She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

It’s been a while since I posted to my poor dusty blog. Alas.

But I have worked on some art here and there, and here’s one piece in progress:

This marks a broad departure from a lot of my work in the last decade because it’s traditional physical media and not digital. Acrylic on gessoed board, to be precise. It’s kinda weird getting used to physical artifacts of art again. Getting used to there being no control+z, no zooming in. I forgot that the hairs on the brush can tweak off at the last second, spoiling your perfectly curving stroke, or sometimes creating a happy accident.

BTW, this sketch does not constitute endorsement of Chertoff or his policies. It’s not “fan-art”. It was just a study because I thought his face would make fantastic reference for the Prototypically Gaunt Creepy Mad Herr Doktor. I think he needs an Igor to be completed. I found the pic at Boing Boing, and it seems to be the photo associated with his wikipedia profile and the official DHS pic as well.

This was really supposed to be a quick sketch for the CA forums. Sometimes these things just sorta beg for more. But sometimes you also just gotta call it finished. If I was going to work this further, I’d refine the hair and shirt a lot more–they didn’t get the same attention the face did. But then with portraits, the face is the most important part.

Here’s the links to the in progress shots — the big versions are on Flickr. Feel free to click to see ‘em bigger.

Over at ConceptArt, there’s a thread where you post a picture of yourself, other people do their take, while you pick somebody else to paint. So here’s my in progress portrait of fellow CAer, AG. (I’ve got more in prog shots, but maybe I’ll save ‘em for the final posting.)

Basically, I’m somewhere in the midst of roughly painting over my flats, but not into the more noodling rendering.

You can sneak a peek at the progress shots to date.