Mondaily with NEWS
Apr. 19th, 2010 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellenmillionBusiness as usual
A little behind on print orders from where I wanted to be, but they should go out tomorrow.
Stuff still going up at Torn World.
Remember to submit 'earth' themed work for EMG-Zine June: http://emg-zine.com/submitart.php
Art and authoring
I may throw away all of my watercolors. Seriously. They are messy, squooshy, sloshy things that have never sat well with me. Colored pencils, though, take forever and are too fiddly and expensive for big expanses. I love oils for landscapes, but not for little details. Trying to combine those two? Not successful.
This weekend, I discovered acrylic paint.
Technically, I have known about acrylics for a long time. Who hasn't? But I always considered them the poor cousin of oils. When I tried them before, they dried too quickly for my tastes, and did horrible things to the cheap paper I tried to use, or bounced around on the canvas texture, defeating attempts at 'smooth' or 'detailed.' They were lumpy. They were flaky. I very firmly Did Not Like Them.
But one day a month or so ago, I ordered two sets of acrylics on a complete whim. GOOD acrylics, not grade-school tubs. And one of them was a slow-dry type specifically for open-air painting.
I sort of thought I might do some more landscapes with them, or use up some canvas boards I had lying around. But on Saturday, while hockey playoffs were invading my house, I suddenly got an irresistible painting bug. I riffled through my canvases, looking for something I wouldn't have to start from scratch. I looked at my start of Journey, on Arches hot press, decided I liked it too much to risk on an experiment, flipped through every other piece I had started, and went back to Journey. I *wanted* to paint this. I didn't want to paint it in watercolor. Every fiber in me protested the idea of trying to paint what I saw in my head in watercolors.
Standing there with brushes in hand, I had a 'what the hell' moment, and marched down to take over the kitchen table with brushes and tubes and a gigantic piece of Torn World illustration, fully prepared to ruin in. I figured I had equal changes of this experiment ending in tears or triumph.
It was worth the risk. I LOVE the way it goes down. I love the surface. I love the workability. I love the COLOR! It's the kind of color I could never get with watercolor - RICH.
And, since I'd already taken the risk with it, I didn't feel so bad about playing around with it further. Unlike oils, colored pencils over acrylics - is like magic. It lays down beautifully, a perfect blend of transparency and opacity, and gives me all the fiddly little detail I can't control with a brush.
I don't think I'll ever go back.
I will be talking further about my process on this piece and posting photos of it as I go along, for folks in the Torn World forum, and on a filter here. How to get on the filter? Comment. It's hard to explain how important and rewarding it is to get comments on creative work, and I want to thank those people that comment with more goodies. :) Be warned that I'll cut you off of the filter if you're quiet too many entries in a row!
Health and stuff
Surgery! On Friday! Holy moly is it a lot of paperwork! And it's FRIDAY!
I like the surgeon and his assistant, Jake came with me for the consultation, which turned into a complete pre-op, mounds of paperwork and a bottle of disinfectant body wash. It will be an 'extended outpatient,' which is a way of saying 'overnight stay' without freaking out insurance companies, because I'm expected to be discharged within (if barely) 24 hours.
An end is in sight!! YAY!
The downside? My 24 hours in the hospital is going to just about EXACTLY coincide with the sketch fest. Timing, huh?
I am nibbling on my lower lip trying to decide if I should assign a moderator to the community to run it for me, or reschedule it, or something else...
A little behind on print orders from where I wanted to be, but they should go out tomorrow.
Stuff still going up at Torn World.
Remember to submit 'earth' themed work for EMG-Zine June: http://emg-zine.com/submitart.php
Art and authoring
I may throw away all of my watercolors. Seriously. They are messy, squooshy, sloshy things that have never sat well with me. Colored pencils, though, take forever and are too fiddly and expensive for big expanses. I love oils for landscapes, but not for little details. Trying to combine those two? Not successful.
This weekend, I discovered acrylic paint.
Technically, I have known about acrylics for a long time. Who hasn't? But I always considered them the poor cousin of oils. When I tried them before, they dried too quickly for my tastes, and did horrible things to the cheap paper I tried to use, or bounced around on the canvas texture, defeating attempts at 'smooth' or 'detailed.' They were lumpy. They were flaky. I very firmly Did Not Like Them.
But one day a month or so ago, I ordered two sets of acrylics on a complete whim. GOOD acrylics, not grade-school tubs. And one of them was a slow-dry type specifically for open-air painting.
I sort of thought I might do some more landscapes with them, or use up some canvas boards I had lying around. But on Saturday, while hockey playoffs were invading my house, I suddenly got an irresistible painting bug. I riffled through my canvases, looking for something I wouldn't have to start from scratch. I looked at my start of Journey, on Arches hot press, decided I liked it too much to risk on an experiment, flipped through every other piece I had started, and went back to Journey. I *wanted* to paint this. I didn't want to paint it in watercolor. Every fiber in me protested the idea of trying to paint what I saw in my head in watercolors.
Standing there with brushes in hand, I had a 'what the hell' moment, and marched down to take over the kitchen table with brushes and tubes and a gigantic piece of Torn World illustration, fully prepared to ruin in. I figured I had equal changes of this experiment ending in tears or triumph.
It was worth the risk. I LOVE the way it goes down. I love the surface. I love the workability. I love the COLOR! It's the kind of color I could never get with watercolor - RICH.
And, since I'd already taken the risk with it, I didn't feel so bad about playing around with it further. Unlike oils, colored pencils over acrylics - is like magic. It lays down beautifully, a perfect blend of transparency and opacity, and gives me all the fiddly little detail I can't control with a brush.
I don't think I'll ever go back.
I will be talking further about my process on this piece and posting photos of it as I go along, for folks in the Torn World forum, and on a filter here. How to get on the filter? Comment. It's hard to explain how important and rewarding it is to get comments on creative work, and I want to thank those people that comment with more goodies. :) Be warned that I'll cut you off of the filter if you're quiet too many entries in a row!
Health and stuff
Surgery! On Friday! Holy moly is it a lot of paperwork! And it's FRIDAY!
I like the surgeon and his assistant, Jake came with me for the consultation, which turned into a complete pre-op, mounds of paperwork and a bottle of disinfectant body wash. It will be an 'extended outpatient,' which is a way of saying 'overnight stay' without freaking out insurance companies, because I'm expected to be discharged within (if barely) 24 hours.
An end is in sight!! YAY!
The downside? My 24 hours in the hospital is going to just about EXACTLY coincide with the sketch fest. Timing, huh?
I am nibbling on my lower lip trying to decide if I should assign a moderator to the community to run it for me, or reschedule it, or something else...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 12:30 am (UTC)I haven't done much artistic work for quite awhile, but just reading this has me kind of yearning to get some acrylics and start painting again.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 02:04 am (UTC)I'd also be interested in knowing what kind of acrylics you got. I've been thinking about trying them out someday (I'm not much of a painter but I figure one must start somewhere.) I'm not allowed to acquire anything new until after I move, but maybe after.
Could you add me to the filter? I'm much better at keeping up here than on the forums, sadly... which will likely continue until I get the whole graduation/exodus to DC thing all done.
Yes...
Date: 2010-04-20 02:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 03:49 am (UTC)also good to hear that the surgery is a-go-go!
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 06:13 am (UTC)I'm glad to hear things are looking up with the definite surgery! Also on 'finding' acrylics - discovering new things is always fun :)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 07:46 am (UTC)Seriously. The last thing you need is to add any kind of commitment to your schedule right now, and the sketch fest can wait. Abdominal surgery, even at its least invasive, is a big deal. Give yourself a window to recover in, and to get your strength and some of your weight back without having things like running a sketch fest preying on your mind. People will understand.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-20 04:14 pm (UTC)or delegate if you can trust yourself to trust your moderator and then just forget about it.
Never mind "something else" you look after yourself.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-21 02:29 am (UTC)Jenny Heidewald
Date: 2010-04-29 10:32 am (UTC)I told you about the acrylic gouache paint that I had found, right? Acryla Gouache? That combines WC+ acrylic ( some are opaque some are transparent)
The nice thing about acrylics is that you can still use them like watercolor if you wish, it will just stay put after putting it down if you let it dry. It also works the best (of two mediums I have tried) on Yupo paper. The stuff that does not wrinkle because it is plastic, and has a nice smooth surface. They market it as watercolor paper, which is crazy because you can't do more than one layer of color without it coming off again. :p the last acrylic painting I did was that wizard for PA, theo ne with the orange background, that was one of my best paintings. I used Golden paints, they have a really liquid type that wokrs well. Golden is the best acrylic paint. There are so many different mediums they make that you can add to the paint to make it do different things.