Portrait

Throughout school I was made to draw humans. I hated it. None of my humans looked, well, human. They resembled very deformed, humanoid-like creatures. Sometimes they looked almost human, maybe like some poor diseased alien who came to visit the Earth and tried to blend in, but failed miserably - with one eye bigger than the other and a comically crooked nose. Sometimes the drawings were almost Picasso-like, but not in a good way... Who knows, maybe I'm just REALLY ahead of my time. Fingers crossed my childhood creations are going to be re-discovered one day, almost like Mendelian genetics, and they will change the way people look at the world. It will most likely be after the Earth has been taken over by poorly-blending-in aliens. The world will be convinced I predicted the whole thing. They will put my name in the history books and the human survivors will tell tales of my wisdom to children...


...or not.

Anyway. This is my attempt at a portrait. I'm pretty pleased, it's light years ahead of any of my other attempts. I think it actually looks human. Or maybe it doesn't, but I've been looking at it for too long. It definitely could be better, but to be honest I'm not the most patient person in the world and so I'm giving up.

If you click it, it should go bigger. Can you tell who it is? You get a free hug if you can. Oh, also I think all my paintings look better if you stand further away from the monitor... Ekhm.

Technical note: This is mostly oils. I discovered for certain effects other tools and brushes are waaay easier to use, so I used whatever. For example the background is painted using watercolour brushes.

Progress?

Seems like I'm failing utterly at this blog. I have many stories written up and ready to be illustrated, but unfortunately I don't have the skills to do it yet and so I'm eating lots of chocolate and drawing other stuff. Or attempting to. Watching YT tutorials doesn't really seem to improve my skills greatly and I'm too stubborn to read "theory of art" type books.

I figured I'd try landscapes. Not great for illustrating stories here, I know, but I figured I'll start big and then work on smaller, more detailed stuff, like, well, everything else besides sky, water bodies, mountains and grasslands with an occasional tree.

So I've been drawing clouds and little landscapes and other things, like those weird green sort-of-goblin-like-creatures playing with little girls' dresses, while spinning around in a circle. I think they might be somehow related to the Laundry Goblins, but I'm not entirely sure yet.

Ekhem. So as you can see at the moment I lack the skills and focus, which makes illustrating stories difficult. I should practice one thing till I get it right, but my attention span... Oh, look, a bird!

Disclaimer: some of those are going to be based on photographs/paintings found somewhere else. I am treating those entirely as training for my own use, not commercial action of any sort.

Playing

I've been ill, so not really getting anything done. Couldn't even deal with drawing, as brain decided that focusing on continuous breathing is all it can handle. I didn't want to argue with it too much.

I got a few random things done. Here:

This is Dragon. It's a sad dragon. Or maybe it's just a stupid one - it inhaled too much smoke and now it's choking on it. Eyes watering, cursing its own stupidity.

This is Fluffy. It likes long walks on the beach at sunset, but doesn't like getting wet or the taste of ketchup. It prefers garlic sauce on its pizza.

This is Grass, Tree and Bunny. They were an attempt at learning some of the tools and unfortunately do not have a cool story. They are pretty sad about it, but life is unfair and they'll have to get over it.