Thursday, September 30, 2010

Medusinae

I painted this one from the idea I had in the previous post. I wanted a sea creature in human shape, but not the usual mermaid. This character is a sad one, longing for contact with the other creatures in the ocean, but she frighten away them because of hers beautiful, but poisonous and urticants tentacles.
The name Medisinae is an hybrid between the mythologic creature Medusa, who petrified everybody looking at her, and Medusae, or jellyfishes in zoology.
Painted in Photoshop, whith a custom brush for some of the tentacles. This time I tried to be quick, even if I wanted a enough detailed painting. Since she is not a human creature, I wasn't looking for perfect proportions in anatomy and face.


I put also a couple of closeups:



Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The beauty and the beast

This is a very quick concept for a children book I would like to illustrate one day, here I wasn't pushing too much for details.
I'm back to my beloved marine subjects, as one can see. The beauty and the beast aren't, apparently, very alike, but both of them are longing for hughs and both of them cannot be easily touched...



Saturday, September 11, 2010

Alexander the Little

When your mother-in-law asks you for a portrait of your child, of course you try to do your best. Anyway, I decided not to paint something traditional, but a picture closer to my own taste, so I put a hint of fantasy in this picture.
Both subject and painting title ironically enough refer to the "dictatorial" attititude of our toddler, but more fit to his age: so, he wouldn't ride a powerful horse, but a frog; his head will not be crown with laurel, but with blueberry leaves and wild strawberries, which are the fruits he loves the most. The landscape and vegetation are typical of Northern Sweden, where he's born, but the dress has something to do with his half-mediterranian ancestors.
This work has experienced some annoying hardware problems (mentioned in the post below), so I had to re-paint it; however, I was happy to realize that the re-painting process has been much faster.


Anatomy has been a big issue in this painting, since it is very hard to convince a 2-years old to stay quiet a couple of seconds and pose in the way and light you wish; thus, I had to use several photo references to deal with it, and I'm still not satisfied. The child was drawn by pencil after photos, then scanned and painted over in Photoshop (I find Photoshop not very suitable for sketching, since its pencil is too slow compared with hand's movements), everything else was painted directly on canvas.
Other photo references of mine have been inspirating for painting the frog, some plants and the background, and much work was done going around in nature and looking at landscape elements. This painting has been the most demanding work I've done in Photoshop until now, but I hope I'll be better with time.

Below follow some close-ups: