Category: Creative Projects

Sexiest Dictionary: New Colors

After nearly two months upon discovering that my set of 84 watercolor crayons didn’t match the picture on the front, I returned to the art store to purchase several browns, nearly black, nearly white and two shades of red. The same woman who’d helped me before, helped me again. She remembered me.  When she asked about how far off the picture on the box was from what was in the box, I replied, “If I only wanted to paint White people, then it would have been fine.” She nodded and said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

Once she finished checking me out at at the register, she then showed me where the watercolor paper was as well as the tracing paper.  I told her that I wanted to get an idea of the prices, so I could budget for it. In the meantime, I’m going to have a ball with my new colors, not just to paint people of color, but also expand hair and eye colors without having to obsess about mixing shades. I’m especially eager to render a dark-skinned Black without them looking unrealistically blue.

I loved how the contouring turned out on her backside and back of her knees.  The water didn’t turn out how I planned–like most of my painting dreams.

Again, I have to be careful not to elongate features. For some inexplicable reason, she looks armless. There’s some detail that I missed in the tracing and even with the picture printed out, I overlooked her arms, which were subtly shown in the original.

I watched a YouTube video on painting with watercolor crayons that stated these paintings will dry and, almost by magic, look so much better. That was certainly true for her face. His face, on the other hand…not enough magic in the world to salvage his face.

For my next challenge, I’m going to have blonds and gingers!

Velma Mae’s 78th Birthday Celebration Powerpoint

For my mother’s 78th birthday, one of my sister’s thought it would be a great idea to have a surprise party.  She chose an off year to throw mom off the scent. My one and only role, other than showing up was to create a powerpoint. Of course there was a technology fail and I couldn’t get the laptop and projector to communicate!

Since the file was too big, I couldn’t even email it to people even though I did show it to a much smaller audience at my parents’ house after the surprise party by holding up the laptop. Fortunately, I could embed it into this blog. It may take up to 2 minutes to load because it includes audio files, but once it does, click “enable editing,” then view it in full screen mode to play it.

Enjoy!

Velma’s 78th Birthday Celebration

Sexiest Dictionary: Latest Round

Although I like the blending and contouring in “Contentious,” this guy’s chest remains undefined because the model in the picture was wearing a shirt. I have to develop a technique for painting an attractive man’s chest.

I realized after the fact that his head was too small.  In the picture I used, the guy wore a hat, which I didn’t want, but I inadvertently made his head too small in the process.  Her face was challenging to paint because it was too small for details and I used too much water for the given space.  Once I buy the inexpensive watercolor paper, no faces will be this small.

Her face was almost too small, but I made sure to use a damp brush rather than a wet brush for her face. I’d also traced her hand too large, but I slimmed it down to a more realistic size while painting. Yet, I like her blending and I can do something better with the tub water next time.

I love that this guy actually looks Asian. Too bad I messed up his pecks and the contouring on his lower abs look more like bruises.

The combination of the smallness of the tracing and fact I tried to create another brother without having an actual brown watercolor crayon, propelled me to buy the missing colors. I’ve grown so tired of trying to blend the right combinations of blues and orange, or yellow and purples to make brown. It’s going to be a sheer relief to paint people of color in a more straight forward way.

Sexiest Dictionary: Contouring & Shading

This week’s painting challenge was to add contouring and shading, so I could possibly cure the facial paralysis my subjects had. I still used non-watercolor journal paper, which made blending rough and it wrinkled. Plus, I still hadn’t bought the watercolor crayon colors I needed: black, red, white, and brown.This was my first attempt at the new skill. I even hedged my bet by printing out the original picture. I was so happy with her expression and hairstyle. Having a visual aid worked so beautifully that I waited a few days to paint the others in order to print out the remaining pictures.

I should have known when I couldn’t attach the whole template file with the images to an email, that saving it to my google drive to print it out where I volunteered wouldn’t work either. I discovered that the hard way. With my printing lesson learned, I stopped being a halfass and divided up the word doc among 9 different email attachments to print in the business office at my apartment complex. In order to save both ink and paper, I printed out 2 pages per sheet. I managed to print out all the email attachments except for one cause there’s always at least one stopper, which in this case turned out to be low ink.

Nonetheless the effort was worth it. Even though this next painting didn’t contain a face, the contouring wouldn’t have looked this good without a visual aid.

Once again, I screwed up when trying to paint a black person. The blending of the crayons looked so good before I added water to it. What I finally learned, thanks to this painting, was that blue needed far more respect for its ability to darken. I’d meant it for shading and contouring, but it just overpowered everything.

Somehow, with all the tracing and visual guidance, I managed to take the sexy out of this nude woman texting on her bed. The foreshortening failed as well as her elongated face. Yet the disaster known as her fingers distracted me more than anything else. Second time around, I’m definitely going to pay more attention to tracing and shading them.

Had I been paying attention, I would of traced the guy first. Her attitude was a little off because instead of focusing the features that would have captured her scowl, I was preoccupied with making her look like a black woman and fixing her nose. I pretty much surrendered and not in the spiritual growth way. His contouring was decent except the trace of her hair appears in his right shoulder.

Now, I got this black man right! Imagine how good he’s going to look when I have actual brown and black watercolor crayons. The dreadlocks need work, but otherwise, I loved how this guy turned out.

This was a terrific way to end the week.

Sexiest Dictionary Paintings: A New Approach

In the latest round of practicing my illustrating technique for the sexiest dictionary, I disassembled my home office. Totally worth the sacrifice.  I had no desire to sit at my work desk on the weekend. Instead, I relocated my work computer and monitor to the living room, so I could paint while the TV entertained me.

Since the monitor couldn’t reach the outlet, I used an extension cord. I doubled the cord and wrapped it up from the middle in order to have the two ends free.  To keep everything in place, I wrapped the bundle with one of the many pieces of cloth that live on the shelf in my closet.

Using a larger and different type of paper, I taped it to the monitor with all the other lights out, and quickly traced the outline. In order to be more efficient, I’m only going to disassemble my work station on the weekends since I’m not going to reassemble it until Sunday night.

As I predicted, better paper improves blending. The paper still wrinkled a little. And as I blended, the paper wore away.At least I didn’t make any holes.

Yet the most glaring critiques are the lack of contour shading and their facial expressions.  Their mouths are either too big or too small as if I don’t want them to speak the truth about their paralyzed faces or other inadequacies of my painting ability in this medium.

I’m going to be more mindful of those things moving forward. Also, as much as I’d like to save paper, I’m going to need to print out the images.  I don’t need them to be full size, but I need to look at the contouring and subtlety of their expressions. I don’t want to fool with signing into my laptop just to see the image.

Part of the excitement of doing projects like this is figuring out the cheapest and most efficient approach.  Since I volunteer at a film school/coworking space, one of the perks is that I have use of their color printer to help move my creative projects forward. I’m so grateful that I can barter my time for both film classes and administrative services.

Sexiest Dictionary Rough Draft Paintings

Despite the fact that computer paper isn’t the best for watercolor paintings, all practice is good practice at this stage in the project.

 Here’s my workaround to not knowing how to draw. I used painter’s tape to place my paper onto the laptop screen. Then I brightened the screen, turned off all other lights, then traced the image with a soft lead pencil. Instead of relying on random Google images, I used the images specific to the project.

My dearest hope is that as I progress with these paintings, I’ll be able to depict the human body far more attractively than what I’m doing now, especially with better quality paper where I’m not chasing the water around the paper to get the pigment in the watercolor pencil to dissolve. 

“Ambivalent” is a particularly challenging illustration since the woman is a shadow and to really portrait it the way I envision, the whole painting should be bathed in a shadow wash with lit places to imply that she’s emerged from a bathroom, but I took two challenges at a time by juxtaposing the two images and making hers see-through.

I also focused on composition for “Amok” as well. My struggle continues to be the lack of subtlety, which is another quality I’d like to capture. In the spirit of Thomas Edison’s 99 fails to get to the proper way a lightbulb works, I discovered that this wasn’t the proper combination of blue and orange to achieve dark brown.  

As a matter of fact, “Anathema” was my inspiration to buy at least on shade of brown, along with some other colors not in my 84 mega set the next time I visit the art store.  I love blending as much as the next budding artist, but I need to hedge my bet a bit more than this.

“Apotheosis” is a fine example of where I’d like to become better with subtlety with hair.  I want to see more volume with the strands of hair. As far as the rest, I trust I’m going to improve with the nudes as I practice.

“Auspicious” was supposed to have a nude guy standing on the other side of the window, facing away from her, but I concentrated so much on using the two images for the cafe and the woman.  Next go around, even though I liked what I did with the window, I’ll have a nude guy standing on the other side of it.

Watercolor Crayons

After researching about which medium I wanted to use for my latest illustration project, I finally bought the biggest set of watercolor crayons the art store offered.  Making the financial investment came in a roundabout way.

I’d bought a plane ticket to go back east to attend an event, which was a financial sacrifice, but I’d just sucked it up and planned on using my credit card reward points. Then, thanks to Hurricane Florence, I cancelled all those plans, got a 100% refund, and felt free to use a fraction of that expenditure to buy the watercolor crayons.

Just the week before, I’d bought a TV tray, which was such an inexpensive convenience, I’m amazed I waited so long. Sometimes, I get so caught up with being miserly with my money that I go overboard. Yet, I’ve used this tray for so many different things already. An in-home temporary artist studio is the latest endeavor.Since I’m still fundamentally miserly to my soul, I haven’t invested in watercolor paper yet. The results will be even better once I do, but in the meantime, I’m getting a feel for the medium.

Once I finally got everything set up to try out the crayons, the sun had already gone down and my indoor lighting was very yellow, distorting the true colors. So, when I reached for what I thought was brown, turned out to be purple, especially once I painted over it with water. I was less concerned about the computer paper wrinkling since I knew I’d not use it for my final product.For the second painting, I colored more with blending and contouring in mind, but I was still distracted by how “off” the skin coloring looked. Moreover, I went to a dark place where I felt that I’d wasted my money buying such a large set of crayons that didn’t have any browns. Lots of greens, blues, oranges, purples, yellows, pinks and no red.

As I looked dismally at the 84 collection of “useless” crayon colors, I noticed that the colors on the lid didn’t match the colors in the box, which I couldn’t have known since the box was completely wrapped in plastic when I bought it. I entertained thoughts of getting a refund when a more enlightened thought visited.

I grabbed my laptop and researched which two colors mixed together to make brown.  I struck gold! Purple and yellow make brown. Blue and orange make brown. Red and green make brown, even though I have no red. I could hack a reddish color combining magenta with yellow. Or just buy a red watercolor crayon. 

Nonetheless, with my creative energy returned, I traced out my third painting.This was purely an experiment to see the different types of browns I could get with one yellow crayon combined with five of the purple crayons. I quickly colored all the characters with the one yellow. Then went on top of it with a different shade of purple. Lastly, I painted over the coloring with some water. I wasn’t concerned about technique since I only had to prove to myself that I hadn’t wasted my money.

I was too tired to try out the purples with other yellows, but at least I’ve worked around that session’s mental block right out of the gates. I’ve got far more possibilities than I originally thought. The best part is that I have so many combinations to play with that all I need to do is carve out enough time during the weekend in to do so.

The Making of Ms. Sandman

Anxious to put my newly acquired special FX makeup skills to the test, I gathered all of my crafting supplies together to transform myself into Ms. Sandman for an upcoming performance at the Austin Writers Roulette.

The first thing I had to do was glue down my eyebrows. In class, I’d used a solid glue stick, but I made due with what I already had.

Since my transformation would eventually involve painting liquid latex over my eyebrows, I had to glue them down so I’d still have eyebrows once I peeled the latex off after the show.

I’d only ever painted with glue to decorate shoes or bind puzzle pieces, but never directly on my face.

I used a blow dryer to speed up the drying process and then headed outside on my balcony.

I set up my usual painting station. I have hardly ever used this music stand to hold music.  Instead, it’s held various canvases, and for this endeavor, my recently purchased Goodwill mirror.

I’d planned to remove all the oil from my face a section at a time since I have such oily skin, but I only remembered to do so for my forehead.  I honestly don’t know, in retrospect, whether that step was needed.

I went to two costume shops to find a light brown latex, but settled on one that dried clear instead.

I chose an old paintbrush with which to apply the latex on my face.

As my special FX makeup teacher warned, “Once a latex brush, always a latex brush.”

I quickly saw what she meant since there was no way I’d spend the painstaking amount of time to get all that latex out of the brush.

I absolutely enjoyed the cool sensation of painting the latex on my face.

Knowing that latex dried rather quickly, I poured out a portion in a plastic container just so I could keep the bottle closed for most of the time.

The trickiest part of this whole process was applying the sand. I had to lean over the balcony backwards with my eyes closed and pinching my nose with my fingers. Now, I guess technically I didn’t have to lean over the balcony, but I wanted to limit the amount of clean up afterwards. One thing I didn’t count on was how to remove the sand in my underwear.

I couldn’t do such a thorough job on the balcony since that’s technically “in public,” but I also wanted to limit the amount of sand tracked inside my apartment.  I did a section at a time to make sure I could target a small area before the latex dried up.The only part that I didn’t like was the sandy chin.  So I peeled off the sandy chin and sanded my lips. I liked the texture of it underneath my lipstick.

Here’s the complete Ms. Sandman costume.

Self Portraits

I’ve never liked drawing. Too great of a learning curve between the effort and the desired result. On several separate occasions, I’ve picked up a pad and paper to draw only to lose steam and quietly put all my drawing materials away. Yet, I keep returning to it since my creativity bends toward visual art as well as words.

Last month, I attended an art opening where the featured artist painted in a style that I wished I could achieve: vividly colorful with a rich narrative conveyed in each painting. I spoke with her for a luxurious amount of time about her technique during which another woman joined in and suggested that I read a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Since I never formally studied art, I didn’t know this classic book. One of the first exercises was to do a “baseline” self portrait; so I could compare it once I learned some techniques.

I’d love to nominate my voluminous face as the 2018 Halloween mask of the year. About the only thing I got right was my insomnia/sleep apnea bags under my eyes!

After several exercises, including toning my paper before drawing, knowing the facial placement of features, and drawing the “negative” spaces, this mug shot looks a little more realistic although I think the next time, I’ll draw myself from a picture.