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.

Faerie Amanita

Just a quick thing, not very original I suppose, made for fun in Photoshop.
When walking in the forest, it could be worth watch your step. Or maybe not?

Rita Levi Montalcini - Painter

I found at home a very old disk of Corel Painter Essential 3, so I installed it and tried to see how it works. 

I spent a lot of time trying the different settings for brushes, and fighting against some bugs and mysteries of this program, which works in another way than Photoshop but is somehow similar to Artrage.

I tried to follow a tutorial of the wonderful Corrado Vanelli from the last issue of ImagineFX, but looks like my program version is so old that I couldn't find many of the described tools, ahah.

As practice, I did a quick portrait sketch in honor of the great scientist and Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, who passed away few days ago. The reference pic is a photo found in Google.

The Gift of Poinsettia

This was done for the OC Winter Contest hold by the very kind Endorell-Taelos (Alicia Cooper) at DeviantArt. The point was to depict one of hers OC and one of mine in a winter/X-mas environment. I do not have specific OCs, but she allowed me to have one of my Butterflowers, and so the Butterflower Poinsettia was created.
I chosed Luciana among Endorell's characters, because I found it the most intriguing one. She is basically a Dragon mage princess, with a vampire illness, a kind girl, with a heavy past and duties.
So, here comes a little explanation of the pic's symbols:

yes, you 've seen right: the Poinsettia gives its blood as a (X-mas) gift for the gentle but thirsty Luciana. Normally Poinsettias have a white juice, but this is a Butterflower. And, no fear for the little creature: the petals can grow back.

The constellation above Luciana is the Draco. Obviously.

The flowers are typical ones used in winter bouquets, as well as the Bullfinch is a must in (Swedish) X-mas cards. Just to make the pic prettier.

The crown of light resembles the one of Lucia, here in Sweden is a key figure under X-mas times. And, Lucia/Luciana means "Light".

I tried to represent her as a young princess with a childish, but sad expression in her eyes, as if the happiness of these days could never be enough to cancel the terrible past following her. I also wanted to give a feeling of a regal portrait from Old Masters, at least a kind of.

Otherwise, I enjoyed very much to paint this, in Photoshop as usual. Hands referenced from mine. No refs for face. The character Luciana is copyright of Alicia Cooper.

Amphetamine Owl

This was a short task, but it put me far long out of my comfort zone, so it was very much welcome. A colleague/friend of mine wanted to give a decorated mug as a present for hers MC-driving instructor. 

The assignment was to depict this bulky guy yelling at her during lessons. I was provided with a picture of him, the info that he used to call her "amphetamine owl" and some details about motorcycle and his typical outfit.

The drawing was expected to be ironic and not too detailed, since it had to be put on a mug.

Here a pic of the finished work. It is really impressive how nowadays the finish and the quality of colours of ceramic items can be so good.

I was in a cover and I didn't know it...

Recently I've discovered the Google option "search by image", and, in a rush of vanity, started to look if my works were used/downloaded by someone else in the Internet.

Besides my own pages, or some of my watchers at DeviantArt, there are a couple of blogs and some russian wallpaper sites. Ahah, so famous I'm not :) .

Then I found this one, which looks like a cover of a magazine:

The picture is Alexander the Little, the portrait of my older son in a fantasy version.

Since I don't know Chinese, I asked a colleague of mine to translate the content on the page, and she confirmed that this is the cover of a widespread Chinese magazine, Science Fiction World. 

I learned from Wikipedia that they have some hundred thousand readers, and in fact for me, little and unknown illustrator, is a quite big honour to have one of my paintings gracing the cover of an important publication.

The point is, they never told me they wanted this picture for their publication. It's not a matter of money, since I did it after a request of my mother-in-law, and for building up my portfolio.

I hope at least they did credit me (well, looks like I'm very naïve :D )

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.

Ipad + Artrage experiments

My boyfriend got an Ipad a while ago, which has became an abused object at home.

When I heard that there're apps allowing you to paint on it, with fingers, or a capacitive stylus and even a capacitive brush, I couldn't resist to try them. What sounded more appealing is the possibility to sketch in a traditional way, without the need to go around with a lot of material.

I got a Sensu brush (includes brush and stylus at both ends), downloaded Artrage for Ipad, and start to doodle to try the stylus and program features. I felt like when I tried PS and the Wacom tablet the first time: fully handicapped.

Issues:

The first issue is the complete lack of pressure sensitivity. I use pressure massively, when drawing/painting both traditional and digital, and suffer when I cannot use it.

The second problem is the low resolution of the drawing, which do not allow you to draw tiny details, especially when using watercolour/oil brushes. The pencil/pen can compensate for it, but you get another effect. When you would like to paint tiny strokes, what you get are perfect, small circles. So, the sketch below named 'Autumn leaves' suffers of this flaw, and I find it awful, frankly.

The sizes for some brushes are limited.

Artrage has some bugs: sometimes the program stops before you can save; big, square areas of your drawing can get damaged and lost when you, for instance, try to erase/smudge/ or other actions.

The stylus/brush

having a stylus is much better than finger, the precision is really greater. I didn't experience an advantage of capacitive brush compared to the stylus. I believed that the brush strokes size could depend on the brush fibres and how you 'paint', but this is not true. The only way to set the stroke's size, is through the program.

You must also be careful not to put your fingers on screen, too, while drawing: otherwise you'll get effects you don't want, and maybe just realize it after a while.

Great features

Artrage works in another way than Photoshop. I think is moreless like Painter, though I've a very limited experience with the latter. It looks really like a real traditional painting, with watercolour, oil, pencil, pen effects. They also blend each other like in a traditional drawing.

You can paint on separate layers, and import reference pictures (maybe taken with Ipad).

Drawing with stylus don't have the annoying delay effect that I experienced by sketching with PS.

It is a wonderful way to keep sketch and paint while travelling, (or maybe lying in bed with a baby who wakes up every half hour): all those situations when dealing with brushes, solvents, or a whole computer with a Wacom, is very impractical or impossible.

The knife brush (which is much about smudging and blurring) has some very interesting effects.

I feel anyway that I need tons of practice to learn to use each brush, to get the desired effect, and how it blends with other brushes, and so on.

Characters

Autumn leaves

Ophelia

This is an attempt for realistic painting, used a blurry ipad photo as reference. I'm not very satisfied, looks like a bad PS airbrush painting.

The Lady Faun

In the last time, painting has became nearly impossible, since my evenings are almost totally occupied by the baby-almost-toddler who got separation anxiety.

So, I was very uncertain if participate in the Faun Contest held at DeviantArt by the lovely Eledhwen, whose conditions were to choose one among three of her Faun stock pics, and do a paint, or a photomanipulation out of it. I tried to give it a trial, and chosed this one:

and finished in a hurry in around a couple of weekends, so I had to keep it as a simple portrait, even if I'd like to put more imaginative elements in it. She asked also to not draw the dress to let the faun features be more visible, but I find it beautiful so I decided to keep it.

It's always great to paint from a real model instead of painting stereotyped human characters, as often seen in fantasy illustration, so I really enjoyied it, despite the little time. It is moreover a very useful exercise. (then, I also won, which is an additional pleasure :) ).

I'm still not completely happy with rendering, but maybe I'll take up again later.

The Butterflies House

This started as a portrait practice, my camera sometimes shows quite odd perspectives while taking narrow portraits, so I wanted to use the pic I had. 

The painting then degenerated creeply, so below I've the result. I've no clue about the title, maybe I'll change it, suggestions are welcome.

This time I tried to use the Sharpen More tool in PS, to avoid that muddy effect I always get when uploading the file. 

Usually I also draw the pic in a computer, and uploading to internet with another, which displays a quite less saturated image. I wonder what people really see when looking at my pictures.