Friday, October 21, 2011

Who's there?!

Friendly neighbor or sinister stranger?  Either way, Sunny and bunny are scared.  One of the houses I grew up in as a kid was a huge ranch-style house that was beautiful, but totally haunted and gave all of us the heebie jeebies.  My sister had recurring nightmares while we lived there, and one nightmare involved seeing a blurry and vaguely familiar, but menacing, figure standing outside the yellow obscuring glass next to the doors.  For some reason that image has stuck in my head longer than any of my own nightmares!

I painted this with my new gouache paints (I totally butchered that word at the art store).  At first I was in love with it, but as the paints started to dry I found it a bit harder to mix enough of my colors to last before they dried out.  It's not a problem if I'm going for a more sheer traditional watercolor look, but for a more opaque look it was harder to achieve using less water.  I think it'll get easier with time and practice.  And next time I go for a more opaque look, I'm going to do my initial drawing in pencil first and then ink after painting.  I'm horrible at drawing straight and even lines, but I also hate using a ruler, so I embrace my wavy lines.

Oh and here's a picture of my painting before I inked in the final lines.  When I first started I wasn't sure what look I was going to go for but my skills are still sloppy and so I needed the tightening of the ink line at the end.    Except around the shadowy figure.  I thought it best to leave that loose and undefined.

3 comments:

  1. love love love the way you did this! great color, funaek! "-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eeek, that is scary. Don't make any noise! I love the way the picture comes to life with the ink lines.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the comments! I loved painting this but was sad to see my original ink lines disappear the more layers of paint I added so I'm glad I re-inked it at the end with a thicker line.

    ReplyDelete