[nsfw] or hardly working?

lyrium

And a bear scratching its bottom

Iruka

Lovely rendering on that fur.

lyrium

Thanks, Iruka!

More but different fur on this guy

lyrium

Yesterday I kept thinking 'man, this is the best thing ever, I get to stand here in the museum drawing, how fuckin lucky am I'

Iruka

These are ridiculously pleasant to look at. How big are they?

lyrium

Thank you very much, Iruka! I'm doing the pastels on a 9" x 12" pad; the fox and the mandrill fill the sheet nicely but the others would probably fit on something like a 6" x 8" size.
The pastel pencils have been great because they are a way to sketch in nice rich colors with the control of a pencil, but they're faster than colored pencils and a lot less messy than painting. Digital sketching would offer the same perks but I'm not very comfortable on my tablet, so the pastels have been awesome. And it's funny, because I always had this picture in my head of how pastel looks that I really didn't like, so I avoided them for the longest time. When my teacher had me do my first one with the figure, I was really apprehensive about it. How silly! I'm going to try to sell these animal pastels at a show at the end of April, so hopefully that goes well. They sure have been a pleasure to draw.

Here's how my big final figure painting looks so far. We have 7 more sessions with the model, so lots of time to make it look as good as possible!



It's so much more colorful in person- I should try to take a picture in sunlight or something.

Iruka

You're in a show?? That's awesome! Have you started to frame them yet? If you plan to, start on that process early, it'll make it way less stressful if you aren't trying to frame stuff a week before.

The figure looks nice, is she going to get toes?

lyrium

I will start to frame that stuff asap. And I guess I'll give her tooesss if you insist

Spent all week wanting to draw this one little bird, and then when I got to the museum and realized that, I kinda felt like a crazy person.

ziddersroofurry

To be fair that's a very well done (and very pretty!) burd.

tapeslinger

I love that little bird!

all of these animals really are awesome. They remind me of the kinds of things my mum goes absolutely nuts for in terms of prints and notecards...

Radicou

Love the textures on everything Lyrium, especially that bird.

lyrium

Thanks a lot!

More work on the figure, started in on the piggies a little

Koreg

I love your animals, they look gorgeous. I hope they go over well at the show. If not let us know, I know people who would love this stuff.


That'd be me.

lyrium

Thanks for the kind words Based on the feedback you folks have given me on the animals, I'm considering maybe putting them on little blank cards or something to sell. It hadn't occurred to me before because I was pretty much just doing them for fun, and then the opportunity to show and sell them came along. But that's another good idea!

Still working away on this sucker. I have 8 weeks left to finish it before I leave the country, which might seem like a lot but when you only work on it once a week and your to-do list seems to grow every time, it can be a kick in the butt!

tynic

Look at dat table!
Your painting and sense of color has become so spectacular. This is gorgeous.

lyrium

Thanks so much
In my head color is just The Struggle. But I'm learning so much from these pieces. It's good to hear I'm making progress.

More work on the figure today:



Sometimes what my teacher tells me is hard to understand, so he tries really hard to explain and I try really hard to get it, and I look at examples from famous paintings in books and then look up at my painting and say some swears, and then I spend like 12 hours painting with it in my head and start to maybe get it a tiny bit. The Struggle.

Lenna

This woman looks nice, but for me it's something wrong with her neck, too long?

Mabelma

I love the hair texture you have on the animals! It looks awesome. As for the lady, I think the problem is the top of her torso rather than the neck, I think it's a bit too down, but then again like @Lenna said, shortening the neck might fix that problem. I'd add a different color floor as to not confuse it with the background but other than this, it's a really nice painting. Is it digital or traditional?

tapeslinger

I think it's an optical illusion from the shadow under the chin, which makes the parts in bright highlight look like they're placed higher

lyrium

I will check on both the chin and the crotch. I think it's true that she may need more chin. Unfortunately I think a big issue is that my teacher took this picture at an angle that stretches out her upper portions compared to what's below them, which is visible when it's not cropped in so far, so you can see that the edges of the paintng are at an angle :



I'll check those measurements though and take another picture. The model definitely has a long neck:



but it does look like the chin might be lacking in the painting. The head is angled slightly in a way that I'll have to be careful to get the perspective right on, or it'll keep looking off.

Thanks for the input!

Oh, and it's an oil painting from life @Mabelma. The floor is the same piece of drapey cloth hanging behind her coming forwards on the floor. The background is definitely less far along than the figure; I have to work on the floor fabric and lighten it up so it's easy to see how it's angled upward and catching light.

lyrium

Ok, so I brought the chin down, worked on the neck, adjusted the height of the crotch and knees. Does it look better now?

lyrium

Ok, so just to be safe I completely repainted the head to make it larger (which was an intense and painful lesson). So after many hours in the studio and nights taking naps on a mat on the floor, these two pieces are all done and the baby bird (me) has officially flown the nest.













Based on how I'm posting these I can only hope that the images aren't too large; I apologize if they are. My options for posting are going to be limited for a while.
It was weird to leave the studio, my home for the last four years, but it's on to exciting new things now. I'll talk about it in the chat thread. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these pieces.

really delayed edit!: I realized the colors on those pictures were off, so I posted better ones, and some closeups.

lyrium

Here's the first painting of my trip! These monks are all over the place, and I hadn't realized that they have smartphones and tattoos and generally seem to go about things just like ordinary folks, at least when they're out and about. I did see a bunch of them singing in a temple and it was really cool; there were different vocal parts and it went on for a long time but most of them were doing it from memory.

lyrium

Auto-rickshaws are called tuk-tuks here.

lyrium

This was in an area outside of Bangkok, but it was still surprising to look up and see two elephants walking by!

tynic

THOSE REDS
love how you've pulled the orange into the trunks. These are all wonderful.

lyrium

Thanks, Tynic!
I'm still getting the hang of doing a whole oil painting in one sitting. I hadn't done much landscape painting before, so it's still pretty clumsy to always be painting on wet paint instead of getting to work over dry layers. But it has been very enjoyable to loosen up a bit, take more liberty with composition and color, etc. As it gets more comfortable to work at this pace I hope to experiment more

Iruka

Really love the dog in the last one, and the colors in general.

lyrium

Thank you, Iruka. I was happiest with the dog in that painting as well, and seeing as you are really good at painting dogs and awesome colors, that comment makes me feel really good haha.

Here's one from yesterday, in certain areas painting wet on wet was helpful, in others it was a challenge. I'll get the hang of it eventually!



As I've been painting in my head I keep thinking of what my teacher might tell me to fix or push if he were looking at it, so that's been helpful.

NightDragon

Yeah, overall, your colors are just super delicious. Love all of it!

Scosglen

I find myself wanting for some more crisp edges to help separate out forms and direct focus. I think experimenting with some strategic palette knife usage might go a long way, particularly given the quick and wet nature of these studies.

lyrium

@Scosglen , that is EXACTLY what I was struggling with! It's so easy to paint a nice crisp edge on top of dry paint but they were totally disappearing in these pieces. I tried using your palette knife advice in this painting and I'm determined to practice with it.



So my goal here was simple, the scene has distinct background/foreground and I wanted to try using the palette knife to get sharp edges in the foreground. Overall I'm pretty disappointed in the background. I darkened the warm stones to separate the values a little more than they were in real life but I didn't do a very good job with it; I was more focused on working with the foreground in the time I had. Using the palette knife was tricky! But it did help! I used it primarily for the flowers and a little bit on the coins. I think it would be good to do a whole palette knife painting to get the hang of it a little better. Thanks so much for the input!

lyrium

Okay, in this one I tried seeing if I could use the palette knife on certain edges to bring out the face. Mixed success.
These are some shrine dancers I saw. Their dresses and headdresses were really lovely.

lyrium

That's a bus driver reading the newspaper while he drives, because traffic here is just that slow!

lyrium

These weren't fish I observed in Thailand or anything, just some personal goldfish because

lyrium

So I spent 2 hours in 100 degrees fahrenheit standing in a rice field of rural Thailand painting this. Afterward I thought, "HUH I MIGHT BE INSANE"

lyrium

Still very challenged by these, but each time I think of something to try next time, so I'm determined to get better! A small part of it might be getting used to painting outside in this heat. But no excuses, haha.



Also tentatively approaching watercolor. It was breezy so a few grains of sand made their way into this one. Mixed media then?

tapeslinger

sand on watercolor is actually a cool way to create texture, if you brush it off there should be slightly paler spots on the paper where the sand was. That's such an evocative little scene!

lyrium

Thanks, tapeslinger! I tried watercolor again and this one got really messed up, definitely makes me appreciate how forgiving oil is by comparison. But I was painting on the top of a huge karst that I climbed with my watercolors in my backpack, so that was fun.



the spot:

At the bottom of the karst lives a family of spectacled langurs, and they are adorable. I used the palette knife a lot on this one.

Koreg

lyrium wrote: »

Thanks, tapeslinger! I tried watercolor again and this one got really messed up, definitely makes me appreciate how forgiving oil is by comparison. But I was painting on the top of a huge karst that I climbed with my watercolors in my backpack, so that was fun.



the spot:

At the bottom of the karst lives a family of spectacled langurs, and they are adorable. I used the palette knife a lot on this one.

That sounds horribly cruel to do.

You could have at least used a butcher knife, or something