This post contains all the tags I have used to tag my posts so far. Tomorrow, I shall post-date it so that it always sits on top of the journal. And I will edit it to add new tags as I create them. Let's see how well this works.
I swear to god, trying to learn to draw people is going to make me crazy. If I draw in colored pencils, I get this:
( Collapse ) It's got decent detail and shading, but the whole thing looks washed out, and kind of lifeless, like I drew a doll instead of a person. On the other hand, if I try pastels, I get this:
( Collapse ) That looks livelier, I think, and I like the colors, but I can't get the fine details in, and the shading goes all flat. (Also, the eyes look wonky, but I don't think it's because of the pastels, I think that's just me.)
What I really want is something half-way between the two, but when I try to combine pencils and pastels in one drawing it just comes out like a mess. Sometimes I think I should just give up and stick to drawing flowers and birds and stuff...
My art class has gotten me in the mood for more drawing, so I decided to try some fanart again. I've been rereading the Rivers of London books, in preparation for The Hanging Tree (which is supposed to be arriving in my mailbox Monday, yay!), so here's a pic of Peter Grant in one of my favorite scenes from Whispers Underground, the one where Nightingale conjures up a little raincloud to follow him around.
Here's my first ever attempt to do a drawing entirely in pastels. I started it in my art class a little over a week ago, had to put it aside while I ran off to Woods Hole, and finally finished it yesterday.
The challenge for the class was to pick a triad of colors from the color wheel and do the entire picture using just those colors, blending to get any other colors I might need. I picked yellow-green, red-orange and blue violet, and about 90% of the drawing is done with those, while the rest is where I wussed out and cheated (most of the cheating came from the white I used on the flower.)
Overall, I'd say Claude Monet's legacy isn't in any danger. On the other hand, you can actually tell that it's supposed to be a water lily and not, like, a giraffe or something. A couple of years ago, "water lily or giraffe?" was a perfectly legitimate question you might've asked about my drawings, so I'm going to call it progress.
So, I totally failed to post about it when reveals happened, but my fandom_stocking gifts this year included a lot of awesome icons and wallpapers of hummingbirds. Which got me in the mood to draw.
This one was a bit of an experiment for me – I did the hummingbird and the flower in Prismacolor pencils the way I usually do, then did the background in pastels. I like how it came out but man, pastels make a lot of dust, and it gets freakin’ everywhere.
I've been watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix, and reading Black Widow comics. Which led me to thinking how fabulous Natasha would look in all those amazing 1920s outfits that Phryne Fisher wears. Which led to this.
I’m pretty sure that Natasha, even in her comics backstory, is too young to have been running around doing spy shenanigans in the 1920s, so maybe this is Natasha from the Marvel Noir universe. Maybe she can have adventures with Noir!Tony Stark, that would be awesome.
So, since my writing brain still isn't functioning, I signed up as an artist for this year's cap_ironman bigbang, and was lucky enough to claim What Lies Beneath by asktheravens, an absolutely amazing (and amazingly creepy) Avengers/Lovecraft fusion story. It's the kind of story that really should be in an old-fashioned pulp magazine, so I tried to do a cover and illustration in the appropriate style. So if you want a horror story to keep you up all night, go read this and tell asktheravens how awesome she is.
