The Star

I've been working on a new digital piece this week, inspired by the Illustration Friday prompt last week, "Stargazing." I finished it too late to submit it, and anyway I'm not sure it's admissible, since IF recommends avoiding linking to "inappropriate material that may offend viewers." Having lived in Nevada most of my life (where I could throw a stone and probably hit someone who'd be offended by a handsome, naked man), I decided not to link to it from IF. Anyway, it wasn't quite done. But now it is!















It was inspired by the Oscar Wilde fairy tale, "The Star-Child." The title character is a beautiful but arrogant young man who wanders the world until he learns humility (greatly over-simplified retelling, feel free to check it out at http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/StaChi.shtml. It's wonderful, like all Wilde's fairy tales). I wanted to draw a beautiful and ethereal man, as untouchable as a star. I don't know how well I succeeded, but I enjoyed trying. I'm getting much better at making my digital art look like my pencil work. The hardest part is still getting the printer and the screen to show the same image.

The Firebird in the Golden Cage

This is a piece I did years ago, but it fits this week's Illustration Friday topic so well ("Caged"). The medium was colored pencils and the inspiration was a combination of the allegory of the firebird and the fairy tale "The Golden Bird." The fairy tale always made me angry because the "hero" was some prince who got a happy ending through luck, even though he took absolutely none of the good advice he was given until it was too late. Repeatedly. The title character, the golden bird, was just another piece of treasure that the prince ended up with by the end, even though it was the bird that really started the whole story when it stole a golden apple.

Accomplishment: Accomplished

Well, I got myself together and managed to submit my entry to the art contest. Barely. The hardest part, really, was smacking myself and saying, "Look, you. You're never going to like it better, just make sure it prints well and send it off. And then you can pretend you're accomplishing something."
It's hard to argue with that, though mostly because arguing with yourself gets you funny looks. When you do it out loud, anyway.
The print looks very different from the picture on the computer, not least because LCD screens are the opposite of awesome at displaying something that is anything like what will print, or even what other people with LCD screens will see. Nonetheless, I've made a variation of the file that approximates (at least on MY screen, everyone else is probably out of luck) what the picture looks like when printed.
I really feel like it approximates the sort of layering and color mixing I used to get with colored pencils.

It's been so long!

Haven't updated in awhile, first because of summer class and then because I was recovering from summer class. Been working on a digital piece for an art contest. I haven't decided if I'll actually enter it or not. The test print I did of it indicates that it needs more highlights and some of the greens need to be blurred more. It also needs to be scuffed up a bit, especially around the edges. I oscillate between loving it and hating it.

Slither

Inspired by Illustration Friday. This week's topic is "slither."

This is Kukulkan. I admit he didn't turn out as slithery as planned. He was a winged snake in Mayan mythology who was sometimes associated with the sun, fire, visions, and the rain god.

This piece was done entirely in Photoshop, with a stylus. I've been trying to do digital pieces that look like my old colored pencil drawings (a few pictures are in the post just before this one). I'm getting closer, but I'm not there yet. I think I'm on to something with the multiple layers of translucent color, though.

Soul-eating goodness

(edited to move the pictures up to the top and the account of my misadventures in business license-acquiring down)

Good news! I picked up prints today of some of my older pieces, and they are very pretty! The printing place does really nice work.
Going to post small scans here because I'm so excited. They're not as nice as the prints themselves, but what can ya do?


























Haven't been able to work on my fairy drawings in a few days, which is sad because I got inspired by the weekly prompt over on Illustration Friday (this week's prompt is "early"). The last two days have eaten my soul.

To get a business license in this city, I need to include with my application proof that I have registered my business with the state. I have already registered with the state, so no problem, right?

Wrong.

If you don't think you'll make above a certain amount of money (I think the likelihood of my success is pretty slim, so I'm in this category), you don't actually need a state license, you just need to register with the state that you're exempt. However, the state doesn't issue verifications of exemption, apparently, and there is nowhere on the secretary of state's site that I can find to print this out. I spent 15 minutes holding with a city receptionist to verify that not only do I need some sort of proof that the state says I'm exempt from registration (which is itself a type of registration...), the city cannot tell me how to get it. So after waiting half an hour (those who know me will suspect exaggeration here, but actually I'm playing it safe; it was half an hour of waiting after I decided to start timing it like 10 or so minutes in) on hold, a state employee was able to tell me that 1) The state does not issue proof of exemption, no matter how required it is by the city, 2) The state website should totally have a button there that allows me to print my exemption status (she was not able to tell me where this magical button is), 3) I should not be angry at her for calling me "ma'am," despite me asking her twice to stop that because (despite all the silly chatter about fairies I do on this blog), I in fact am a dude, and 4) I should not be upset with her because it's completely unreasonable of me to expect that she can assist me with state business license-related problems (I had called the state's business license-related number).

Depressing true government stereotypes are depressing.

Not awesome

I used to draw fairies when I was little, and it's funny that even then I was pretty much convinced that fairies just standing around isn't really interesting enough. Why, then, did I think I'd be much more interested in fairies doing nothing but striking glam poses (which I suppose is marginally more interesting than just standing there looking blank, but not actually interesting as such)?
I give you Exhibit A.














(all the writing and color splotches are notes to myself about opacity and brush size for the layers, and what color I was mostly using)
This is about as far as I got before I decided that this was too boring for words. Not having drawn fairies in years, I'm glad I started this to give me an idea of what frost fairies would look like, but I think it's time to up the ante and start over on something that's actually worth looking at.

It begins

After a (three or maybe five mile, we really aren't sure how far we went) really long hike, a shower, and some pie (oh, delicious pie, I love you so), the great work has begun! I started work on a picture of frost fairies. I couldn't decide if I wanted to do a male or a female (hey, fairies can be guys too...assuming fairies require two genders to reproduce, which, admittedly, is a bit of jump for mythical creatures that presumably use magic [for flying, at the very least, given their tiny wing-to-body ratio]), so I decided to do both. Behold the first step of the process: the sketch and preliminary palette.














It's pretty hard to tell (or so I'm told), but the one on the left is the dude. I figured fairies probably aren't too butch. Butch doesn't seem very aerodynamic.

Fairies are kind of weird

Clearly a frost sprite would have moth wings. It stands to reason. Because of...totally logical factors of...wind...resistance...

A long day

Spent most of the day wrestling with a permit for a city business license. Unlike the state license (well, exemption from a license, since I don't think I'll make enough money to qualify for a license), which took five minutes to do online, the city license requires a crazy number of forms. These are as follows:
1. A notarized form filed with the County office declaring my business name (Frostsprite Designs, as you will surely be surprised to learn)
2. A form saying that I do not need to have worker's compensation insurance (and wouldn't it just be a lot less effort to not have that form required at all if you don't need worker's comp)
3. A form saying that, yes, I'm pretty sure my apartment qualifies as the sort of place you can run a home business from
4. Another form with my name, business intentions, etc., which is what I naively thought, before I fell into this scorpion pit, would be the only sort of form required.
5. A form with a drawing of the layout of my apartment, indicating areas where I do business stuff, with the parcel number of the dwelling at the bottom. The man at the surveyor's office sounded vaguely annoyed and suspicious when I called to find out what the number was, and indicated that he found it unusual for people to need this for an apartment building. Worrisome? Perhaps.
6. Proof of my state business license, which is troublesome because they gave me a number but not a form. Still have not heard back from the city's office on what I'm supposed to do with that.

But on to more exciting things (I know, what can be more exciting than bureaucracy, am I right?)! I'd already decided to learn to make cards and magnets from my older prints, but today, after listening to me moan for awhile about the veritable gauntlet city business licenses present, the office supply store not carrying any of the papers I wanted to try (or a heavy enough paper cutter, or magnet strips, or anything I wanted except a stapler...), and my uncertainty about selling any of my art, my friend suggested that I draw pin-up fairies (he is a fan of both pin-ups and fairies, and a HUGE fan of pin-ups that are fairies) and put them on magnets.

Well. It's better than even the best idea I had today (which was to lie down and not stand up again, no, not even if the cat comes and stands on me and squeaks for dinner--yes, it was that kind of day), but starting has been harder than I expected. Finally I asked another friend what sort of fairy I should draw and was told, "A frost sprite!"

She is extremely cheeky.

So, now I'm looking at photo references of frost for ideas. We'll see how this goes.