Big hair girl!

Lot's of hair this time. Since most of my favorite painters are very bold and brushy, I'm trying to be a bit braver with brushstrokes etc. I have a tendency to srub and try to blend things out rather than just putting down a stroke and leaving it alone. I was definitely keeping that in my head on this one.
This was done on a sheet of canvas stock that I was told was made for color copiers, it's an actual sheet of canvas not just some paper with an embossed weave pattern stamped into it....I like it!

Tiger hat girl!

It's been a while but here's a new girl. I've been working on a lot of very technical drawing stuff lately so the other night when I got home I was definitely in need of some "real art" therapy. Yeah, I needed that ;)

Cafe haunting and sketching

Whenever I don't have paintings to show, I like to fall back on the good ol' Moleskine sketchbook drawings. I do a lot of these while I'm grabbing a snack at cafes/airports etc. I used to go to a local figure drawing session but kind of fell out of the habit and so these 'people' drawings fill that need of drawing folks from life. Drawn directly in ink with a Japanese brush pen marker in the small Moleskine plain paper book (not the moleskine "sketchbook").

Watercolor pen

It's been a while since I've posted but I just haven't had the time to devote to my quickie paintings lately. Since I do art all day long and often do commission stuff after that, there are just so many hours in the day!
But I did do these little watercolors recently. I know that there is definitely no shortage of cool drawing and painting supplies out there, but I had the idea to rig up a foam tipped watercolor brush-thingie using a plastic tube and some foam rubber. I wanted something that you could just draw with like a fat watercolor marker and what do you know...it actually works! These were done in a few minutes each...super fast, super fun!

Alchemy art....

While I do a lot of my professional art on the computer, I seldom do any computer art "for fun". Steve Epting posted about the art program Alchemy on his site and thought I'd take a look at it, it's free to play with. If you want to spend an interesting/frustrating half hour with it, I think that you will see what it's like. It has some really odd tools, all of which seem to be fashioned to not let you do what you want them to do ;) ....which I guess is the whole idea of the program...to just doodle and see what happens, rather than drawing a controlled picture.
I'll admit that it is a cool way to get some unusual shapes and angles going. Steve was smart enough to then take his attempts into Photoshop to reign them into something cool.
Here are a few I did in the last 20 minutes....

Flapper girl on canvas paper

I haven't been doing any acrylic pieces lately, but I just glanced across the studio and realized that this one has been sitting on the easel for about a month now and I never posted it, so here you go. I did this one using just a few colors, on a piece of "canvas paper" from a Canson pad. I mounted it onto a piece of board so it would be solid while I was working on it. Canvas pads and canvas board get a bad rap but I think that they are a nice texture to paint on with acrylics.

More gray girls...

Even when I'm not posting I've usually got some stuff in the works. Here are some more of the gray gouache studies I've been playing around with lately.

more gray girsl