Slightly older piece from 2007, I think. I'm going to be working on this and posting photos later tonight on Twitter, for #fridaynightartdorks. If you aren't already following me on twitter, I'm @MehganTrice Some of you who watched my old account on DeviantArt probably remember seeing this one, since I had a photo of it as my "desktop shot" for a long time.
Also, I was going through some of my artist proofs from past prints last night and pulled out these extra prints of "Farewell" that I have. I'm going to go ahead and post these in the shop tomorrow afternoon, there are only 5 of them left. I'll make a more detailed post on this tomorrow as well.
A few quick updates, first of all, I set up a Vimeo channel a little while ago for my film work. Therefor all film related videos can be found here http://vimeo.com/channels/mehgantricefilm. I wanted to separate my film work from my artwork videos, and I felt
like a Vimeo channel was a better option, for a few reasons, for my
film work rather than setting up another Youtube. Though I might post short previews of new films on my art Youtube as well, we'll see, I haven't made up my mind on that yet. Nothing is on the Vimeo channel at this moment, however I wanted to go ahead and make everyone aware of it in case you're interested and want to either bookmark it or add me as a contact if you have an account there too.
I'm doing a bit of cleaning up so to speak, over the years I've set up quite a few accounts on different sites to help network and promote my artwork. All of which have been very helpful over the years in different ways, however now I feel like it's all a bit too much to maintain and some of them really aren't needed anymore. Because of that I'm going to be closing my Myspace account, which I never seem to log into or update these days, and I'm thinking about closing my DeviantArt account as well (Edit: I decided to delete my old one and open a new one under my real name http://mehgantrice.deviantart.com/), to start off. I'm going to be dropping the Lost Butterflies name from this blog (not from my website shop though). And lastly, as some of you already know, I have a new email address, which is mehgantrice@gmail.com. So if anyone needs to contact me from now on, please use that address.
I think that is all for now, tomorrow I should have a couple new illustrations share, I just need to photograph them.
Hello, hello! I realized I haven't posted on here in awhile so I figured I should give a quick update. I've been super busy lately, however I've been working on a lot of art related projects as well (new paintings, jewelry, sculpture work)
Everything seems to be in a state of 50 to 80 percent completion right now. So expect lots of new works to be popping up during the month of May. In the meantime, I have a few work in progress photos, concept art, and workspace shots to share with you all, from the past couple months:
(I'm not sure if I've posted photos of this piece before. It's a drawing that I did about two years ago and transferred onto panel. Then I forgot about this kid and he's been hiding in my closet ever since.)
This video simply shows part of the shading process that I do before starting on the underpainting. Shading with the charcoal is basically a guide for painting the monochrome underpainting.
For this I use Winsor and Newton Vine and Willow charcoal. The Vine charcoal is a dark gray, while the Willow charcoal is black. I don't have the box from my Willow charcoal, so I couldn't take a photo of it, but it comes in a grayish blue box similar to the the one pictured below. Usually I'll start out shading with the Vine charcoal first, which is what you see in the video, and then afterward I go over areas that need to be darker with the Willow charcoal.
For blending and smoothing charcoal I just use stumps and sometimes tortillons for smaller, more detailed, work. Also I like to use the q-tips for blending as well, but mostly for smoothing and picking up excess charcoal, sometimes they seem to do a better job than the stumps do. For large areas, like the sky in this piece, soft Kleenex Tissues are great to use for blending as well.
I stumbled upon something on Twitter that some of you artists might be interested in participating in, if you don't already know about it. Chet Zar, who many of you probably know of I'm sure, has started a neat little event on Twitter called #FridayNightArtDorks. The basic idea is, if you're an artist on twitter and you happen to be working on some artwork on Friday night, tweet a photo of what you're working on, with the #FridayNightArtDorks hash tag attached to your tweet. Basically it's just a fun way to share what you're working on with not only your twitter followers but new people as well, which makes it good for promotional purposes. Plus it's also a fun way see what other artists are working on in real time if you type #FridayNightArtDorks into the Twitter search on Friday nights.
Just thought I'd share that with you all, I'll have the next part of my video up soon hopefully, I haven't quite had the time to finish editing it.
I don't think this piece likes me much, I've drawn about four versions of it, made it to the painting stage and started it over twice, haha. But I think I'm getting somewhere with it now. As I think I've mentioned awhile back I've been filming the whole process of this painting, because I get a lot of comments and messages asking about my process of transferring my sketches over to the masonite panels. Plus I know some of you would like to see the underpainting process as well. I was planing to just post all of these videos once the whole piece was done but since it's taking quite some time, I figured I'd go ahead and start uploading the early stages. Keep in mind I am still very much self taught when it comes to painting, so this is just what works for me. Most fine art professors will teach you to use graphite or charcoal for your line drawings, personally I don't like to use either. So this is just what I like to do.
The video shows the process of transferring the sketch to the Masonite panel (and of course this will work on canvas as well). For this I use Saral Transfer Paper in blue:
This is somewhat easy to find, many large art stores carry this paper, like DickBlick for example, and I think Michael's might carry it in the sheets. Saral transfer paper works like carbon, it lays down waxless, greaseless, clean tracings on a variety of surfaces. It comes in five different colors for different purposes:
Blue — non-photographic, for bright line and tole painting.
Yellow — good on metal and glass surfaces.
Graphite — for all-purpose tracing.
White — for dark surfaces.
Red — for ceramics.
I've only used the graphite and the blue paper, I prefer the blue simply because it's less messy and doesn't smear like graphite. This is the reason why I don't use graphite or charcoal in general for the line work on my paintings, even when using a fixative, I find it to smear into the paint too much. Which isn't so much of a problem now that I'm doing gray scale underpaintings, but it was when I was laying down color right on top of the line drawing. This paper, from what I have seen, is available in two forms, a 12½" × 12 ft roll (which is what's pictured above) and sample packs of 8½" x 11" sheets. I could be wrong about that size of the sheets but I'm pretty sure they are somewhere around that size. The only downside to buying the samples packs of sheets is that they only come with 5 sheets, one sheet of each color (which is why it's called a sample pack). So in one pack you'll get one graphite sheet, one blue sheet, one white sheet, and so on.
The first thing that I do is cover my masonite panel with the transfer paper and tape it down using scotch tape, sometimes I use painters tape, anything that can be removed easily without ripping the artwork. After that I lay the sketch on top and tape it down as well. A good tip would be to photocopy your artwork first and lay down the copy rather than your original. Because you will be tracing over this and if you do so on your original, it's not going to look so nice anymore when you're done (I should heed this advice more myself, actually).
Once the sketch is taped onto the panel, I trace over the entire sketch, applying a bit of pressure since the transfer paper works like carbon paper and you want to make sure you end up with a nice clean transfer the first time around (if you use canvas be careful not to apply too much pressure, thus making dents in the surface). Which is also why it's important to have the transfer paper and the sketch taped down securely, because you do not want anything to move while you're tracing, it'll mess up your transfer. Once that is done I just remove the transfer paper and the sketch, the image should be perfectly transferred onto the panel.
From there I use a Pigma Micron pen to once again trace over the entire sketch. Pigma Micron pens are waterpoof and fade proof archival inks. They come in different colors and a wide range of sizes. Fine tips and brush tips. Though I haven't tried their brush tip pens, I have a feeling they might be useful for calligraphy or anything requiring wispy strokes (like drawing hair for example). I like to use the fine tip pens in the 01 size, for most of my work, which has a 0.25mm line width. The reason for doing an outline in ink is so that I can see my lines through the paint better.
Once the tracing is done in ink, I usually let it sit for about 24 hours before doing anything else, just to make sure the ink is nice and dry. Then I erase any blue lines, that might still be showing, from the transfer paper.
Coming up is stage two, shading with charcoal, I'll post that video in a day or so. I hope this was helpful to some of you though!
These are the polymer clay bird skulls for my animation project, I ended up having these made, I didn't sculpt them. I'm really happy with these! I'll start to work on the armatures for them next week sometime, most likely. I've made a few armatures over the past few months trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to go about making them, I don't have it figured out completely yet but I'm leaning towards making the body similar to a marionette in a way. Since I like the aesthetic of marionettes and ball jointed dolls and I'm not going for complete realism, I don't mind joints showing.
Congratulations to Christine and Beatrice! As soon as I hear back from you two, I'll get your prints right in the mail! Also thanks again to everyone else who entered and also to those of you who left me the sweetest little messages and comments in your emails! I appreciate them so much! This was quite fun, I'll have to do another little giveaway sometime in the future, perhaps a Halloween one next time?
Anyway, I have quite a few new pieces in the works so expect some new videos to be popping up soon, in the meantime Happy Holidays to you all!
I'm a self-taught artist and aspiring filmmaker. Most of my inspiration for my work comes not only from imagination but other personal interest as well such as mythology, music, and folklore.
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