Ponytail Woman - Portrait by Renee Dillon

Okay, starting to get back on track now. Here's my post for the 4th of May (even though today is the 6th, but whatever, I'm getting to it). Believe it or not, this is drawn on lime green cardstock, which just appears grey because of a bad photo taken on a stormy day. Light is funny like that. 

Vortex - Acrylic Paint and Ink Portrait by Renee Dillon

The unexpected arrival of a friend in town made this post a little late, but I'm still hoping to get something up every day in May.

I was going to go with a green background for this one, then get a bit distracted by other colours that were still on my palette and then this happened. Next time I'll experiment with how a single colour background looks. I still think I prefer the person staying in one colour.

The Curly Haired Lady - Acrylic Painted Portrait by Renee Dillon

After the slow blogging month I had in April, I've decided to try posting daily again, like I was doing in January. Unfortunately there isn't another 30 in 30 challenge going on this month, but hopefully I'll still be able to motivate myself. It's all about developing habits, and not letting myself get distracted by other projects.

My theme for this month is simple, graphic, pop art style portraits on 12x12 scrapbooking cardstock. I'm still working on exactly what I want to do with them. I like the simplicity of just the lineart, but I think I like the background to be painted a different colour to add a bit of contrast. In this piece, I decided to add a bit of colour to the lips, eyes and jewelry, to see how I liked it.

For today's portrait, I was inspired by this weeks Color Throwdown colour palette - bright pink, lime green and sky blue. Excuse the dodgy photograph, the colours are much brighter in real life. I'll take a better picture with my camera in the morning. But for now, it's here, and that will do. Not sure what possessed me to do pink for the eyes instead of green, but it is interesting. Experiment, try new things sometimes.

Fergie - Mixed Media Portrait by Renee Dillon

I feel like I've found a solution to the problems I was having with finding a substrate for my art. I thought I'd get a nice pad of watercolour paper to try out. Instead I found a Canson Acrylic Pad at Lincraft. It has an almost canvasy texture to it, but it's still thin enough to use on my lightbox. It doesn't crease and the paint sits nicely on the surface.

This was my first experiment using the new paper and I'm loving it so far. It feels a bit more classy than regular cartridge paper, so I wouldn't feel bad selling an artwork made on it, but it's not so expensive that I'm too afraid to use it.

PRODUCTS USED:

(Not this paper pad, but something very like this, various brands of paint)

30 Paintings in 30 Days - Day 15 - J K Rowling Final Mixed Media Portrait

I'm guessing this is the second last picture of J K Rowling. All I have left to do is touch up the lineart that has been hidden under layers of paint, then she's done. I'll probably edit this post with the finished artwork rather than make a new post, because six posts of J K Rowling is probably at least 4 posts too many. 

I've painted this portrait on the back of a piece of 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper I bought from GOLO when they were closing down. I wanted to see if scrapbooking paper made a nice surface for painting on, and so far I'm pleased. It held up nicely to layers without too much creasing or buckling, which is good. It's kind of a cardstock thickness. I'll have to check what gsm is written on the paper pad. I might keep an eye out for seasonal paper pads when they're on sale, because I predict I'll be using them for painting again in future. Maybe after next Christmas I'll have finished with the paper I have and it will be the perfect time to buy a new one.

Here's the final piece with reinked lineart, unless I choose to go back and figure out where the rest of the lines in the hair go, Which I might, but that's a job for later. Tomorrow, a new piece of art.

30 Paintings in 30 Days - Day 14 - J K Rowling Work in Progress 2

So now J K Rowling has dark hair and looks nothing like J K  Rowling. Admittedly, it wasn't a great likeness to begin with, but now she looks like an entirely different woman. I wanted to cover the splatters with my house paint sample - a British Paints sample pot in the colour Blue Gum Park - then go over that with a lighter blue that would be more similar in value to her actual blonde air. I'm getting into the process of layering different colours to add depth to the final painting. It will be easier once I figure out how all of my different brands and types of acrylic paint react to each other.

PRODUCTS USED (Assorted brands of paints):

30 Paintings in 30 Days - Day 13 - J K Rowling Work in Progress

I've started adding some colour to the J K Rowling sketch I painted yesterday. The splattery texture in the hair is there to cover up some lines I didn't want to keep. I added more spatters to make it look like a uniform pattern rather than one random splodge where the line was. It will mostly be covered up when I add the additional layers of hair colour anyway, but I wanted to make sure the original line wouldn't be visible.

I know I'm technically not posting a new artwork for the 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge today, but I've decided that I'd rather do part of a larger artwork each day than pump out 30 smaller, less polished artworks for the month. As long as I'm continuing to draw, paint and experiment with different ideas and techniques, and as long as I have something to post each day, I feel like I've accomplished what I intended to anyway.

PRODUCTS USED (Assorted brands of paints):

EDIT: Added these two posts into one because there wasn't that much progress between the two images.

Next step in the J K Rowling portrait. I've added some more shading and highlights to the face to make it look a bit less flat. I've used yellow, orange, red, magenta and blue to create the kind of purpley hue I've ended up with, which I quite like. The hair spatters are looking quite messy now, so hopefully they'll be covered up in the next step.

I'm probably going a bit overboard with the amount of blog posts for this one piece of artwork, but I like documenting the process for future reference. Maybe one day I'll look back at this and think "Good grief, why did I do it like that?" Only time will tell.

PRODUCTS USED (Assorted brands of paints):
 

Fedora Girl Sketch

This is a sketch from my lunchbreak the other day. I didn't have access to the internet so I drew a random girl wearing a hat from a reference picture I had saved. I didn't do a lot of drawing on the plane to England like I had intended, but at least I can still make use of all the reference pictures I saved.

I don't care what anyone says about fedoras, I like them. I'd get one if I was ever out in the sun for long enough to require a hat. Maybe I'll pick one up if we go camping again some time.

Chris Pratt Sketch

I decided to draw a quick sketch of Chris Pratt from Guardians of the Galaxy this morning. I think the likenesses to my reference pictures isn't great lately, but I have ups and downs. Even if it doesn't look quite how I wanted, I still don't mind it as a portrait of a person generally.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to paint this one when work calms down in a couple of weeks. I'm thinking of getting a lot of sketches ready to paint, then doing a big batch of paintings at once. I'm starting to get an idea of the process and the things I need to set up in order to create. My painting area is tidier than it was before, just need a better selection of colours at my fingertips if I can arrange that. I'm also getting into the habit of updating my blog more often, so I'm pleased with that. Hoping to get back into the Pals Paper Arts and Color Throwdown challenges again soon.

Hayden Panettiere Sketch

Hayden Panettiere is a lady I saw in the news recently. Apparently she had a baby. It's strange how I have a huge list of names of people that I can draw, but most of the ones I've been keen to draw have shown up in the trending news on the side of Facebook. I wonder if there's some subliminal reason I'm thinking "THIS PERSON IS SUDDENLY VERY INTERESTING TO ME".

Not sure I like how the shape of the mouth came out, but there's still time to fix that up before finishing it off and painting.

Christmas is proving to be a very busy time at work, which is making it harder for me to reach my goal of 52 blog posts by the end of the year (one for every week of the year). I think I have to post one per day until New Years Eve in order to do it. That's what I get for putting it off for the last month and a half. Still, it can be done. I'm still trying to at least sketch something every day. When I have a bit of time to myself I'll break the paints out again.

Jennifer Aniston - Mixed Media Portrait by Renee Dillon

This artwork was a pretty big experiment for me. Even though the image itself is quite simple and straight forward, it was an experiment in applying finished artwork on paper to a canvas. I figure if I can glue a finished artwork on paper to a canvas or other kind of panel and make it look finished even without a frame, I can be more free to work on different sized artwork and experiment without worrying about finding frames to fit. Canvases seem to come in a wider variety of sizes than standard photo frames do, and I can trim a piece of art to fit the canvas as well.

I'd like to be able to complete a few pieces of art before picking my favourites to go on canvases without having to have a huge room full of canvas art that I like enough not to paint over, but not quite enough to hang. This way, I can store the others as flat paper without taking up as much space.

Something I've learned from this experiment - Paint on thicker paper. The paper I painted this image on was quite thin and wrinkled as it dried. I flattened it out fairly well by placing a couple of heavy books on top of it, but it seemed to wrinkle more when I glued it down with matt medium. Air bubbles getting stuck between the paper and the canvas also seemed to be a problem, which I tried to smooth out a bit until I ripped the paper. Thicker paper definitely would have held up better to the moisture. 

The picture above is how it looked before I glued it to the canvas. I might post an update picture of it on the canvas after I've trimmed off the edges. Still need to buy a blade or sharp knife in order to do that.

Adele - Mixed Media Portrait in Yellow, Red and Teal by Renee Dillon

This portrait of Adele is one of my favourite recent artworks. I've really been enjoying getting used to working with paint and mixed media. This one uses black coloured pencil for the lineart. I like the kind of rustic, expressive look the pencil lines give that I find hard to do with pen. Maybe I should work on making my pen lines more expressive in future. I also love the colour scheme in this one. The contrast between the bright reds and oranges and the cool blues and greens is nice. I'll have to use them together again.

I had a go at using various layers of shadow to the face. Still not perfect, but I'm pleased with it. 

Karl Stefanovic - Mixed Media Portrait in Blue and Orange by Renee Dillon

This is the first of a series of portraits that I've decided to work on (the last few blog posts were kind of practice faces or experiments that lead to the idea). I'm always looking for new faces to draw. One of my favourite places to look for faces is television. You can capture a screenshot at a particular moment and get close up shots of faces of different shapes and sizes, at different angles, showing different emotions. TV and movies can be a much better place to find drawing references than using posed photos as they offer more variety and movement. Also, once you have the basic gist of the face, you can add or remove details, change the hairstyle, create patterns and use colour combinations that didn't appear in the original image.

Over the next year I'd like to create a collection of portraits of famous people and characters, as well as unknown people that I find interesting reference images of. I'd like to get better at creating a likeness between the original image and the artwork, as well as experimenting with colour and texture. I've already been putting together a list of people that might be interesting to draw, as well as keeping an eye out for news stories about celebrities. Celebrity news isn't something I follow personally, but if people are interested in and talking about particular people it might increase the chance of people liking and sharing my art on social media. 

Of course, that means I have to get into the habit of creating art quickly and posting it while the person in question is still in the spotlight. Or alternatively, creating art of celebrities and resharing it when they come into the spotlight again. I'm not sure if this is even a remotely useful way to garner an audience - people who are reading celebrity news might not be all that interested in portraiture - but if I'm going to be drawing anyone it might as well be them. 

Goals for this project:

- Draw more men. Most of my portraits so far have been of women.

- Draw more older people. Draw wrinkles. They're interesting.

- Draw faces I find attractive and faces I don't find attractive.

- Draw the same person multiple times, changing things to make a completely different artwork.

- Pay attention while watching tv shows and movies in case a good opportunity for a screenshot arises.

- Don't be afraid to admit who the person is supposed to look like, even if it isn't a good likeness. 

I chose to draw TV host Karl Stefanovic because he was in the news recently. Apparently, he did an experiment where he wore the same suit every day for a year in order to prove that his fashion choices weren't under as much scrutiny as his female counterparts in the industry, As he predicted, nobody seemed to notice or care that he wore the same suit every day. I thought that it was an amusing way to make a point, so I decided to paint him first. He looks a little smurf-like in blue, but I wanted to make him blue to match the blue suit.

Green and Purple Lady

Another portrait that I painted while I was in Birmingham, England. Still not much else to say about these, just spent some time doodling while I was waiting for my Mum.

The Tattooed Lady - Acrylic Paint Mixed Media Portrait by Renee Dillon

This was my second attempt at the patterned face technique that I tried in the previous post. This time I broke out the acrylic paints and my one decent stencil (a lovely damask stencil by KaiserKraft). I wanted to be a bit subtle with the pattern, to make sure I didn't overwhelm the face again. I think that went fairly well. 

Below are some of the things I used to create this artwork or suitable alternatives (Amazon doesn't seem to stock the brands of paint I have, but it tends to be cheap acrylic paint).

Products Used: