Dress Code

At the court of Thulanya, evenings dresses are highly intricate and admired, also by the foreign guests visiting this place in the forest. Etiquette rules, nevertheless, forbid everyone to wear such garments during daytime.
This visitor now understands why.

This is another quick painting in the series of tiny forest people started with Faerie Amanita. I feel it pretty much undone, but the more I rendered it, the most unsatisfied I grew, so it was time to go on with something else.

The Pet of Lady Usnea

If you look up, at the tree branches, when you walk in a uncontaminated forest, maybe you'll notice her or hers people walking slowly from tree to tree. Just, don't make them understand that you've seen them! They're very shy.

The Lichen Usnea Barbata lives well where pollution is low. Her crown comes from Cladonia ssp.

Sweet Pea Love (Butterflower#3)

I'm not really a pink-sweet-girly type, but the pea flowers growing this summer in my greenhouse couldn't avoid the chance of becoming the subject(s) of a tender, eternal meeting between two Butterflowers. The motif of petals is a little revisited.

No surprise that an alternative name for this subfamily is Papilionoideae.

Eichhornia

Done for the contest "Girl with a Flower" hold at DeviantArt by Gabbyd70 .

This was a pretty good excuse to paint flowers again, and practice a little with faces, which I always need. It's not very clear if the girl is really human, but she tries to give the observer this illusion, at least. She's also not intended to be beautiful or perfect (asymmetries are intentional), but misterious and probably dangerous.

The flower she's connected with is the Water Hyacinth, a very invasive species which, while cleaning the waters where she grows in, accumulates the worse poisons...

 a couple of closepus:

Butterflower#2 - Iris

This is another, quick version of the 'Butterflower' (butterfly + flower) concept.

I did it quickly and trying to get a 'macro' photo effect. 

I used a picture of Iris from my father's garden as a loose reference, but I changed the color scheme and petals shape to made the flower more interesting.

Butterflower

I sketched the concept of this imagine in the gone century, at least 17 years ago, since the original pencil drawing I found at home is dated 1994:

I felt like I wanted to paint a colored version of it, soon or later. In a lack of ideas I've picked up the subject and done a Photoshop version, using mainly round and chalk brushes. Maybe I'll try later other versions, with different kind of petals, or pistils, or insects, will see.

If pictures with human subjects are challenging and often leave me with a sense of frustration and low self-esteem, these flower-insects-creatures subjects give me a feeling of freedom and creativity which I enjoy very much, even if the results may not be that good.

Queen Radiolaria

I've not really much to say about this painting, except that I felt almost compelled to draw it after having seen the wonderful scientific images of Radiolarians drawn by Ernst Haeckel in 1904 (look here to appreciate his tremendous works).

For the anatomy reference, I credit the photographer Marcus Ranum (Mjranum-stock at DeviantArt) for using his pic.

I tried, after finishing the picture, to set Vibrance at high values, I think that it gives very nice colors, seen in a normal computer screen, without getting strange saturations effects.

And some close-ups:



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...

Transgender

I've not updated for a while, since time for painting has been scarce, and I'm actually working at a very detailed and probably too ambitious painting which takes me an eternity.

In the meanwhile, I had a very quick project, it means helping my boyfriend with a deadline. He had to produce some characters for a boardgame, and wanted to have some female ones. So, he drew this archer:

Which I chose for a very quick (maybe 1 h work) transgender-surgery:

The final drawing should be quite small so I wasn't requested to paint a well-detailed image. Anyway, it was funny; not least to see how a guy is more specialized in painting males, and myself drawing females, instead. In the future there will be some more female contributions from my side, I suppose, ahah.