Twisted Pine - Day 8

Another hour on this today. I got a new lamp -- the blues in the sky are coming out way more than before.

Twisted Pine - Day 7

Working one-handed is getting old! Although I don't dual-wield pastels (now that's an amusing mental picture), I am accustomed to accumulating a selection of "currently-in-use" pastels in my left hand, which I can switch between with my right hand. At the moment, I have to set those pastels down on a table, where I quickly lose track of them, because apparently I lack the capacity to put pastels back from the place where I picked them up. It goes something like this:

"Oh, I picked this pastel stick up from that side of the table? Let me just set that down right here for a second, in the middle of a bunch of pastels I haven't used lately, which are all so covered in the pastel dust of other pastels that they all look the same color. Wait, where did I put that one I just set down? *cleans pastels and examines several before finding the correct one* Ah! Great. Now I'll use this, and then I'll set it down right here..."

You get the idea.

Anyway, I'll see an orthopedic specialist on Wednesday morning. Hopefully there is nothing seriously wrong with that wrist.

1.4 hours on this today, and over 6 hours on art-related stuff in general. Not bad.

Twisted Pine - Day 6

I sprained my wrist on Sunday. Fortunately it was my left wrist, but I didn't really feel like moving earlier this week! I'm doing a bit better now, so I worked on this for another hour today.

Twisted Pine - Day 5

I can't believe I haven't worked on this for almost a week! I spent this week sketching and beginning to educate myself more about Photoshop instead of working on this painting. In any case, I worked on this for another hour and fifteen minutes today. I should probably wrap this one up soon.

Twisted Pine - Day 4

Another hour today. Started in on the forest background to the lower right, and did some more work on branches, etc.

Twisted Pine - Day 3

Another hour today, focusing primarily on the background forest in the lower left. I was going to go in with a rubber shaper and blend it all together, but when I stepped back I decided it didn't need it. (At least not yet. Who knows how I'll feel the next time I'm working on it.) I also did a little work on the placement of pine branches.

Twisted Pine - Day 2

It has been awhile! I've been sketching, but between working on the comic, cleaning my house, finishing A Song of Ice and Fire (well, finishing all that has been published to date), and various other things, I haven't had a chance to work on my current painting. I started to lay in some finer details in the pine branches. I spent an hour on this today.

Twisted Pine - Day 1

After I finished working on the Rose piece, I decided I needed to play around and be a little more expansive and experiment with new techniques. So I broke out some cheap Canson watercolor board (which I had never used before -- after I bought them, I read somewhere that they tend to buckle...and I now have first hand experience of this!), dug out our bottle of rubbing alcohol from the cabinet beneath the sink, and got to work. First I blocked out some basic shapes to get the value pattern down:

Then I took a large-ish brush and made a wash out of it with rubbing alcohol:

Then, after that dried (and after I tried in vain to eliminate the slight buckling of the paper), I started to lay down some pastel on top of the underpainting. Now it looks a bit more like the woods, and less like deep red blobs:

I spent about an hour and fifteen minutes on this in total today, not including research and setup. I'm looking forward to playing around with this piece some more!