PROJECT DUMP

I'm really behind on posting about my projects, so here's a PROJECT DUMP. (Meant to be said in the manliest of voices)

Pita

My sister commissioned me to paint a picture of her friends dog Pita who had recently passed away, to give to her as a birthday present.  She asked that it be done in the same style that I did the three paintings of our dogs.

Kevin 2

I had posted my Kevin costume on a home-made costumes website a few years ago, and in September I received an email asking if I still had it, and if I would be willing to sell it.  I was extremely excited that someone actually wanted to buy something that I had made, and it was someone who wasn't related to me!   The costume was for her young daughter though, and the Kevin head that I had made for myself was very large, awkward and heavy.  I made a new head for the costume that was slightly smaller and made out of lighter materials.  I had learned a lot while making the original head, and was able to improve on the new one quite a bit.

The new head (left) and old head (right)

I painted the beak so that it had more of a natural looking gradient than the older one, and gave it's eye's highlights to give it a bit more life.

I fixed up the body as well.  It originally had a cardboard box inside of it to make it look bigger, but that made it super difficult to move in and almost impossible to ship anywhere.  I luckily had some of the blue fabric left over, and sewed it inside, stuffing it and cutting arms holes to make it into a sort of feathery vest.

DQ Cat

One of our managers had been away for a couple of months, and to welcome him back a friend of mine had suggested that everyone give him the gift of cat pictures.  I luckily had a large picture of a kitten just lying around....so I suited it up in the proper DQ attire and added a lovely cat pun.  I ended up being the only one to bring a cat picture, because no one else was ridiculous enough to take the note seriously...My manager really enjoyed it though! :)

Lucky's Birthday Present

My friend Shawna, the same friend who suggested that we bring my manager cat pictures, also requested that we give her dog Lucky a birthday present.  Shawna is a HUGE Harry Potter fan, so I made a tiny Gryffindor scarf and an owl for her dog.  She was very pleased. 

Birthday gift for my Mom

My mom loves both Tinkerbell and her dog, so I decided to make her a paper piece with both of those things!

You can see our other two dogs in the background as well.  Amigo is chasing his favorite carrot toy.

Watercolors Are Hard.

I recently did a two weekend watercolor workshop through the USCAD program at the U of S and I thought that I would post some of what I did.  I discovered that watercolor painting is not an easy thing to master.  Mixing vibrant colors was especially difficult for me.  It was also difficult having two other classes and working part time while it was going on...I am very tired now.

For the first weekend we did a lot of color mixing exercises and learned to find the lightest lights and the darkest darks first when painting.

We did some drapery studies.

And a whole lot of still lives.

We also did a winter landscape from a photograph.

For the second week we were encouraged to take what we had learned from the first week and try out different styles of watercolor painting.    We worked from photographs again and did some portraiture.

I tried out pointillism.

We also did an exercise where we had to paint the picture upside down in splotches of color.

We did a timed still life.

On the last day we had a model.  We did some warm up gestures and some quick paintings with a limited color palette.

This warm up painting ended up looking like an amazon woman...

And this one ended up looking like a fancy cave woman...

My longer pose turned out a little better, but it could still use a lot of work.

Then I did a quick tree study.

And another still life.  My teacher told me to try a more vibrant color palette.  That didn't work out so well, hahaha.

We also got to do a non-winter landscape, and I chose to do one of Loch Shiel in Scotland.  I went on a Harry Potter fan trip a couple of years ago and this was one of the coolest places that we visited.  It is also where they filmed a bunch of parts of the Harry Potter movies!  If you look really closely you might even see Harry riding Buckbeak over the water in the distance... 

I also tried playing around with some watercolor pencils that I had bought.  It wasn't turning out so great until I added some ink for the outline and gave him some fruity friends.  None of them are happy to see that pear though...

So my sister got me to do some paintings of our dogs a little while ago (in exchange for a Princess and the Frog movie poster from Disney Movie Rewards....) and I'm finally getting around to posting pictures of them.  We have 3 dogs, all chihuahua's named Abby, Sophie and Amigo and they are all ridiculous.  My sister is a huge Ron Burns fan, so she asked me if I could do them in a similar style while still incorporating my own.  I tried my best!

I first did little thumbnail paintings to try and figure out what kinds of colors I would use and where the general placement of the dogs would be.

This first thumbnail painting turned out looking more like an angry Ewok type creature than a chihuahua.  It also let me see that just painting the dogs head with no body is kind of creepy...it looks like Sophie had a run in with a guillotine or the Cheshire cat.

The next thumbnail I did was of Abby, our long haired chihuahua.  I like how the eyes and the colors turned out.

The last thumbnail that I did was of Amigo.  He has an abnormally large head.

After the thumbnails I had a better idea of how I wanted the paintings to look, so I did the actual paintings on slightly larger canvases.

And here are some actual pictures of my dogs for comparison.

Amigo

Sophie

All 3 dogs

And then I found a ridiculous sultry picture of Amigo...

The End.

I finally graduated from something!!!!

Last Friday (August 6th) I graduated with a certificate in Art and Design from the USCAD program at the University of Saskatchewan! And now after 4 years and 2 different schools I finally have something to show for it! We had a graduating art show to finish up the program and my octopus chair made an appearance.

This was what my corner looked like.

The UP house was also there!

The Octopus chair got to graduate too!

My animation teacher/mentor James Clow stopped by! Kendall, Kirk and I were all students of his both at our old animation school and at USCAD.