Free Giveaway of an Original Painting!

Original Painting Giveaway yay!

Wow, 300 likes sure came fast, thank you every for your amazing support!
As a special thank you, I am having a giveaway of your choice of one painting shown above - the Original! Thats a gift worth $180 and a rare chance to snag one just for yourself ^^
To find out how to enter read the picture above! And head on over to http://www.facebook.com/plantiebees to enter today ^^

Good luck everyone!

Yard Sale!! All Anime Paintings Super Low Selling Price!

All 3 anime paintings are for sale now! $75 (500 kr)

Hey everyone! Welcome to my first public sale of these paintings. They are my acrylic anime paintings which I had made for our home and now must find a new one as I need lots of space for my new collection!

As a result, I am selling them off super cheap! Each painting is only $75 each. They all measure 46 x 38 cm - and are acrylic on canvas.

Silhouette" 46x38 cm acrylic on canvas, $75

close up shot of her face

"Blueberry Tree" 46 x 38 cm acrylic on canvas, $75

"Atari Girl" 46 x 38 cm acrylic on canvas, $75

All you need to do is message me at cm.lank87(a)gmail.com with which painting youd like and we can go from there!
Please no time wasters, I just want to find these lovely ladies good homes for an absolute steal price!
Thanks for looking!

Painting with Plantie Tuesday! #7 - Burden of a Face

Ahh, I am back, quite late! But I am back, with Painting with Planties.
Today I will be showing you a rather mental example of what happens when I get frustrated with a painting. I will show you all the stages my recent Bird Girl has gone through the last few days or so of painting her. Its been pretty all over the place :P

Ready?

"simple days..."

This is where the painting was the last time I displayed it here on my blog. So simple, with such hope!!

hmmm getting pale

Then, I started painting her arms and her hands and I thought that her face looked too pale and flat.
This is when...the rumbling craziness proceeded...

yes, i know. its different.

So the logical thing to do in my mind was to shade it more appropriately with the same sortve colors!
Right? Well the eyebrows and lashes disappeared and she started looking just really dark and fake tanned.

more and more creepy

So, I logically tried adding some lights, and I wound up making her look very old and getting paint all over her hand and the rage began.

looking up!

So I added in some eyebrows and lashes for better perspective! It seemed to be going in the right direction...

rage continues

But I started having alot of trouble with her forehead, as the paint kept peeling away so I said SCREW IT! Shes getting bangs!!

oh and i added the feathers too ^^

I did some simple highlighting and shading here thinking...itll be okay...itll be over soon :P

But alas! Then I thought her hair was too poofy on top, and decided to erase some...

And then I erased her lips and half the bangs....

Then I erased her eyebrows....

it looks different...but why..

I think here I started painting her hair, and put back in some eyebrows. I got complaints that all my paintings end up looking like me, especially the eyebrows so in my attempts to make it not look like me, I made it look...special.

thats....very different

Then something whacko happened with one of her eyes, her lips became red without my knowledge and I decided that this painting would officially kill me.

Thats all I can show for now :P I think. I THINK. I fixed everything. Its potentially possible.
But from beginning to end thats one manic journey.
Its sitting downstairs, with varnish drying on top of it, so however I left it (I cant remember after seeing all those pictures lol!) thats how itll remain.

So! Even if this isnt much of a lesson of how to do things, maybe its a lesson of caution of how making one change can turn into a snowball of crazy obsessive changes :P

Ill be posting the painting tomorrow stay tuned :D!

Morning Charm Complete!

"Morning Charm" acrylic on masonite board, 14.5 x 40 cm

Here we are! This is my lovely new painting, my first on the masonite boards I showed you the other day! Richard slaved away to make me 3 box frames that matched perfectly from one board to go with the theme I was imagining.
I wanted 3 paintings, one for each time of day. Then got hooked on the popular Renaissance subject - the three graces. So I put them together!
The Three Graces are beauty, charm and creativity. I thought Morning suited charm the best ^^
Drawing inspiration from old classic paintings, I put them into my newer style. Still classy though right hehe :P

Because Richard made a box frame for all of them, the painting goes on over each side. Meaning no need to frame them, and the picture is actually alot bigger than you may first think!

that was alot of green leaves to paint let me tell ya!

my writing skills are a bit wonky at times.

I even got to sign the back! Which looks so much better than me painting it on :P You can see Richards handy work back here, wooden blocks to keep the boards nice and stable!

I hope you all like her! Only 2 more to go with that collection... But first. I have one very large painting which now is just the right time to start. Itll be very detailed, very symbolic, and very beautiful....Stay tuned!

This painting, and the following 2, will be on sale over Easter during my art show. The price will be $150 for one, $450 for all three, just in case you wont be around and want to put an offer in!
Have a great monday!

Painting with Plantie Tuesday! #3

Hello hello again everyone! It is Tuesday, which means Painting with Planties is in full stride. Today I am bringing you back to the painting I featured the start of 2 weeks ago - my Deer Girl which will be in a lottery draw over Easter here in Sweden :)

these trees remind me of the 70's, anyone else hehe

I will be going through how I built up the background in an hour and a half. This needed to be a quick painting so all techniques I am using are time effective. You can see above I started them the day before, and will continue using that outliney method.

messy palettes are messy -_-

First lets start with the materials! I have here some Hooker's green, Titanium white, Burnt Umber, Black, and my new Golden artist color - Yellow Ochre!
These are the 4 basic colors I used throughout the entire background, mixing various shades along the way!

i wish i could make some sortve doctor/nurse joke here.

Next! We have in my lovely medical syringe Acrylic Flow Release liquid, which must be mixed with 10 parts water, so it is easiest for me to put into a syringe to measure correctly.
Behind it you can see my next handy tip - a paint roller tray.
A problem I found with my brushes with painting is while working you cant leave them out of water as it poses the risk of having any acrylic still left in them drying and ruining the brush.
And if you leave it in a standard water tub face down it will misshape the brush and ruin it as well. My solution that I found online was using a paint roller tray, which keeps the brushes wet while I work, and also horizontal so they are basically floating and will not get smooshed at the bottom.

Back to the painting! To start off I used a dark color to outline where the bark will be moving and flowing.

bark outline complete

Then using a mix of the various colors above I worked through and around the lines to create a bit of dimension. Super simple and easy. The acrylic flow liquid really helps with this.

My hands are known to be rather shakey, and I used this to my advantage letting the funny lines I made become interesting knobs and bits on the trees

For the grass - I went through 5 steps. The first basic three are up here - first start off with a medium light color and make quick short strokes upwards all over.
Then repeat with the darker color a bit more sporadically.
Finally I added a bit of a yellow ochre/green color to add a bit of life within it.
Later on, I dry brushed on both a white-ish green, and a darker green to break up the harsh lines, which you will see below.

Since I had already smashed on some leaves 2 weeks ago, alot of different colors were already taking place. I just highlighted and shaded those with the side of my brush giving a soft bushy leaf feeling all over.

wa-la! youve got a background!

And there you have it! A nice little background in an hour and a half - using a medium, small, and one dry brush to create a fun looking wood scene.

Thanks for stopping by ^^ Feel free to ask/complain/comment!

As for next week - the Deer Girl will finally get painted!
See you then!

"Sunrise Lament: Swan" complete!

"Sunrise Lament: Swan" acrylic on reclaimed plywood 43.5 x 65.5 cm

So! She is finally complete. Ive been battling it out with this large heavy painting for a good few weeks now, and actually kept record of how long I spent on it! After 43 hours and 35 minutes of working on her I finally got to a place last night that I was happy with.

detail of the arch bridge with wisteria flowers in the background

This painting to be shows a certain emotion I was thinking of at the time.
I suppose its no surprise the thought of a white swan bears a bit of melancholy, but to me the look on her face reminded me of times where things have been so sad for so long you just have to smile, just a little bit...despite it all theres almost a sweet undertone to all the pain.

close up of the detail on the swans head

But instead of being the crazy girl at the bus stop chuckling to herself with tears in her eyes, finding the beauty in the misery, I painted it here in a more magical setting. Because we all are the white swan girl now and again...

the wishy willow tree over the pond in the background

a side view because it can always be a bit easier to see things from this angle

I hope you enjoy my swan girl and the meanings I find in it! We all must battle on, whether it be in grace and beauty or otherwise... I hope to myself I can do just that :)
Have a wonderful Sunday!

Painting with Plantie Tuesday! #2

Welcome back to Painting with Plantie ^^ This week I documented my journey of painting Swan Girls bent leg in my current painting. I have not to my recollection painted a bare knee realistically so this was a bit of a challenge for me too.
So! Lets see how I went about doing it :D

This is what I saw when I decided to start painting. Not much going on, just a basic coat.

Well, I first saw a problem, I had in my extreme sleepiness the night before decided to painted a large shade spot under her calf on her thigh without looking at the reference picture for guidance and thus saw later that that should actually be a light spot :P So! The first thing I did was correct my misjudgement.

This is my Winsor & Newton stay wet palette, with the 4 skin shades I had made up: a base light, yellowy, reddish, and purple

Since I am trying to use more skin colors in my work, I made it up much the same way as the rest of the painting - with those 4 types seen above. I use a stay wet type palette because I like having the same colors the next day since I work 8-5 in another town, its nice knowing when I come home theyll be ready to use again!

First off, map out the dark lines where the curves and such are.

Using a small dry brush from Games Workshop I use the yellow and red color to put in shading.

Note! Dry brushes - I use them all the time. The small ones I use like in this picture are from Games Workshop, which are made for painting Warhammer and other miniatures :P These are super cheap so they are a cheap way to go - but they wear out really fast. More on that later!

after adding basic shading with a small dry brush.

If you dry brush on paint and then keep going too hard without letting it dry properly, you get this ugly "hole" effect in the paint.

the "bid daddy" dry brush

 After I had struggled to put in the purple shades with the Games Workshop brush I noticed I had really worn it down my last 2 paintings and I needed a better alternative for the large leg.
So, I got out the big daddy dry brush. This one I made myself by chopping off the end of an old thicker brush to make a fat square shape. If you have brushes you can mutilate and make into dry brushes, go for it!!

after one coat of blending with the bigger dry brush, started getting alot closer to where i wanted, but still too purple.

The left is where I started, the right is where I ended up. One more coat of base color dry brushing over the purple and wa-la!

Swan Girl - Leg WIP done for now :P

All in all the process took me 2 hours with some mental breaks here and there :)
I found out - knee caps where very hard! And I will still want to work a bit on the shading but would like to wait to do the other leg to get a better perspective of what needs to be done.

I hope you all enjoy this edition of Painting with Plantie, have any comments, critiques, questions, just let me know! Thanks for stopping by :D

Continuous Work on Swan Girl Continues!

Its been a pretty productive weekend I think! Ive gotten some good work done on Swan Girl, which looks more or less like this now:

"Swan Girl" continues! Shes got some huge boobs *cough* and after 1 breast reduction surgery another one may be needed lool :P

Ive put alot of work getting her face and the upper half of her body to a good standard. Though I got to tell you her face is NOT  done and neither is her hair (im currently working on the dove wing nestled in there) and it has gone through some pretty funny changes.
I put together a small collage for you to show you the journey over the past few days.

jaw surgery, eye surgery, mouth surgery (still underway with that one) and the relaxing inclusion of hair and flowers

I added a large peony flower, lotus, tiger lily, and some unidentified purple flower ^^ next: pearls perhaps?

Shes been a long journey, and painting on the laminated plywood has been really smooth and nice, but still offers up some problems when blending stubborn acrylics.

Yesterday I saw the house where I will be showing my paintings over Easter and met the fellow artists who own it - it made me really excited but super nervous at the same time.
I have roughly 2 months to paint enough pictures for 3 walls, whilst working a full time job and having the kids about.
Its going to be stressful and never enough time in the day but I will try and light the fire under my butt and as Tim Gunn would say, "Make it work!!" hehehe

Hope everyones had a great weekend! :D