Saturday, February 25, 2012

ONLINE SHOP OPENING

I just opened my new little online shop at bigcartel - go check it out!


I plan on selling original artwork as well as signed prints there, as soon as I have some.

For now, there's only one product: 3  signed copies of "Black is for Beginnings", each with a small original drawing of a different character. You can choose the one you like best!


Anyway, I'll be sure to keep you posted whenever there are new products available! :D

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Daisies and Oboe


 Oh, masking fluid, how I love thee! How come I had never even HEARD of you until some weeks ago? My life would have been so much easier! Especially when I was painting this piece here.
So. Thanks to the wonderful masking fluid*, doing the background was a lot of fun! Yes, I COULD have done it without it, but it would be much less clean, and it would have involved a lot more frustration and swearing on my part.


Anyway. I painted these for my parents, as a thank you gift for helping us so much with our big move to Germany. Getting paperwork in order, organizing what we already had at their place, passing on the electricity and water contracts on to our name... And of course, helping us to set everything up now we're here.
So, I'll say it again: Thank you SO much, we really, really appreciate it!

By the time you read this (I'm writing this like, a month ago), we should just have arrived in our new home! Wheeeeeee! =D


Both illustrations are meant as a diptych (as you can see), with the daisies and notes flowing from one to the other. The daisies, because my mother's name is Margarita, which means "daisy" in Spanish. And because she's Mexican, it felt right to paint a darker skinned female character.
The oboe and the music notes because my dad plays the oboe at various amateur concerts.
By the way, what a complicated instrument to draw! And I had never noticed how steampunk-y an oboe looks. I hope I got it about right, I had lots of reference photos, but there might still be mistakes.

Yeah. So. I really like how they turned out. Hope you do, too! ^^


*Masking fluid: It's a liquid you paint on like, well, paint, wherever you want to leave white areas. When it dries, it becomes solid and rubbery, and you can paint over it with watercolors without fear of messing up your beautiful white areas. When you're done, you just rub the stuff off carefully (a kneaded eraser works great!).
A word of warning, though: Do not use one of your good brushs for this, as the masking fluid can easily ruin your brush as it dries.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Pin Up Girl

This is a gift for a friend who's going to help us move to our new house (soooooooooon now!) - driving the van with all of our stuff from Spain to Germany.

It was really fun to draw, I had never actually done any pin ups before. It also was a great study for the back of the girl. Could have turned out better, but it's okay. The bad thing about watercolors is that you can't re-paint too much when you want to improve something. Nevertheless, I still like it.
And our friend liked it a lot, too! :D


Muchas gracias por ayudarnos con la mudanza, David!
.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Weekly study: Characters (1)

Hey, this is my post nº 100! Yay! =D


So... Monday will be studies day, so here we go.

These are some quick character sketches from a really odd TV reality show, called "Who wants to marry my son?", where rich ladies try to find a match for their spoilt grown-up sons. Let me just say it's a horrible, horrible show, but it offered a range of incredibly weird characters. These are just some of them.
Don't worry, I won't be watching that junk again. :P

And here are some sketches of people I did on the train. Not much to say about them, just really quick sketching.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

ORIGINAL ARTWORK RAFFLE


If you're on Facebook, you might be in luck!

I'll be raffling this small watercolor illustration (8,5 x 12 cm) among all those who share this image on their wall. For more information, check out my Facebook page!


Okay. About this piece.
Some very old followers of mine (those who've known me for, oh, over 10 years) might recognize this character. Yup, it's Din. ;)

I wanted to do something rather simple for the raffle piece, because it had to be on such a small format. When this image came to my mind, I thought it was perfect. Initially, I thought if just painting a boring blue background, but I thought, "Hey, Din's supposed to be fire element, so how about a fiery sky?".
That also gave me a chance to challenge myself both in the perspective of the face (I'm not too sure about the nose...) and in painting the sky and the lighting - and I want to try and challenge myself whenever I can to improve faster. And I'm really happy with how it turned out.