Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Desire

Just quick post been sick since Christmas I wanted to get these gowns out they are great for your New Years Celebration. The Desire gown is made of a soft shimmery metallic chiffon with lace detail and delicate organza prim flowers that adorn the skirt and bodice. Included in the set are a BallGown, Aline Gown, Day dress and a tea dress with a chiffon overlay as well as an optional sparkling overlay.


Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Dualities and some more meandering

Deep in the forest

A few posts ago I mentioned I had an assignment to create a diptych (technically these are 2 paintings or panels that work together) of dualites. Most times these are a continuation of a theme or a story and relate to each other, however our teacher decided that he wanted two images were opposites of each other but had some kind of link, Some examples would be life, death, young, old etcetera. It took me a long time to come up with a concept for these mostly because I didnt really want to do opposites, I wanted to do something along the lines of the panels you see in the iconic russian art, that what came to mind when I thought of drawings that are panels of linked image or some of the beautiful Japanese art prints. Needless to say I dawdled and dawlded cause everything seemed to be either to cliche, blah or not fit the assignment criteria.

Finally out of desperation I ended up settling on doing landscapes that were opposite in location, feeling and technique. Deep in the forest was mostly done in photoshop this time I did it after I did the LightHouse at sea. I love how this one came out with the dark moody feeling of the deep dark forest it makes me wonder what is lurking out there in the woods.



Lighthouse on the Ocean

The light house painting was done entirely in Painter and to be honest is not a finished as it should be I spent so many hours on those darn clouds and I am still not happy with them, by the time I got to the light house I was fed up and wanted to be done so I rushed through and did a very loose painting of the light house and rocks.

What I discovered from this is Painter is hard! I can move so fast in photoshop and painter takes me so much longer, I am sure this is still lack of familiarity of how to get the tools and brushes to give me the results I want, I have seen some beautiful work done using painter but I am a long way off from what I would call competent. The second thing I discovered it so sucks to paint things you arent interested in. I really didnt want to paint a lighthouse lol so that probably made it so much harder. I think its important to try to do things out of your comfort zone to help you grow and develop as an artist (but its probably better not to on a deadline for your final projects).

Both paintings are 11 by 17 300 dpi- Kinkos does a great job printing on color stock by the way if anyone needs a place they also do calenders and all kinds of fun things you can print your own art work and photos on.

I have been able to get som gowns done but not in all their colors I tried to get them out for Christmas but that just want happening this time, hopefully Ill get them out this weekend.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Let them eat cake!

Another one of my school projects. I was so stuck on this the assignment was to create a surrealistic painting every thing I came up with seemed to fall more into the fantasy category rather then surrealism. After alot of whining and moaning about it and some help from my fellow fashionistas I was able to get a firmer grasp of where I wanted to head with this.

Once I let go of all the preconceptions of what it couldnt be and just let it go it really started to flow on its own and the problem ended up not being what to do but what not to do in the amount of time I had to finish it.



The Orignal print is 11by 17 and was created using Painter and photoshop. Im still finding painter to be a bit frustrating but Im going to keep kicking it for a while see if I can get it to bend to my will.

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Line and texture


The semester is finally coming to a close thank goodness my arm feels like its going to fall off this week but I'm down to the last few paintings for my final hurray!! These are a few of the beginning projects that we had to do to show line, texture, shape, contour, gesture and negative/positive shapes. I love the fashion pose one each of these was done individually as a contour drawing, I actually had a few more poses done but they wouldn't fit on the page once I added the negative shapes. I was disappointed at first cause all the work that didn't get included, poor pre-planning the lay out on my part but I think the negative shapes give the final lay out more interest.



This next project we had to do a panel for each of the topics the contour was hard for me as I really wanted to add shading and some shadows into the face the second portrait we could use line as value along with contour, again I really wanted to shade her face but I felt might not meet the project goals. I lost points for not using cross hatching on it :(. Doing cobblestones was kind of fun I experimented with using a few different techniques and think the end result turned out pretty good.


This was our very first assignment on shading, volume and light sources I actually decided to challenge myself and used Corel Painter to do these instead of Photoshop. I have only used painter a few times it has some great paint tools but I'm still not understanding some of the tools like the blenders they worked great on these but later as I moved into the color paintings I had trouble with it picking up the canvas colors.

If anyone knows more about Painter I'ld love to hear from you none of my searches turned up the answers I needed. Lost points on the cone and abstract shape cause my shadows were too hard "cry" I tried softening them but still not good as needed to be I guess, oh well try to do better on the next series.