MINI PAINTINGS - Work in Progress

Hello lovely peeps, 

As promised, here is a little breakdown of the concepts I have decided upon to fill all the little frames I shared with you a few weeks ago. 

I am trying to have a mix of challenging and more comfortable concepts, to make sure I don't exhaust myself with each painting and keep the whole process fun.  I need to have all these pieces ready for the market I am doing in December, so the time I have to work on them is limited.

I did a lot of iterating for this in my Daily Doodle Diary, and I have a couple of pages of ideas in there :

Here's what those will become : 

I have 5 of these wooden coasters, and eyes feel like a good fit for those, so the first will feature this lightning eye. I want the brow above the eye to be akin to dark stormy clouds, with a lightning bolt going across the eyeball and extending onto the skin as a scar.
This promises to be a somewhat challenging effect to create so fingers crossed I can pull it off.

Another of my eye designs will be going into this oval silver frame.
If I can achieve it, I would like it to look like the surface of the eye is rippling away from the pupil like water.

Next up, I tackled the small golden diptych frame (a diptych is a two-part frame that can close like a book). 

I decided to go for another couple of eye designs, with complementary themes.

The sun, on the left, and the moon, on the right.

This idea started in my Doodle Diary and I was initially going to put the night sky eye in one of the coasters, but I want to add more details to it than such a small format would allow, so this should fit better. 

The idea is to have one eye glowing like the sun, and one eye in the shape of a crescent moon with the shadow of the brow dotted with stars. 

The sketches as I have them now are a little too big, so I will probably make them a little smaller for the final painting. 

Next up, the rest of the little coasters :

I was initially planning to have them all be eye paintings, but I think that that would get a little repetitive and tiresome, so here are the designs I have settled on instead :
- One will have a tooth growing in soil, with thin red roots
- The next will have a human skull with an eye on its forehead
- The 4th one will feature a jaw working as a stand for an arrow. This one if the one I am least sure about. The sketch shows the arrow dripping something onto the ground, but I don't think I like that. I will leave this one towards the end so I can think on it some more.

And finally, the last coaster will have a small bug with a face as its carapace. A classic, simple, straightforward, fun to paint. 

This little silver frame was one I had a lot of trouble coming up with an idea for, but I think I have finally settled on this image of a hollow human heart containing a spider web.
I find the silver of the frame a bit off-putting but I'll make it work. 

Next up is another classic, the ribbon skin hand.
A concept I have explored many times, and always love working on.
Hand paintings always do quite well so this is my comfort piece.

For the bigger golden oval frame, I have chosen this older sketch, from earlier this year. It is a concept reminiscent of my Ouroboros painting so it should be fun to paint. I don't think I will make the skin gold in this one, although it could be interesting to echo the colour of the frame?
I'll have a think. 

The other golden frame, of which I kept the oval matting, will have this little surreal portrait in it. I want the earring to echo the shape and colour of the gold border on the matting.
I did change the sketch a little after taking this picture, here;s the newer version : 

And last but not least, the first of the 2 drawings that will go on the laser-cut pieces in their floating frames. 

(The final frames won't be pink and blue, don't worry)

These will be tricky to work on as I don't think the papers can withstand much in the way of paint or water, so I will either have to only use pens or pencils, or I will need to paint on a separate piece of paper and glue that to the final surface.
We'll see.

I still have one frame to create a sketch for but I know that it will be similar to that last sketch, as I want those 2 pieces to sort of go together.

Anyway, that is it for those little paintings!

I will update you on my progress as I go. 

In the meantime, I have finally finished my Stranger Things painting and I will be able to share that with you all very soon. 

I have managed to take some time to work on those bigger pieces again the last couple of days, which feels like such a relief after weeks of admin and other paperwork related tasks. Between my shop sale, my calendar orders and buying our house, things have been too hectic for me to be able to immerse myself properly in my bigger projects, and I feel starved of creative time.
Here's to more of that in the coming weeks. 

I hope you are all well!
Take good care,
All my love, 

M