Face Practice 01

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm posting some face practices using the faces from Humanae project on Tumblr. The advantage of that project is it has a variety of people from different genders, ages, and ethnicity allowing me to practice and gain more varied knowledge of the human face. All of these made in Mischief. You can click on picture to see the image on the 'Made With Mischief' website.

Wine & Design and Humanae

The painting to the right is one I design as a causal artsy word painting. A lot of people like to paint words for decoration. I had several inspirations in creating this one. Celtic art, illuminated letters, and spring and love related themes. It is always a balance between my vision and making sure that it can be painted in 2 hour time frame.

In general capital letters are more well define and different therefore easier to recognize and balance in design. Lowercase varies too much in size of how much space it takes. This comes with some studying of graphic design or at least typography. I do recommend all artist to study the basics of typography.

By the way, sorry this is a bit late with the storm on the East coast it has caused some internet problems and caused extra demands. So I've added some practice images below done in Mischief. I've been working on improving my skills of painting a variety of faces. This should increase my visual memory so when I design characters they'll become more unique and varied. You can click on the photo to go see that image on Mischief. I will post more of these practices in future blog posts.

The source I'm using to practice is the images from the Tumblr page, Humanae.  All photos are taken by Angelica Dass who is working on creating a chromatic inventory of human skin tones using the PATONE color schemes. It is a great reference and a great reminder of how varied our features and skin tones are. So you can randomly pick one as practice. Hope you enjoy these.

Valentine and Wine & Design

   Here is some more paintings from the Wine & Design business I work with. This was inspired by an older painting for Valentines which we'll see if it is popular idea or not soon. For those of you who are local to the Triangle area in North Carolina, you can click on this link to check out the paintings of the location I work at.


The original painting was finding a way for a the human face to be simple and interesting for people to paint, which lead to the painting to the right. It was the first inspired by various cameos. Having it like this allows simple customization without having the details of the face to worry about. It allows the use of bright colors still which contrast nicely with the black. This painting I created about 2 years ago, while the one above was within the last couple of months. I kept the same premise but themed it and made one for each sex so we can have a couple paint each one canvas to represent themselves in the image.

Below is the male silhouette I came up with at the same time as the pair to see how it would look in comparison to the female version. We're always looking for more ways to encourage male painters to come in. If any of you have painting suggestions, I will gladly consider them for future Wine & Design paintings.

Traveller: Space Scene

Another sketch done in Mischief for a mini contest on their website. I have it online on their website here. I decided since my fiance has been rolling up planets using the Traveller RPG system that I would go ahead and paint one of the major planets he plans to use called New Iapetus.

I was given a description of it's temperature (below freezing), type of atmosphere (dense), how much water on planet (about 50%), and the like. From there I looked through different NASA images doing quick research what would create such a world and what planets to use as reference. I decided that if it was around a dwarf red star and further away from it that it would create a cold world. I used a mixed of Pluto, Venus, and looking at the possible habitable planets in the Kepler system to create the main world. It was done relatively quick since I didn't have much time to work on it. I may post future work on this planet and others.

For those of you who like to look or want space reference images, you should go to NASA site here. All their images are royalty free and can be used as you like with their attribution, which you can click on the link about that on their website for more information.