The White Rabbit at the End of the Tunnel

This week has been a rough art week, I don't want to get into it but there's been many distractions, so here is the third image of the week, I'd like to say I'll make up for it over the (holiday) weekend, but I'd probably be lying.  Anyway, today I had fun with Corel painter 11. More specifically I had fun with the pens in Corel.  I've missed drawing with pen and ink, but it's so messy, this had that rough scritchy-scratchy look I love without the black under my finger nails, win!  I especially had fun with the Coit Pen 3, which as near as I can tell means 3 pronged or rake, it was fun.  I created a tunnel with it and the most logical thing to put in the tunnel? Alice of course!  Oh, and another thing, I used NO REFERENCES for this, I was inspired by Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, but I avoided looking at the images, I drew the rabbit and the girl completely feom my head, I didn't even get help for her pose, I am very proud....and her feet were a pain in my tush.

Watercolor Wednesday: A Fantastic Water Balloon

I seem to have been hit hard by a summer cold and the congestion is making concentrating on anything but the inside of my eyelids quite difficult.  However, I still managed to get an image done and I'm mostly happy with it, I'm just not sure weather to outline this guy in black marker or not and I'm afraid of ruining the image so for now I'll leave it be.  This little boy was strongly inspired by boyhood pictures of my husband and this pose.  The fish in the balloon idea popped into my head as soon as I saw the pose and when I started drawing the boy he started looking like my husband.  My subconscious must have taken over, because my husband has a zany and incredible imagination as an adult, so I can just imagine the things he came out with as a child:

From the Sketchbook: Shields and Dragons

Today, I was doing a little research on medieval shields to make a logo for my husband's blog and out of nowhere a dragon popped into the drawing.  These are just sketches:

Flattery Friday: James C. Christensen

I know, I know, the original purpose of this blog was to post image made by ME every weekday.  But I really really want to share some of my favorite fantasy artists with everyone and give an insight into the people who inspire me.  Today I want to share an amazing modern American artist, James C. Christensen whose focus is on fairy tales, mythology and  folklore.  James Christensen's paintings are so whimsical and detailed, for me his paintings are a perfect example of modern folklore.  I love the jewel tone shades he tends to use and the way he exaggerates the roundness of many of his characters. It is hard to just pick a few painting to share but I narrowed it down to five, they are all available for sale here and you can also follow his blog!

Icarus Bound

If Pigs could Fly

 Outside the Box

 Poofy Guy on a Short Leash

The Blind Leading the Blind

Dungeons and Dragons Character: Fiona

Last night I started playing my first D&D campaign and I have an awesome Human Slayer Fiona she has an AC of 17, max hit points of 25 and her Melee damage with great sword is 1d10+7, I love her she kicks ass...so I attempted a drawing of her, which I mostly like but I need to work on the face drawing skills.  I may rework this digitally later, she'd probably come out better that way, everything seems more polished when I draw in Photoshop.

Watercolor Wednesday: Mystique

As in the mutant from X-Men.  I was never a comic book junkie, and then I met my husband.  I'm still not obsessive like he is but I share his love for the X-Men and Batman, those two remain the favorites.  So, when a pose showed up on posemaniacs that reminded me of Mystique I went for it...I hope I did her justice, she's actually harder to capture than I thought:

Molly Weasley's Enchanted Knitting Needles...

It's no secret that I'm obsessed with knitting, I'm knitting all the time and I love to knit for friends and family....however there are not enough hours in the day to do everything that needs getting done AND knit everything I'd like too.  So you could imagine I'm more than a little jealous of Molly's magicked knitting needles that do the work for her, not fair.  And I love that Hermione learns to knit both manually and with magic because she was knitting elf hats in the summer and couldn't use magic.  So I played around in Corel Painter with the "oil pastel" brushes and came up with this:

It's a bit rough looking but that's on purpose, I wanted it to look more like an old masters painting, like Van Gogh's bedroom studies. Below are two photos, one of the living room in the burrow I used as reference and the other is Van Gogh's bedroom to show you what I mean: