day #365 - the end of an era

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I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
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day #141 - surprised!

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Well, that was unexpected. I started with some random watercolor piece that was once again making use of the muted palette that comes out of colors mixed with burnt umber and could had let it at that, but then I still had some time, and decided to start a new piece. Eventually I crunched through my rest time, but I’m very very happy about the result. Both paintings actually.

On the first one (the random one) I love the colors and the interplay of all these hues superimposed on the brown undercolor. I also managed to  add some pure black (payne’s gray) without overwhelming the composition, something I hadn’t been able until now. While I don’t know what I’m seeing, it looks like a vertical slice of earth, and one underground town, and one on the surface.

The second painting is much more intriguing. I started with a fineliner with no idea of what I’d be making but before laying on the paper my first stroke I new I wanted to make some thick animal/beast head. I tried visualizing the forms in 3d space before drawing the rest of the strokes on the paper and this way I craated both the beast and the dragon without accidents. This feels a very fascinating Kim-Jung-Gi approach; not to say that it’s close to that level at all, but the idea of painting from life (imagined) life sounds fascinating and possibly quite the way to go. I don’t know if everybody else does that (which is quite possible) but this is very different to what I’ve been doing thus far which was either drawing randomness and trying to make it appear correct (form/perspective) on the paper, or using perspective and constructive methods to recreate how it would appear. I didn’t master any of those, but the idea of trying to compose the rotation/perspective in my mind’s eye, and copying/referencing it from there sound very intriguing! 

What else do I like about this piece? Quite a lot. The fact that I was interested about the animal anatomy (wish I had been studying it), the palette (I created an underpainting with burnt umber and then shifted the hues on top), the color contrast of the triadic scheme (magenta/bluegreen/orange), the fingers, the skull in perspective, the objects in the treasure-pile... The rendering (shading, reflections) it the one I’m most happy about; I love the texture on the dragon-skin, the reflected colors from the purple beast, the sky, the dragon and the gold - I’m starting to raytrace stuff in my head, still finding my footing. The composition is ok (though I’d like it to be a bit more spacious at-top) and the story which present (a baby beast befriending a motherly dragon) is nothing special whereas the dragon on the gold-pile has been a recurring theme of mine since 20 years ago...

Overall, beyond the length of today’s work, and the integration/falling-into-place of everything I had been studying (anatomy, color theory, composition, story, color-mixing, detailing) plus new stuff (visualization, rendering) I’m most proud of the fact that this feels like a finished and real illustration!I do things that feel complete so rarely that I’m proud of it!

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