My PC is still dead. The silver lining is that it forces me to do more traditional stuff. That’s one of my goals these year too (I’ll write more on my goals later).

However, because the year is already long in tooth, I’m posting my first pics for the year. One of my goals/challenges, whatever you want to call it, is to make two horse portraits per week. I took the first two weeks off for holidays’ sake, so these first ones I made in week 3.

These first ones are off-the-cuff warming up ones:

Crescent & Moonie
A6, Crescent w/c pencils and coloured pencil, Moonie graphite pencil 2B

And there you have it.

Beacause I’m a highly peculiar person, I got terribly excited.

So I picked a rock.

Of which I planned to make 30 studies.

You can pretty much guess what happened.

These are all of the same rock we had to paint last time in the still-life. Different angles, obviously.The large one I did on another session, on purpose, for I had my frustration threshold sufficiently broken. Lord a small thing can be difficult!

On the side I started a white seashell, but that one I’ll show you when we get to the session on which I finished it.

In the meantime, a new piece. I was browsing through Finnish horse blogs and came across one with a really beautiful (handsome!) Thoroughbred. The blog happened to have a drawing contest open, so… Do I have to mention the deadline was that evening?

So, some midnight (all-night) painting and this was the end result:

(oil on canvas mounted paper, 20×20 cm)

The surprising thing was that I could still enter AND WON. WOW.

Eventhough I’m not really happy with this piece, on any level, I’ve been thinking more and more about how much I want to paint. And how much practice I really should be getting. Crying about not knowing isn’t going to help. I need to paint and cry.

//edit. Forgot the almost-most-important thing: my laptop crashed. I’m keeping my fingers crossed (with tears in my eyes) I can get all my old digital works as well as new WIPs back. Somebody please tell me why it’s so impossible to use Dropbox!

Due to acute need for funds I’m offering a couple of Christmas commissions this year. That is to say, if you need a present for anyone (even someone who has everything) or just want some pretty things for yourself, read further!

Please note that overseas deliveries need some time, so the deadline for is extremely narrow.

Only traditional works available, examples of prices (all including shipping to Finland, or a percentage of overseas shipping):
1) A5 sketch/study 5 euros
2) A4 sketch/study 10 euros
3) ca. A6/postcard size 10 euros
4) 4×6″ painting on panel 15 euros, also small paintings on canvas (ca. A5 and smaller), paintings/coloured pencil works ca. A5-A4
5) ca. A4 30 euros
6) ca. A3 50 euros
7) mid-sized (ca. A4-40×50 cm) paintings on gallery panels 60 euros

Examples of previous work here on my blog.

Contact me for details. (stiinu365 @ gmail.com also works)

Those of you who have followed my blog and/or my works for a while now might have noticed that I’m not a huge fan of linework. Nor do I usually like them aesthetically speaking, but when it comes to actually doing them myself — impossible. Nevertheless I had to try, if only for the delusion that I might pull it off, be quicker and get a nice (different) look.

You can probably guess how this went down, but here it is in a step by step account:

Part 1. Sketching, or the first mistake.
“Can’t be bothered to find refs. I’ll just draw something. After all I know how to draw stuff!”

Yup, so do I indeed. I don’t think that blob has ever even seen a Finnhorse. As good news: it did take only half a night to produce this and a whopping amount of pained sighs.

Part 2. Lines, or that second thing that went wrong.
“Yeah, I’ll do these as vectors! Brilliant! At least I’m good at vectoring!”
Managed to draw the line of the horse’s buttocks and the top line of the tail before realising my hand shakes like I was suffering from coffee withdrawals.

“Oops, maybe I’m not actually that good. Maybe I need another tool… What’s this… Looks nice, let’s use that one.”

I must state for the record that I have never ever laughed as much while painting as I did during this lining. My hand is unbelievably unaccustomed at drawing clean lines, I can’t use any tool and to top that my OS didn’t recognise using the tablet’s pen as user being active so the screen saver kept flicking on constantly.

The finished product is absolutely thoroughly gorgeous. What else can it be with sketching as fabulous as I had! From the tail one might be able to deduce that I have drawn an Arab or two in my time. And that cleaning up… The what now?

Part 3. Colouring, or logically speaking the next thing going wrong.
After finishing my beautiful lineart there was no other option than to colour it somehow. The best way is to choose a tool you have never even heard of before and select totally random settings. “It will work!” Next, choose a colour you never manage to get right for the horse. Make it with totally random colours that clash.

Please note the incredible background design.

Well, it’s fun to have fun. Once in a while.

This second watercolour painting lesson the assignment was to paint a fairly complex still-life (= several objects of different qualities). Because I had no real plans as to what I wanted to do (and the crow I drooled over the first time seemed too difficult to attempt), I did as I was told.

I must say that it’s rare experience to feel as desperate as I did this time. I hate green and of course the still-life was full of it. I liked the vibrancy of the colours but I couldn’t translate that on the paper. I fully screwed up the base washes. Small things like that.

Also I was very annoyed at myself. WHY do I have to draw with brushes, why? Maybe I do have brushes that are too small (and following this logic I since went and spent over 100 euros on watercolour brushes on one go).

Well, you can’t hit it every time. Not even the every tenth you wish with watercolours. I’m a long way off from professional.

Felt like drawing something quick and use the pink watercolour stick. Alas,below the results. This was also January assignment for pARTy-challenge (@dA). Very difficult ref for me, mainly because I found it difficult to think of anything to add or remove from the original photo. Which is usually my approach to refs.

But all in all, pretty fun sketching. And I like the way I pulled off the wintery quality I set out to find. However, I think I overworked the piece, again. I need to learn when to quit. C’est la vie.

(reference © tragedyseen @ deviantart.com)

I love lino printing. I love my new lino blocks. I love those lino colours.

When I grow up, I’ll do only linos. (Well, maybe not. Depressing. Jealousness.)

This week’s finished work is a commission I tried to finish a month ago. “Tried” mainly because of all the work hassles.

Very much inside the comfort zone because it’s a graphite work with a fairly traditional approach. Very much outside because it’s about dogs. Without exaggeration these are numbers 10 and 11 on my dog drawing career. Thusly my only guide was the references I had and frankly I still don’t have a clue on how to read character in dogs for example.

In a way this was a very successful learning opportunity. The medium and the style were very familiar to me even if the subject was really alien. Maybe someday I’ll learn more if I keep taking baby steps.

(I will be making a walkthrough type series of this piece at a later date. The work itself will have some little changes mainly because I’m not entirely pleased with it and the commissioner wanted me to add the dogs’ names. Updated image will be posted on the walkthrough.
The image is a bit oddly framed for it didn’t fully fit in my scanner. Graphite pencils on 24×32 cm watercolour paper.)

I had the flu this week and thus had a tiny amount of time for art stuff. Which was kinda nice because I really had the inclination to be productive.

Until the realization that nothing works.

I started with fiddling some long overdue commissions. Veeery slow fiddling and faffing about and nothing really happened. On the contrary, everything went from bad to worse. An example above. I cannot fathom why on earth it’s so damn difficult to get colours and brushes to work as you’d like when working digitally. Why on earth palominos never ever agree to be even remotely palomino-y?! Ack, feel like throwing up because nothing’s working. If I could, I wouldn’t do these things.

The other thing on this week’s to do was pieces for an upcoming show. Well, actually either finish those WIPs or choose works from the already finished ones. Why on earth isn’t there any worth looking at?

Difficult, utterly difficult. It’s unreasonably annoying that I have all this need and wanting to paint but nothing’s going anywhere. Nothing’s working the way I’d like it to work and I never manage to try out anything new. Everything I do just slides into the same old rut and run into the same old problems.

Sometimes painting and doing it alone really drive me up the wall. Instruction and feedback is crucial for improvement.