Really felt completely under the weather today after noon, so first took a somewhat nap and then humored my brain, who didn't want to do nothing for the rest of the day, by starting a fun but low stakes project that I'd wanted to tackle for a while.
Behold this masterpiece:
And now I feel like if I close my eyes I'll fall asleep and never wake up again orz
Excited to share the new logo I created for The International Crane Foundation's "I Give a Whoop" campaign. What a super fun project! Loved working on this guy. Cranes are the coolest.
ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on
this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏
BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos
the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise
ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!
Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this 🥹
Just got back from a week-long art intensive studying horse anatomy with Terryl Whitlatch out at New Masters Village in Mancos, CO! I've followed Terryl's work for over 20 years, and her passion and expertise is unmatched—feeling challenged, refreshed, and like I want to draw a bajillion horses.
The week was made up of a whole lot of classroom time, balanced with hands-on horse sessions and some fun creature/character exploration on the last day—my brain is completely fried, but I have ZERO regrets. Can't recommend the lovely team out at NMV enough. ♥️
painting a cat for my grandma's birthday, which is tomorrow and I'm once again fashionably late
spent one hour and a half applying the masking fluid on the whiskers, because I kept applying it too thick/shaky etc, removing it, accidentally removing the perfectly good whisker right next to it, and having to start over, so you get a process pic just for that
The change to google becoming an entire new AI response thing that completely destroys its prior function and everything connected to it just reminds me of when Deviantart rolled out its major Eclipse update and overhauled its entire search function
Devart's original art categories were arbitrary at best and weirdly hyperspecific and unnecessary at worst, but for the most part you'd get things in the right place to be able to search for them. i.e. you'd find art tutorials in the art tutorials and resources category.
The update overhauled the search to be keyword based, an update that was not retroactive for the millions of already-uploaded art, often by people who were no longer active. They didn't repurpose those categories to include them as tags by default to the art that was in them; they just severed them and left them behind.
So now you go to search for a tutorial, but there's no tags associated with any of the old resources. It could find relevant searches, but only if they said the right words in the title or description, which wasn't always.
Years and YEARS of art and resources, references, the ability to easily access a huge scope of inspirational pieces and collect visual libraries, suddenly destroyed. The wider sense of community was suddenly choked down to a pinhole scope of who you follow and what shows up in popular. On top of that, I recall a statement that their algorithm would try and push low view pieces to the forefront, so there was no middle ground between the popular and very unpopular.
I remember trying to look up clover references, so I searched clover. Prior to the update it would have given me photography and stock images in abundance, interspersed with art, and I could further limit my field to be ONLY photography or stock images.
This time around: it gave me Clover, the character from Totally Spies, specifically involved in inflation art, because that's what the algorithm decided to push at me since it wasn't massively popular and it clearly needed more attention. I couldn't narrow my search, because the references I wanted were old and thus had no keywords. Mass-uploaded photos by amateurs and professionals alike often just had numbers for a title. There was no way out. It was just me against the Clover inflation art.
Google is doing the same: turning its entire function as a resource into a slurry that channels down into one single process that isn't what anyone asked for. There's no scope, no way to filter what is and isn't relevant to what you want, no way to pick and choose between a huge range of results, and thus it's losing its entire purpose. It's just kind of sad.
My lil messed up guy who I almost don't know how to talk about 🧡
As a character he has been with me for well over a decade, and he's got that special little place in my heart. But with so much time of him being a constant work in progress, how do ya even begin to unravel all the layers he has since made for himself and do so to any justice.
His original iteration was rooted amongst a world-building of demons, and revolved around a story about pushing back and fighting the forces that made you.
It's always interesting to me to see what these elements end up shaping into when passed through the lens of different worlds. I find a lot of comfort in his constants.
In the verse of our floofy bird folk Raul comes across aggressive and ill tempered, with little to say in word but lots in action. He's not what you'd call friendly, and for the most part very few stick around to dig much deeper than that. And that's the design, of course!
Get past that initial layer and he's still gruff and snarky, but for all the distance he keeps and upholds - he is craving proximity.
Proximity that his self-destructive ass does not believe he deserves (in most cases)
He's a master of self-sabotage. When things are going too good he has a tendency to toe the lines that would have him marked for watch. Risk taking skyrockets, an overconfidence in physical durability and a serious talent in proprioception seeing him push the limits of what he can achieve in highspeed high skill demands.
And when he inevitably gets himself hurt? Well. That's just deserved. Clearly.
Keep chipping, of course, and it becomes apparent so much of his bravado and attitude is bluff.
The most important aspect to Raul is that, at his very core, all his anger and lashing out is coming from the fact that he's scared. He's so scared of his own intensity, and his total inability to understand the 'why' behind the overwhelming extremes.
He's really no good at emotional talk – a disaster when you realise just how highly emotional he actually is. And this is a point of contention that leaves him spinning out into some truly awful spirals.
I'm putting him on blast here but he does not see all this with the clarity I'm laying it out in. Lol. Lmao even. Offense is the best defense and he'd be pissed off to be considered scared about anything.
pixelskylines
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
