Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Do I know you?

One of my main problems regards anatomy and figure painting. 
Last month I decided to improve myself by sketching some portraits found in a old hair fashion magazine. The first sketch was so bad, and did not correspond at all to the photo, so I began, very frustrated, to change a lot of things in the face, until I got a completely weird creature. Back to my usual love for marine stuff, I start to add more and more elements resembling a sea monster. At home, we start to speculate that this creature could pretty much look like a hypothetic concept for the coming movie Avatar and the Deep Sea (or whatever the title will be): a humanoid sea alien depicted in hers first contact with a new species from the deep oceans.
My boyfriend suggested that she(he?) could very much do something, so I elongated the canvas and added shoulders, arms and hands. She is holding some kind of unknown and luminescent animal, for which I loosely got inspiration from googling radiolarian pictures.
Now I had to deal even harder with anatomy issues (well, I punished myself..) so we took some pictures of myself and my hands and paint them into the first concept, until I felt somehow satisfied or, better said, fed up. (I can anyway tell that I don't usually look like this, at least not in public). I'm still not very convinced about the result, but at a certain point I wanted to go further.


I need to find a way to get a more saturated image, normally I work at home and the colours look bright, but then, when I look at the pictures from another screen, the image becomes dark, desaturated and muddy.

And a couple of close-ups:

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Queen Bee

Before Christmas time I was asked by a friend to draw a picture for a tattoo. Since it was intend as a present for her husband, I was allowed to publish it only after X-mas holiday. beeing intended for a tattoo, I felt the task quite challenging, since it implies that the drawing is permanently fixed on skin.
The requirements were to draw something inspired to this song from the Italian band Marlene Kuntz. The attitude of the Queen Bee must be aggressive, somehow insolent, and she must hold a pot with honey between her legs. I decided to draw a couple of doodles, with a robotic style, the second one with a more antropomorphic and sexy approach to the anatomy:




The first one was chosen and then refined, including both a colored and a monochrome version. Since the deadline was close, I feel that the result could have been improved, especially about boots and some details of head, which I would have made more hi-tech/cyber, lets say. Here come anyway the final drawings: