Archive for October, 2009
Art From the Past Week
Monday, October 26th, 2009Over the last week I’ve concentrated on putting together a couple of sets of fronts for some Moo Minicards to go along with my painting for a small exhibition starting in a week or so’s time.
They’re all based on previous work and ideas and I re-painted them in Corel Painter. It was fun exercise and I’m looking forward to see how they turn out when they arrive (Royal Mail strikes will no doubt delay these so they don’t get here in time!)
I’ve also sketched designs for two 20″ x 20″ canvases in Corel Painter and followed that up by putting the sketches onto the canvases and sealing them ready for painting this week. I’m going to try and work on both at the same time, as I don’t have a massive amount of time left before they need to be ready. Fingers crossed on that 
Art From the Past Week
Monday, October 19th, 2009Bit of a quiet week on the art front. I spent most of the time I had available finishing off an acrylic painting of a Jellyfish. Very happy with the result, please click the image below to see the full painting plus some close-ups of the detail.
I decided to do the line work with acrylic ink on this painting (using a brush). First time I’ve used ink and it went on like a dream – nice and opaque, flowed really well and gave me nice control over the lines. I will be using inks for outlines in future and fancy trying some colours other than black.
Art From the Past Week
Monday, October 12th, 2009I’m going to try and do a post every week showing the art and doodles I worked on the week before. This should help make sure I do something every week, hopefully! So, without further ado, here’s what I worked on last week (click the thumbnails to see larger versions):
The first one above, ‘Trick or Treat’, was kindly featured on Fresh Characters which was a nice surprise. Plans for this week include finishing a canvas I started last week and doing some more character posing and doodles.
In Seach of the Perfect Black Line
Monday, October 5th, 2009I think the title says it all. I’m never happy with my line work when painting, although I have seen a definite improvement over the last 12 months and it’s getting to the point where, for the most part, my black lines might give the impression that they weren’t painted at all. But, I’m constantly niggled by a couple of things:
1. The blacks I use just aren’t opaque enough, so I can’t just lay the line down and forget about it – there’s a fair bit of touching up required.
2. The clogging on the brush can lead to mistakes on the lines. Because of the first point, it’s difficult to water the paint down enough so that this doesn’t happen as it then just loses all opaqueness.
I’m currently using Liquitex Soft Body ‘Ivory Black’ for my lines and have been for some time. It’s nearly what I want but still suffers from both of the above points (although it’s certainly the most opaque black I’ve used until now). But this morning I got thinking about the possibility of using acrylic inks, probably with a brush although maybe with a dip pen (haven’t used one before so I’m sure there’s a learning curve there). So any advice? Are inks the way to go for line work on paintings? Are they opaque enough? Should I use them with dip pens or stick to brushes? Questions, questions
Welcome to the new Moopf Site
Thursday, October 1st, 2009Hello, so here it is. A new site. Finally. I should have had a “proper” site up and running months and months ago but couldn’t squeeze the time in to do it. Anyway, that doesn’t matter now.
If it wasn’t already obvious, the site is built around a blog but with some extras to keep you interested – such as the Gallery (where you can see my art), Extras (where you can find out about some of the other things I’ve been known to do), Downloads (grab yerself some stuff!) and…well that’s it at the moment, but there’s a couple of other things to come along in the next few months. Shhh, I didn’t tell you.
The blog’s a bit thin on the ground at the moment (well this is day one, what do you expect – I didn’t just want to fill it with wibble) but I am determined to write regularly, and hopefully coherently. After using Twitter for a while sentences over 140 characters really make me sweat though, so no promises 
I guess I should explain a little about how the site was put together. I now understand why the majority of blog owners pick off the shelf themes for their blogs, even if they’re designers – Wordpress’ templating system is ‘orrible. Maybe it’s just me but it’s like pulling teeth But the design itself was quite nice to put together – I drew everything you see, scanned it, turned it into vectors and played around with it in Illustrator from which everything was exported for final cutting etc. in Photoshop.
For the doodles I used black Posca markers on a Copic marker pad which ended up giving nice sharp results (sharper than using a Copic on a Copic marker pad!) There was quite a lot of re-drawing that had to happen (especially with the handwritten titles, each time I decided to change the wording I felt the need to rewrite them all so they were consistent – it’s amazing how much my handwriting changes between “takes”). I think it’s turned out well – it’s not where I was aiming when I started but I appear to have got a fortuitous ricochet
Anyway, more to come soon I promise.
