Taking Stock, April 2015 - Progress and Reassessment

So, in January this year, I stopped and took stock. I was hopeful of moving my art forward, but that doesn't seem to have happened, so I stopped and took another look

Where I was:

• Refamiliarise with materials: using the book Everyone can Draw. That hasn't happened. Once university started pretty much everything stopped.
• Dragons: apart from the Anna and the Rock Dragon cover, I haven't touched a dragon picture since I wrote this piece.
• Beetles: also no progress.
• Spiders: also no progress... unless you count all the photographs I've taken since then.
• Problem Areas: I figured out I needed to work on a lot of things: perspective, colour, plant shape and form, lizard anatomy, weapons and proportion. I was going to start small and work bigger. Hasn't happened yet...
• Sunday Walk Feature: supposed to happen every Sunday; hasn't been happening.

So, not a lot of progress. I'll try again.

Where I'm going:

Lately, I've been studying an awful lot - anywhere from 6-12 hours in a day. That's not going to change much. I've also not been taking as many photos as usual. That will have to change. And I haven't done any sketching or picture-making. That will definitely have to change. Here's what I'll try this time:

• Do some drawing every day: Sounds simple. I figure the time for this is usually just before I go to bed. To keep myself on track, I'll post what I've drawn the day after. I'm thinking of a dinosaur and fighter focus.
• Photograph something every day: Again, easier than it sounds. I might have to incorporate this on my morning walk.
• Sunday Walk Feature: I'm not quite up to this, at the moment. I'll post walks as I manage them.

Action Sequence for Fantasy Art - Ancient Arts Fellowship Training on April 11, 2015

Here are a couple of short sequences I took of the Canberra Ancient Arts Fellowship fighters doing skirmish training on Saturday, April 11, 2015:

Take Two on a New Cover

So, sometimes I do something and I’m not quite happy with it, but it takes me a while to work out what I don’t like. Anyway, this is what happened with Anna and the Rock Dragons. I’ve spent the last month pondering the cover, while I go through edits. It was missing something.

I finally realised it didn’t look finished. Well, I didn’t know what to do about that—oil pastels can be a bit tricky—so I went back to my art folders to see what had attracted me to using them in the first place. The work before had a lot more lines in them, more colour showing through, more lines in parallel. I thought about that.

One of the biggest problems in the original cover is the shirt—there’s too much blank space, and the speckling looks messy. Other things I didn’t like were the outer lines—they look hesitant and almost temporary, and the figures aren’t clear on the page. Also, the colours don’t show through as clearly as they do in the raw, and that’s a shame, because colour is what drew me to oil pastels in the first place.

So, I kept editing and tried to come up with a solution, before I had to decide between delaying the release, or releasing it in a cover I wasn’t entirely happy with. Here’s what I’ve done so far: 

1. Played with the original art, redefined the lines, thickened them, and added more.
2. Scanned, trimmed and darkened the scan.
3. Played with the font on the title.

The cover before I played with it:

The cover after I played with it:

I still don't know if I like it... but, let’s see how it goes.