painting progress & inspiration

Hey ya’ll~

Long time no talk, had to take some time away from social media because it was getting toxic… I think it’s an age thing but I have a pretty hard time being online and visible for over 2 weeks at a time…. I kinda went ham and just stayed online from December to mid-January and crapped out. I love social media but I need to develop better habits so I don’t just compare myself to others (like everyone else I’m sure!!!)

I DID however spend time offline adjusting to my first month off from freelance 3D work. I’ve been asked to cover so many topics from favorite illustrators to 3D techniques to room tour to updates on all of my hobbies so I think a vote could be necessary for February...

1-4: I’m not done with the painting yet but wanted to share how far I’ve gotten. I had to really zoom into the shoes and take pictures of my existing 3D printed h99 shoe to get all the details.

5-7: photos of the shoe for each foot + digital painting I found off the wild web (sorry no source!) but it worked perfectly for the pants bc the lighting matched :)

8. Found this on pinterest but I started adding more textural water bubbles to push this whole painting more into the contemporary space. I found that everything was starting to look flat compositionally so I wanted to basically give it more magic :) Source is here! This artist takes super high res pictures of the inside of MARBLES!!! I found their work through a lucky scroll on pinterest and I hounded the image until I could find the source... worth looking thru all their photos really I found such amazing reference for light and color!

9. Tomoko Nagai is now the extension of the moodboard for this painting… I didn’t actually know she existed until I recently found her work through related Aya Takano pieces. I love the texture, colors, and composition of her works and how they look almost thrown together while being clearly planned out. Here’s a bio written about her by Artsy since I’m not going to pretend I know all about someone I just found out about ;)

“Tomoko Nagai’s works are known for their recurring girlish subjects and for the density of their compositions. Her palette is characteristically composed of pastel hues that shift subtly depending on the mood or a particular season embodied by a work. Her tableaux occupy indeterminate spaces appearing to be composites of several places, at once indoor and outdoor, varying between fine detail and flatness unto abstraction. Recurring motifs in her work include endearing animals (particularly cats and bears), forest vegetation, toys, and young girls dressed as princesses. She sometimes presents her paintings and drawings in embellished frames arranged in suites, or as an installation. Nagai also creates sculptural objects featuring similar imagery; some of her other well known works include wall-mounted stuffed animals and human-scale dollhouse settings.”

You can find her work here.

Painting:

待ち合わせの時刻

2009, acrylic, oil, glitter on canvas, 194 × 162 cm

10. Peter Köhler is another painter I just found out about and you can find his extremely detailed work here. His colors are phenomeonal and I’ve been really looking at his and Tomoko Nagai’s pieces as reference on how to make a super colorful painting without it looking like rainbow vomit. As you can tell, I’m also currently obsessed with the idea of a pink moon on a dark blue background…

Painting:

Crepuscular Tales #5

Ink and acrylic on paper, 40x40 cm

11. Current status of the painting. I stopped posting on social media because I have a tendency to stress myself out with expectations. I got used to posting every day so I started to feel like I had failed when I wasn’t ready to post aaaaand yeah… will share work again soon now that I’ve had a healthy 1 week break!

I posed my ball jointed doll and took close up pics of the joints as reference for how to paint the joints on the girl character to the right. I used a reference for the mushroom too. I haven’t made much progress on the orange headband but I want to save it for later since I’ll be covering a lot of the big orange blocks with textural things like dewy drops, fluffy clouds, and tiny plants and wildlife!!! All in all… very excited.

Will drop a few more posts hopefully before the end of the month! Namely the 3rd (&final) part of the 3D shoe modeling tutorial, why I’ve converted to Clip Studio Paint (a rundown of how I’m using it), and what’s going on with happy99 (we have a 3rd person to help with physical production!)