Valentine Sweater

Prints Available

This little watercolor is for the Illustration Friday topic, "sweater." I just love big chunky knit things, as many hours pursuing etsy would attest too, so that's what I decided to illustrate. The drawing was really fun to do. It was nice to exaggerate and simplify the figure once I finally let myself. As I was working on the drawing, I knew that I wanted to make it a monochromatic painting in the end. Once it was finished it took me what felt like forever to actually decide what color to make the monochromatic painting. I thought of blue, probably because of the cold. I thought of green because I like green a lot, and it seemed a challenge. I finally decided on the pink-y red of quinacradone rose because it seemed ever so appropriate for Valentines Day. Seems like her favorite sweater is her valentine this year. :) My biggest self critique is that where I started to make the wash for the sweater a graded wash I got way too much water too fast and it didn't make the gradient I was going for at all, but it still works for me. It was good practice and fun to do anyway. Hope you like it!

It's not Friday but...

Prints Available

This was for the last Illustration Friday topic, "surrender." It was a fun little watercolor illustration. I used quinacridone rose, manganese blue hue, and azo yellow as my color triad supplemented with quinacridone sienna(which I LOVE!) and the littlest bit of pthalo blue. Thanks to Sister Sally Ellis for suggesting manganese blue hue for me. I haven't done greens with it yet except for a quick little color wheel for the triad, but I really like it so far.

Here's the little color wheel I did for my color triad. You can see put a little swatch of quin. sienna next to the oranges for perspective. I think it fits in with the triad colors. And those beautiful strokes are from Sis. Ellis showing me quin. sienna for the first time. I like it a lot! I got a tube of mang. blue hue and quin. sienna for Christmas and I'm excited to keep experimenting with this little family of color I've found.

Project of a Lifetime

Several months back, my husband and I decided to start this life long project. It's our second actually. I've put a lot of time and energy into it so far, and Jamin has been working hard to help too. All of our hard work has paid off big time and we finished phase 1 of the project. Here's what we've got so far.

His name is Kyler Lamar Mills. Isn't he beautiful.

Delicious vs. Disgusting

The idea behind this piece is to use color to show the same food in the two different conditions; delicious and disgusting. The idea was to use color to demonstrate statements and reaction of color. The top one needs darker darks for contrast and I wish the kernels were smaller, and the bottom one needs more saturation to make the reaction more shocking. I just didn't know how to go about it without reaching for the Hue/Saturation slider, and I tried to just paint the whole thing rather than using shortcuts to help me understand the colors better.

For BFA critique

It's just the left page that is ready for critique. I'm saving text treatment for later.