the things I want to attempt, now that I know (visually, as opposed to verbally) what he looks like is a rendition of Lalya in acryics. 

Ellen Million is hosting a Sketch Feat. http://ellenmilliongraphics.com/sketchfest/

People are leaving prompts and artists are sketching. In whatever media they want to practice. If you go to the site and go to the prompts page, you can see the prompts, and click to see who claimed the prompts, and/or click to see the sketches.

When I asked what I should talk about in this journal, several of you asked about my creative process. So, what is it like to do a challenge like this?

Today wasn't ideal. It's hot enough that I had to keep putting water on the dollops of acrylic paint on my makeshift pallette. But the "not ideal" part started earlier--at lunchtime, when the computer crashed. The clever software in it recovered, leaving me with an alarming message. So, when I got home, I scanned prompts and started the computer to do the waiting update. Which took forever. No way to Google images; go check the junk mail for some kind of ad or magazine with pictures, since one of my goals has been to get better at faces.

The prompt that stuck in my brain was "butterfly tears".  That's a good choice for my goal of painting at least one face during the sketch fest, since tears come from eyes, which are in the face.  The photos I found were tiny, which is doubtless part of why it took me so long to get the face to the point where I didn't hate it.

So, I started with sky.  Butterflies need sky.  And acrylics cover each other pretty well, for the most part, which means you paint the background first.  Or at least I do.  

And then I started sketching in the face, all in paint.  It's hard to tell in the photo, but the shape was wrong, and I ended up spending a bunch of time on that.  These two pictures are about a half-hour apart.  Doesn't look like it does it?

Next, I started to really fill in the face, adding eyes.  And shifting them--this one's too big, that one's too low, and so on.

One of these days, I'll get to the point where I don't have to draw or paint the parts of faces a dozen times before they get close to right.  It's just one of those things where you need to practice to build skills.  

Which means, of course, it's time to pretend I'm a patient woman.  Paint, snap a pic, look at what is effectively a thumbnail, paint some more, look at the photo I'm using for reference, and so on.  Slow, picky--stuff that my sister Dragon would have had finished by doing it right the first time.  But then, there's other things that I can do right the first time that she fumbles at.  It's all in where we put in our hours of practice.

Then the hair.  I like doing hair, I understand hair.  Though the more I look at this sketch, the more I think I'll need to add more hair; the head looks short.  So I'll have to put a bit more paint on this later.  

Then, finally, the inspiration from the prompt.  I'd like to add a few more butterflies flying off into the distance, but this is good enough for tonight:



I'm willing to send a real scan of the picture (as opposed to a cell-phone photo) to anyone who tips, and the original is also for sale, once I'm sure I'm done with it and less sleepy.

Oh, and comments and questions are welcome!