He-Man 01

I've been on a He-Man kick recently, getting some of those new figures from Matty.com, (all apologies to my friends and lovers at Hasbro!) and going to that gallery show - I decided to do my own, after being inspired by all of those wonderful pieces.


It is a smaller canvas, so I kept it to just He-Man, Skeletor, and the Castle Grayskull in the background, I tried to find a series of poses that would fit together into a good composition.

I also needed to draw the castle separately, to comp it back behind the figures. The other poses were cool, but I think I already found the composition in those very rough thumbnails.

And on to the canvas - back to hot press paper with gesso! - with the final composition and costumes. I went with a ram's skull, instead the more representational version I had sketched out, but I think that's the only new addition to the culmination of the sketches into the final.

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 04

Final! As predicted, the pencils were a pain to work with on this canvas, moreso with what I wanted to do with the background, than the Witch herself...anyways, lessons learned, and I have about 1/3 of the palette set for the big one...which I'll probably get going on next month.

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 03

Here's the airbrushed color, I kept it to two colors, the bright green skin tone, then I mixed in some brown and black to gray it down, to that dark muddy green of her clothes.

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 02

Here's the blacks and texture added in. Even though I was using a brush, and not a pencil tip, the canvas still grabbed at the bristles and modified the intention...darnit. Regardless, it still came out pretty strong - now on to the colors!

Wicked Witch! Look Out! 01

So all this work is gearing up to do the big poster size Oz painting, that I did all the comps for last year...I had a scrap of canvas board lying around, so I'd thought I would do a quick test.

Already I can tell you it was a mistake to use this canvas board, rather than a custom gesso'd illustration board - the grab on the pencil was a pain in the ass to deal with, so I only expect it to get worse when I start working over the paint...let's see how it goes...!

Junipurr 2

If you recall the post from last September, we lost one of our cats - it's become tradition to do a little portrait for my wife, and for fun, an animated angel version for her laptops' desktop screen.

So here's Juni in his classic "did someone mention food?' pose.

Captain America Final

So here it is, and again, the scan does it no justice. I tried to bring up the saturation to match the real version, but it started to pull out some of the overspray bits too much as well, making it look a little blotchy...so, the real one looks better, but...

...while I'm happy with the red, white and blue colors, the flesh tones came out a little undersaturated, so that's a lesson learned. Next time I'll over saturate, and then bring it down with the pencils. I'm also happy with the chrome wings, but the shield never came together, at least in the way I'm used to, in a smaller format using templates. And the red color transition got lost in the highlight - I was really happy with the flow of cool red, to warm red, and that got all covered with the white.

Overall, I give it a B; it's not going to make it into the portfolio, but I learned a lot, and that was the point of this one. Maybe when/if the sun comes out, I'll take a proper photo of it to post?