Painting with Plantie Tuesday! #1

Welcome to the First Edition of Painting with Plantie Tuesdays!
Every Tuesday I hope to show you what I have been working on and walk you through it step by step ^^
For this first edition I had a last minute project I HAD to work on as well...I thought it was due the day after. So I rushed quickly through everything and documented the beginnings of the crazy "beginnings of a painting" here for you!

waste not, want not! my scary fairy gets remade :P

The painting had to be small, it is for a lottery that my local art group is holding for a show upcoming. The only spare small canvas I have left in the house had a barely started painting on it I made last spring :P But I am a firm believer in reusing canvases that have no hope of being finished!

shamefully promoting winsor newton gesso hehe

One coat of white gesso and its already pretty much a clean slate again. There was slight damage due to me being careless over the months on the corner but we will ignore that.
The gesso I use is: Winsor & Newton Artists' Acrylic White Gesso. I remember thinking it was pretty expensive for such a small bottle, but its actually lasted me a LONG time with plenty more go in it!

an amazing digital painting by 0Effe0 found on deviantart

Next! Is the concept, idea, etc. I usually had tons of images for paintings go through my head just before I go to sleep and I knew I wanted to paint a naked deer girl in the woods showing her booty with a little tail :P Originally the idea was quite chibi-ish but I thought it would be better growing her up a bit. This painting instantly came to mind. Its part of my stash of "Inspiration Pictures" I have on my computer and the shape of her body and her face as a sort style I wanted to bring out in this painting.

paint tool sai is the program i prefer best for sketching. the tools are alot easier to use.

I am a digital sketcher for paintings. That is for several reasons, the main one is that in the end I can readjust the size of the sketch to fit the canvas itll be going on. I am lucky enough to have a Wacom Intuos4, and used paint tool sai to first create the face like the reference picture, then I altered it, and added a body in the style I had invisioned.

credit to the original artist is due here! but...it was a quick google search...sorry artist.

final deer girl sketch! minus the whack-a-doodle hand

After one quick google search for antlers because even though I absolutely LOVE girls with antlers...I can never draw them correctly from pure memory :P You can see here in my sketching fury I put her hand on backwards LOL sorry. I do that alot actually - hence all my practice lately with bird girl hands ;)

my poor computer. i abuse it so much. but its love, i swear.

 So then I flip my monitor down after painfully finding the correct image size and put the sketch onto transfer paper.

you gotta love that deer booty

And the numpty that I am I still wound up putting on the sketch backwards, but nevermind! Nothing is ever exactly "perfect" in Plantie world, we just roll with the punches over here ^^

because this is what trees look like in the back of my mind :D

Since I was under considerable time rush I started throwing on the background. The colors you see here are: - Lamp Black - Titanium White - Burnt Umber - Cadmium Yellow - Hooker's Green.
I mixed them on different levels and slowly worked my way into the figure.
I tried keeping the trees especially grey so in the end they wouldnt get too neon bright (something i do alot and too often!)

fast and furious leaf making!

Here I am using a medium small brush with my hooker's green, black, white and a tad of cadmium yellow making fast leaves to add and fill in the background.

i love the color combo light red and green ^^

Colors used for the deer girl - skin: Titanium White - Burnt Umber - Cadmium Yellow - Crimson Red (tiny tiny bit of red)
hair: Crimson Red - Cadmium Yellow - Titanium White - Burnt Umber
And there you have it! Thats as far as I got last night before I passed out and was happy to hear this morning they got the date of submissions wrong and its in a month. Not today :P Thank goodness for that. You can see here finally I added all the basic colors straight up, and from here on out I will start to slowly add in details, starting with her skin and perhaps the trees, giving the painting more definition until I am satisfyed :D

Thanks everyone for tuning in to this weeks Painting with Planties! See you next week ;)