gouache with a little bit of water color and a littler bit of acrylic. yes, i know they arent actually that dark. i'll blame the bad color job on the lack of blue jays in southern california.

9x12

another quickie watercolor - not sure whats with birds lately, but i still hate feathers even if i keep trying to paint them. :P

4x6 watercolor with a little acrylic for good measure.

another quickie. this time 4x6

quickie watercolor on (for once) nice paper. wish i could afford to always paint on Arches. o_O

gift art speed paint. 5x7 watercolor and acrylic - 90-120 minutes-ish.

white charcoal pencil on black paper and several hours of fiddling. not totally happy, but turned out better than i thought it would when i got to the half-way point.

new painting. watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and a dab of acrylic. hooray mixed media?

mermaid commission. it always nice to get paid to do something you'd be doing anyway.

i like the clownfish in the hair, the rest of it... meh.

11x14 watercolor

kirin done at a friend's request... cause we were drinking kirin beer. :D

these took about an hour each, give or take. they're fairly small, coming out of the same 9x12 sheet of coldpress. im actually really kind of liking the chalk-like quality these uber cheap watercolors have once dry, i just wish they werent so good at covering my lines.

second attempt at the same character. need to work on blending out shading and getting more contrast. also need to get a proper knife because cutting 8x10 out of 9x12 paper with scissors... ugh.

doodle that got a little out of control, painted on the inside cover of my shiny new sketchbook.

2am is around the time when my brain simultaneously says "i want to paint something!" and "correct anatomy? bah, who needs it!" also, this is 11x17 so to me its unthinkably huge... oh well. its colorful if nothing else.

this is a dik-dik. i like animals with funny names.

however, i dont like this painting. im entirely dissatisfied with the way the kind of speckled fur came out, but im not entirely sure how to go about doing it right. this was done in about an hour, maybe slightly less, in the middle of the night. not an excuse for poor painting, but hey. at least i like the cloud, right?

And with a sudden POP, the sabertoothed cat slipped into extinction...

doodle. trying to let go and be less detail-oriented.

spain won, just like the octopus said.

(updated with newly acquired scan rather than washed out photo)

girl. with antlers. didnt come out at all the way i wanted it to, but since i spent a few hours fiddling with it, i figured id post it anyway. bleh.

saw a barn owl the other day, wanted to paint it. already had the speckly watercolor background from a week or so ago when i was playing with table salt vs kosher salt for effect. owl is mostly gouache, with some watercolor mixed in for color.

giftart for a friend who's kid's room is carousel themed... here's hoping he likes it. if not, guess i'll have to do another one. o_O

5x7 watercolor/gouache

gosh, i done painted a ladybug. :D might have to go back and mess with the colors later, it didnt scan quite right. good enough for now.

just a little 2x6 scrap of paper i wanted to try a speed painting on. took about 15 minutes.

charcoal, white charcoal, and colored pencil on grey paper. took about 4 hours and this is my first time seriously trying to do something on toned paper... overall im pretty pleased, even if the lighting on the feathers isnt quite right. :)

the vertical lines are a texture in the paper... they're not as visible in person.

Great Tit is an awesome name for a bird. srsly. had to do this to go with the boobie.

it wasnt really an option. :P

in a toss up between painting Great Tits or a Boobie, the Boobie won. still like the tits, though... they might have to be done sometime in the near future.

one of several crappy sketches today. thinking i'll try painting instead and see if that turns out any better, or if im just not going to get anything done today.

assuming i ever go back and do a color version of this, the hair would be made of leaves, maybe a few flowers, and the skin would have a wood grain to it. yay dryad.

i like this one. :) watercolor and gouache, touched up a bit digitally because it didnt fit on my scanner, so i had to take a photo. the icky white pixels on their heads and wings are because i used an iridescent medium in the paint and the camera flash didnt like it.

took all day, but yay birdies.

a pair of quaggas* for Olivia! hooray gift arts. :)

*inside joke. yes, i know one is actually an okapi.

i doodled this while watching Star Trek 4. there are issues (like the missing leg, and the misshapen head) but all in all its not bad, considering its watercolor on old caricature paper i had lying around rather than watercolor paper... one of these days i may redo it on proper paper and see if it comes out better.

last one for tonight. the blue is a lot bluer, but it got washed out in the scan for some reason. oh well. toodles.

someone stage an intervention, im still painting. o_O

using up the scraps from cutting 8x10 bits out of larger paper. this one took about an hour, mostly figuring out where to put the stripes.

another 8x10. this is a redo of something i did digitally five or so years ago. while the colors didnt turn out as vibrant as i might have liked, its not bad for an hour and a half.

behold. i have doodled. took about... eh, maybe 3 hours? 8x10, which is bigger than i usually work, so there's both more detail and more fail. not sure which outweighs the other. the more i look at it the more i think i can do something similar but better if i try again sometime.

also, i dislike the character more than the background. silly rabbit... edges are too hard, lighting isnt right. but oh well.

saw How to Train Your Dragon the other day. i like chris sanders' stuff... even if i cant replicate it. i can has fanarts?

quick bookmark sized watercolor. maybe an hour or so of work time sketch to finished, though sprinkled with some time distracted by the internets. feeling really out of practice, but now that ive got a couple weeks of mostly free time, maybe i can work on that.

not feeling at all well. painted a unicorn... dunno why, i just wanted to paint something deer-like, but not a deer. all those messy antlers. the little rabbit was a last minute addition just to add a little more.

not really happy with it, but that's what i get for painting when i feel awful. c'est la vie.

i am so out of practice. this is the second small painting tonight - the first doesnt even deserve to be scanned...

second Year of the Tiger painting. tried to go a little more stylized, but im not sure how well i succeeded.

painting for the upcoming year of the tiger. i swear its face didnt look as crooked before there was color on it. oh well, lesson learned.

and the original sketch:

tonight's painting. done while playing WoW, then wandering around the internet, so i dont have an accurate completion time. mostly just more practice with watercolor. this one didnt scan particularly well and looks a lot better in person.

hooray white lions.

tonight's painting. tried to follow the advice ive gotten about going more saturated with the watercolor rather than simply doing layers of what amount to tints. not sure how well it turned out and i'll probably go back and add more contrast to the horns and spikes, but i like the background at the very least. and, oddly, i dig the little flowers.

played around with some gouache this evening, which is a first for me. i was assured that this first painting would be the WORST PAINTING I EVER DO. its not quite that bad, but yeah, definantly not my favorite.

second painting of the night. this one uses up the rest of the paper from the girl with the tea and cat. the mighty hunter is generally based on an iguana's body and a monitor's head, but i didnt study the anatomy of either, just kinda glanced over them while sketching, so im sure there's tons of errors. fun to paint nonetheless.

the butterfly is so doomed.

i am not entirely pleased with the way this turned out. actually, im nearly entirely displeased. hopefully i learned something nonetheless, posting it so everyone can have a giggle at my FailPainting. right. going to try to do another one now to make up for this utter fail.

another experiment with color. this one didnt really turn out the way i wanted it to, but it was entertaining for an hour or two and hopefully i learned something. that, and ive always kinda liked the way "golden" tigers look. just not easy to replicate. o_o

tonight's painting... spent a little time working on a red dragon, but got bored with it so i painted a kudu. its green because i found a green col-erase pencil lying around and decided to do something with green lines.

i like kudu horns.