And the New Bird Girl is...

Blue Bird!!

My new model is my sweet friend Susie, who made me think of these cute, bright little birds. Its nice going back into a more light painting again after doing a few blackish ones :P

Blue Bird Girl Sketch

From the reference pic I wanted to make her hair quite elaborate as in real life Susie has really long wavy hair - I had to make it more of a center piece! And add lots of little birds and flowers around ^^

WIP of Blue Bird Girl...need a proper name for the painting :P

Its going to be a very blue and pink painting in the end :P
Ive been hashing out issues with her face shape, eye shape, lip shape, every shape! But I think I got alot done yesterday ...
And I am on VACATION! Woot! So plenty of free time to spend painting and having a good time ^^

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas this year and will have an equally awesome time ringing in the New Year :D!

another life dump, art and all

Hello hello,
its another life dump sortve day, lots of pictures and happenings here in our little corner of Sweden. First off, I am sick so excuse any poor typing or lack of sense :P comes with the territory.
Secondly, some of you may or may not know my birthday is coming up on September 11th (yes i know an awful day to have a birthday no need to remind me :P) and whilst in town we went to SF Bookshop - and found a wonderful early birthday present for me!! :D

oh yes very nice.

Its the Imagine FX's Fantasy Workshop book! Complete with guides to all sorts of fun things like character creation, backgrounds and more

even a whole manga section yay!!

and some great hints to help me with more realistic painting which i need.

My dream is to someday have a bookshelf full of art books - from digital to acrylic, to sketching, and anatomy... Every book I collect is special to me, as is this. Ive already spent alot of time this weekend reading through and then just without looking at it making crazy sketches on my computer

this is what happens when i start with a blob of paint and nothing else O_o

Despite the oncoming of a cold most of the morning, in the afternoon I got out the paints with liam and did a bit of "portrait" painting with him. We've been watching some Sailor Moon episodes together and he absolutely LOVES her, thinks shes so funny :P So he took it upon himself to paint her:

shes the one named sailor moon!

Obviously hes got the artist talent lol! He even remembered her tiara and "when shes fighting" she has red things in her hair ;) And just for kicks I gave him a moon on his forehead:

moon prince ^^

And beyond all of that!! Ive managed to also find time to work on my Aedhen projects:

Aedhen the chibi - lineart

full form Aedhen sketch - for the element Fire

You know Ive previously done Aedhen in a winter theme, this time shell come about in a burning city, covered in flame. Its another huge challenge, like the forest was, so well see how that all goes.

And thats it for me! A weekend photo dump of all the things going on and about. Now hopefully I can get some rest, and feel much healthier tomorrow as I start the process of my eCourse, new paintings, and more.
Hope everyones had a great weekend ^^

A Revisit on a Past Project

Today I joined a few new groups on Deviantart - and decided to test submit an old painting into this one: AnimeFanGroup. The painting is called Blueberry Tree, and is the most popular of all my paintings I have up in my gallery.

I kindve laugh a little - that it is so popular. I made such a huge stink about painting is back in February or so. I simply didnt want to do it.
Back then I was just getting into painting - I had stopped for several years and had just painted a few anime pictures Richard picked out for me to do for our house. The original picture I painted it from was all olive green and I wasnt even sure I liked it to begin with!
I messed up all the sketchwork on the canvas - I hated her eyes - and was completely overwhelmed how to get that blue background on without ruining the figure.
And till this day I had no idea who the character in the painting was...I just painted the picture I saw and made it more my own with the flowers and colors I wanted...
Until today!
I resubmitted this painting into the group above and someone hit the nail on the head and I can now officially call it a fan art of Youmu from Touhou :D

Gotta love that sword :D
Anyway a special thanks to the very knowledgable Masatog for pointing this out to me - was nice to revisit an old favorite which hangs happily in the stairwell.
Anyone else have an old painting which you werent too happy about doing, but turned out to be one of your best? :)

when an idea comes to light

so! a new blog design! isnt it looovely! thank you to Sneaky Foxeh for the wonderful job you did making my blog oh so shiney new and beautiful ^^

 tonight, in this dreary dark rain, i thought it was time to sketch up a new painting - a larger one with perhaps quite a few details in it. something feminine and gentle.
since i love japanese anime but havent done a more "grown up" piece since blueberry tree i thought id roll with that sortve an idea

sketchy sketchy good

okay so thats quite messy but i didnt think about getting reference material until AFTER i made the sketch :P now that explain, that lovely lady in the kimono is holding a cherry blossom, from the tree next to her, leaning over the pond with the koi fish in it, surrounded by bamboo with a japanese pagoda in the background...lol
i think that about covers it.
as for reference material heres what ill really be pulling ideas from later:

even has appropriate colors hmm?

heres a proper pagoda. not the crazy thing i sketched a few minutes earlier :P

i have a thing for small delicate birds. i was hoping to make a pattern similar to this on her kimono, maybe egg blue in color over all...what do you think?

now thats a tree

as for the cherry tree and the bamboo i have plenty of that in my garden. we have a very large cherry tree (though not flowering atm, i took the photo shown above in may) and have a mass of bamboo which is really flurishing atm - some almost 3 meters this year!
so once it stops raining ill be sure to pick out some of my favorites and get some good reference material there.
i luckily have some larger canvases lying about in the house - so i could start work on that whenever i want/am ready :P
i think itll be a great summer vacation project, ill be sure to let you know how it comes along ^^

p.s. heres me at the thai restaurant we ate at tonight, we got purple flowers in all our glasses, was lovely