I made some more tweaks on "The Aerialist" thanks to some feedback from Monkeybread, which was greatly appreciated. I'm still not quite happy with it, though, so I'll move on and look back on her later when maybe I'll have a bit more insight. Here's the series so far with a teaser for the next piece:

Presenting "The Aerialist"--a new digital painting in the same series as "The Room". I'm posting this up to a few different communities, hoping to get some feedback. I had lot of trouble creating an effective background and I would have liked to use a vertical format instead of this wide horizontal one, but the reason I am using a horizontal one is because I hope to put this whole series online, each painting a full page--hence the widescreen format. I don't want a "lightbox" (like the one I currently use in my portfolio gallery).

I don't regularly do graphic design because my last job really turned me off to it (although it taught me a lot), but when I occasionally do it now, it's pretty fun! Here are two recent logos I did:

This was created from a photo courtesy of The Vertcal Barre and Sincerely Vintage Photography.

This one was created from a really old photo of me back when I first started trapeze!

All right, voici une nouvelle version de Monsieur La Tortue ! This new and improved version is thanks to the great community of artists over at Crimson Daggers. A big thanks to Simon Palmer, David Shearer, and Jacob Anderson for their paint-overs!

Also, after doing so much digital painting I decided to revisit "Pelagic Hominid", so I could push those values a bit more:

It's a big difference, no?! I don't know why, but I'm always reluctant/lazy/hesitant to push my values the way I do in my oils. Maybe it's just that I never feel like my lines and edges can be as precise and crisp in digital--but that's not true, I'm pretty sure it's strictly related to my ability to stick with it!

And now for some digital painting! This is going to be part of a series of paintings that will illustrate some super short writing pieces of mine--eventually, once all the illustrations are done, I hope to consolidate it  all into a website, but presented in such a way that it's an "experience", like opening a book. This is technically not the first in the series, but taking the source photos for the first one was a huge pain and I only just got them done now.

Mr. Turtle was pretty challenging--perhaps not the turtle himself, but the room, the environment. It doesn't quite "pop" the way I want it to, so I'm hoping to get a critique or two and revisit it in a couple weeks.

Here's the process:

Oh, and some of you may be wondering "Whatever happened to that comic she was doing?" I haven't forgotten it. I hope to get back to that soon.

The final version "Rampion Rising" is now posted to the website--as always, I take a picture and announce it's done, and then a few weeks go by, I look at it again, and it's "Oh, wait--hold on." So, after a few more tweaks and corrections and then waiting several days for a sunny day, now the final picture is up on the website.

This time around, I'm going to varnish it instead of using a glaze. I've always glazed my paintings using a mixture of Galkyd watered down with Turpenoid, but after reading this, I noticed that a lot of the artists were doing varnishes. Previously, I thought of a glaze and a varnish as the same thing (a glossy translucent coating to bring out the saturation of a painting's colors), but apparently a varnish is a final coating that can be removed. A glaze cannot. I read a very a comprehensive PDF online by Gamblin about varnishing and their particular varnish, which is called Gamvar, and I decided I want to do varnishes from now on (I can't find the PDF to link to, so if you want it, email me and I'll send it to you).

This spurt of reading was brought about by my somewhat failed attempt to glaze Leviathan Queen--I apparently have to learn the hard way a few times before the lesson really sets in, so I think I must have glazed a bit too thickly and it didn't dry evenly (plus, it's also freaking huge, so that makes the job even trickier). This means that when the painting catches the light at certain angles, you can see a couple areas of glaze that stand out from rest of it. @#$%. So, I went ahead and tried to correct with a few more coats, but no go. The new layers are too thin to cover my mistakes--I would have to risk another thick layer and hope it dries properly. I'm not counting on that, so I'm considering varnishing it instead--worse comes to worse, I can remove the varnish. Plus, I noticed in the link above that the wondrous Donato Giancola used Galkyd as a glaze and then Gamvar on top.

The witch-mother and the husband-prince had one thing in common--the desire to possess Rapunzel. Rapunzel represents the billions of young women who are treated as property by their families and husbands, and by society as a whole. Rapunzel's life is not her own--she is merely the vessel of her proprietors' demands, their dreams, their desires. They imprison Rapunzel and strip her naked. They fetishize her hair, symbol of her virginity. They clutch at her ripe breasts. They clench the promise of her womb between their prying, possessive palms. She sits still and silent in the darkness of her isolation, but in this darkness the seeds of rage, the spores of rebellion grow--like dank, glossy white mushrooms, they do not need sunlight, they flourish in the wet dirt, lavished with tears. Her repression and confinement is coming to an end. Rapunzel chooses her own path, her own purpose.

She will rise.

"Rampion Rising", oil on canvas, 24" x 34"

This painting began as most of them do--a vision, a blip of an idea, which I then pursued without knowing the full depth of its significance. As I worked on it, though, its meaning became clearer. The name "Rapunzel"  is thought to refer to Campanula rapunculus, an edible plant known as "rampion" in English. Both its leaves and roots may be eaten and its flower is a light blue or violet. Someday I hope to try some!

I still haven't quite gotten the knack of taking pictures of my paintings in our new place--it seems like the ideal light (at least in winter) is between 2:45 and 3:15 PM, and it's often cloudy! At any rate, it's pretty much done. I'm mostly happy with the results, but for next time, I will work on drawing the viewer into the painting as opposed to having the painting leap out at the viewer.