Painting Studies Prep

I've got a few traditional paintings I'd like to do before the end of the year...but it's been awhile since I've done any acrylic painting, so I figured I'd better get in some practice studies first. 

The canvas -- gessoed illustration board. Each study is about 6 x 9 inches. At the moment I'm deciding what type of fixative (if any) will be used to save the line work, since I do want some of that showing under the paint. Maybe. 

I did a quick sketch on each canvas with HB pencil.

Above study is "Jon Snow and Ghost" inspired by GoT. The other three are also inspired by my imagination...mostly: "Horse," "Warriors," and "White Deer".

I'll start applying color next week.

The Hunter

I seem to be posting everywhere but my sketchblog lately; I'll have to remedy that.

Juggling projects as usual, but I also started up a new weekly sketch practice for myself to work on lighting, speed-painting, and other areas in my illustration artwork that I feel still "needs improvement". I'm calling it "Friday Faces" and plan on posting a new one of those images every week as I have been doing on my Facebook page.

The above image is a concept I did in Photoshop 7 last Friday. A speed-painting practice sketch (for me any detailed illustration under 20 hours is really fast as opposed to product design concepts where I might do 3-10 a day or per week depending on complexity, etc.); took about 6 hours to do including research, sketching and coloring in PS.

Acrylics: "Lap Dragons" progress

Started this small acrylic painting last weekend, in the hopes of getting in some traditional art practice at least once a week (in addition to the watercolors I already do) -- it's been entirely too long since I've done any traditional painting on canvas. Believe it or not, I still had one of my old paint tackle boxes from twenty years ago or so...a few of the brushes were still good, but most of the paint was either dried up or separated. But not all!

At the moment, the painting is very much in the rough stage. I'm experimenting for now, applying some of the techniques I've learned from the artist group I belong to locally, as well as from my observations of other artists I appreciate, deciding what I like and don't like or doesn't work for me, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm also applying some of the digital painting skills I've been using when I work in Photoshop, at least in how I work with applying color, strangely enough. I'll post some more progress next week.

I'm somehow not surprised to find myself a little too often wanting to go for CTRL "Z"....not to mention "cut and drag" or "cut and paste"; however, this is not Photoshop. :)