This should be getting easier...

...But it's not! Here is my portrait of my friend Maggie, which may conclude this series of elemental portraits (I suppose I could still add earth and/or wind, but I'll have to wait until I find something inspiring to run with on that one.)


As I'm teaching myself to paint with Photoshop, I'm trying to learn from all of the mistakes and missteps that I took on my last project, but it seems that rather than doing that I'm just trying to find shortcuts. With the past two pieces I've painted and repainted areas with numerous glaze-like layers and a lot of complete redo's and rethinks. With this one I wanted to get straight to the source with a more "direct application" approach. Unfortuneatly I spent more time trying to fix my errors from this approach than I did really enjoying the painting process. Perhaps my method is long and tedious, but maybe that is the road that I have to ride to achieve the level of success that I want. I guess I'll have to see how the next project I do turns out!

Another, slightly less convenient.

Self-Portraits are convenient.

I wanted to do a sketch and play with the oil-paint look in photoshop (because the last couple times I've tried to, I end up using the chalk tools and mess up the whole illusion.) I really enjoy smearing the paint around, it's a lot of fun to play around. I'd still like to get even more expressive, but I'm afraid to make mistakes. For shame.

Copycat Photoshop Wizard

I was bored (which is amazing since I really have 5,000 things I should be doing) and saw that Havana Street Retro Clip Art had a logo that seemed like it would be a fairy simple but satisfying Photoshop exercise. And thusly I created this logo. PLEASE look at Havana because they did all the design work. I just did the technical magic to reproduce it. I was thinking about using this on this page, but it's a little tacky. And not me. Also you can see a drawing I did that no one has really seen from a Jem and the Holograms revival that I was working on last summer. I should whip that out....

Amy Winehouse

Here's something that I've been wanting to do for a while--a portrait of Amy Winehouse. Everytime I see a photo of her gaunt frame and big hair I just think, wow, she was born to be illustrated. And, please do not misinterpret me becuase I didn't make her a vision of lovliness, because I love Amy Winehouse and think she is an incredible artist.

Artistically this is another step forward for me and I'm excited about the road I'm going in. Here is also a little sequence showing my process. (The first part is certainly the most amusing!)