Happy Halloween!

Something fun!
This took me four days but was soooo worth it. This is a line drawing, coloured with markers. I did use a bit of photoshop for the background because I am a sloppy artist and had finger prints in the moon. Trust me it kind of ruins the image when you have a big blue finger print on the moon. It really ruins the illusion of depth.
I got my inspiration from 'the nightmare before christmas'. And the girls dress from some fashion show I was watching a few weeks ago. I can't remeber who the designer was but they did some really dark clothes which I felt were perfect for halloween. I have her in blue because black kind of becomes a hole in the picture.

Star Fall pt 1&2

I was goofing aroung on Photoshop with some sketches I had done and I came up with these. Needless to say I was messing with the brushes, blur, rainbow gradient and dodge tools. There is also a little glowing egdes in there. I just did these really quickly so the line drawings are not that smooth but they look alright. Originally they were supposed to be together but I like them as two seperate pieces.

Beach

I felt like painting the other day but I didn't feel like cleaning up so I tried to paint on photoshop. It might have been faster just to get out the paints, oh well it was fun. This used a lot of reference to get the colours right and I had to use about 6 layers just to get the water to do what I wanted it to. But it turned out really well. The water was created by layering layers of blue with the Stain glass filter (blurred and waved then tiltled in pespective) and the chome filter (also blurreed and tilted in perspective). The clouds are the leaf bush painted and blurred randomly. Finally the sand is just experimentation with different brushes.

Surfs up

Friday the 13th (for me a lucky day!), so I decided on one of my favourite finished pics. The figure in the foreground and her board are all done with markers (the stars are photoshop). I'd like to claim that I own some really fancy markers, but alas no. While I do own quite a few nice tria's and prismacolours, my collection is still very small and I often use no name markers. This makes backgrounds difficult due to the fact that they dry sooo fast and tend to streak a lot. So the background is all photoshop. The water was especially difficult to get just right, otherwise it starts to look like glass. I think it turned out great. Enjoy!

Birthday Clown

A friend of mine recently celebrated her 30th birthday. She wasn't completely pleased with the fact that she was turning 30 but was happy that she was celebrating with friends and family and good food. It was funny because she mentioned a few times that she was upset that she was leaving her 20's behind and now had to be a responsable adult. I remarked that she already had (she has a house, car, is engaged, has several pets that she treats like children, has a full time job - sounds adult to me) but she has younger friends such as myself to keep her young (because I'll never grow up- no matter how much I may try). So for her birthday I drew her a card. I figured a clown is young at heart and festive.
This was done completly on Photoshop except for the sketch of the character. The version given to my friend has a different background and has a message to her but this is basically the same. The character came from a school project I did fa few years ago. I always invision him as being about 2 inches tall. Don't know why.

My Skates Have Wings

Recently I bought some new (previously loved) figure skates. The ones I wanted cost too much brand new and were way outside my budget, so I bought used ones in a similar style (Gotta say I like used skates they're easier to break in. Not so much pain in making them comfy). Since they were a bit scuffed in places I decided to add my own touch. While I left the scuffs in most places (shows I work hard at landing those jumps and getting the footwork fast), I painted wings on the outside heels of each boot. So far I've had no complaints the wings are helping me fly when I'm on the ice. I painted them with gold and silver acrylic paint, outlined with a blue sharpie, then sealed it with clear nail polish.

Caught

So keeping with the idea of Halloween and cats, here is my pic 'Caught'. It's just a marker drawing with a gradiant background done on Photoshop (mainly to hide that fact that I was sloppy with the markers and ended up with smudge marks everywhere). I drew this for a contest about 2 years ago. The contest gave three words (Cat, Wing, Wand) and you had to come up with something interesting. Then the public voted for it's favorite. Unfortunately I didn't win but I managed to sell a few prints of this.

Behold! My cat!!!

Well it's October. That means it's the month of scary things that go bump in the night. It's also the month of my favorite non holiday-Halloween. I like scary movies and the idea of ghosts and witches and the idea that the fabric between this world and the (possible next) is thinner on Halloween. Really we should all have the day off and celebrate Halloween properly with some kind of pagan ritual, failing that dressing up in a costume and trapsing aroung the neighbourhood asking for candy is just as good. So in honour of my favorite day I present my black cat (or if I was a witch, my familiar). Isn't she cute!