Butterfly Paintings - Behance!

Just a short post to let you know that my best butterfly paintings can now be viewed on my Behance page! I think I'm done painting butterflies for the time being; there are other things to attend to! Check them out, and let me know what you think. I'm particularly pleased with these ones you haven't seen yet:

Pentatonix WIP

Today I spent a considerable number of hours working on some fanart of Pentatonix, my favorite a cappella group. They do wonderful covers of popular songs, and both I and Mom love them! If you don't know them yet, a good place to start would be these two videos:

Evolution of Music by Pentatonix

Pentatonix on Sesame Street!

Now, the fanart is still a work in progress (WIP), but here's how it's coming along! I've done most of the line work, so the next step will be to even out the skin color that I just slapped down. It's too late to continue working on it now, and I'm away for the weekend (seeing as it's Easter and all!), so I'm not sure when I'll continue working on this! Haven't decided yet whether I'm taking along my laptop or not.

Scott looks kinda creepy as a floating head. Sorry, Scott! I'm working off a promotional photo of theirs, but might rearrange them a little bit further on. I'm not planning on painting the rest of their bodies, so this set-up isn't optimal!

Just realized that I never did finish that turtle rider I started painting some time ago. Hmmm...

Anywho, have a happy Easter!

Butterfly Paintings

The other day I decided to make a fake butterfly display case. They're so beautiful, aren't they? The only sad thing about butterfly display cases is that the beautiful butterflies within are dead, and so I thought I would create an artistic one instead. All the butterflies in this post were digitally painted by me, and each butterfly took me a bit over 2 hours to paint. It's really fun - I might end up painting a few more!

Which is your favorite? I particularly like the vivid orange one, and the blue one is beautiful - though I do love the earthy colors of the others, so it's hard to pick a favorite! I'm thinking of selling prints of these, since I'm sure they'll look lovely on a wall! These might even be nice in calendar form, if I paint another five butterflies... 

Ocean Practice

I forgot to post this on Tuesday - I painted a little strip of ocean to see how water and waves work, and I'm actually quite satisfied with the result! It took me a lot longer than it should have, but that's because it was a first attempt, and a second try will definitely go much more smoothly!

Using this photo as reference, I digitally painted this here:

I'm pretty happy with it! Though, to be frank, the sand could have used a bit more work. Ah, well.

Poem Illustrations

A little glimpse at what I'm currently working on...

"What's that?" chirped Ben, a baby bird,
And, pointing with a tiny wing,
He lifted wide his beak to sing,
"What's that?  What's that?  of everything,
To learn another brand new word.

Poem excerpt courtesy of Anastasia C. Moser, illustration by Sophie-Therese Lupas.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I have plans for today, so I doubt I'll be posting later! So, without any ado, have some little images I made. Happy Valentine's Day!

Turtle Illustration

I'm working on a digital painting of a sketch I did the other day:

Clearly, my skills at drawing animals without a reference are pretty terrible. Thankfully, it's easy enough to find photo references, and upon finding a nice photo of a turtle I set about recreating it digitally.

The original image

My digital version! As with the sunset from last Friday, I completely painted over the original photograph.

I do quite like the idea of a girl riding the turtle, but I'm afraid I'm still working on it! Here's a work-in-progress image, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the idea to copy part of the turtle's shell pattern to create a lace top for the girl's dress. So sweet! Lots of work still to be done, though.

So that's my current art project! Takes a while to paint all that. (I fear it'll take me a long time to get the girl's face right, too!) As always, click on the images to see them bigger!

Sunrise

This morning I got up far earlier than normal - at the shocking time of 7 AM! (Yep, I've been spoiled these past few years, what with my 9 AM wake-up call.)

Basically, I went and hung around a cold apartment while men drilled and scraped and generally fixed up terrible water damage behind me. Fun? I used the time to work on my digital painting a bit, using the wonderful new computer I lugged down the hill. (Lugging it back up was worse.)

I spent quite a bit of time simply reacquainting myself with my Photoshop brushes (including some extra ones, such as this brush pack by DanLuVisiArt that I really need to work with more), before using a few brushes from the aforementioned pack to recreate this photo (by "Michael from Minnesota"):

Isn't it gorgeous? I had a lot of fun recreating it, but I have a lot to learn (and work on) still. Below is my rendition, achieved by painting over the original until none of it was visible anymore. (Click to enlarge!)

The clouds, in particular, need more work (or just more effort - I slapped those down first, so they're the roughest part of the painting), but apart from those, I'm really pleased with the result. I'll do more such paintings in the future, I think - copying really helps you learn how to create something realistic and apply that new knowledge to other paintings!

But seriously, those colors... *sighs happily*