Art and Illumination

I have finished the bulk of the work on this faery painting. What art work is left to do is a little slower, on account of the brush size I work with for details. I do still have to finish shading the birch before I work with any highlighting too.

I am holding off on this because I still have to get the base tones into the figure of the faery. The last art detailing must be done together to show consistency and proper emphasis. I approach chiarascuro (contrast of light) with much trepidation. It comes so natural for some people but I am kind of a “wuss” and am afraid to go too far and be stuck.

The last purposeful exercise in chiarascuro was doing this with Pears. It turned out pretty well, but this faery painting is more challenging because of the inclusion of the light source with a subtle secondary light source around the figure of the faery.

The image is actually 12″x12″ but I only did a quick scan of the art piece. This cut off the left and right margins a tad.

One of my favorite winter guests to the bird feeder. I sure did not see them much today with the horrid windchills, but I am sure we will see some tomorrow. I enjoy painting birds. I hope to get out to see the migration at Crane Creek again this year and get some good shots of Herons for painting.

She has been waiting months for completion. I started her and it ended up being a study. Study is a nice way to say mistake. Hehe. Really though, as I painted her I noticed a tone the composition made that was not fitting the theme and emphasis I wanted. In the original “study” The moon and faerie do not present the oneness I wanted between them.

So I went back and changed the composition to achieve this. I love Luna moths and do not see them nearly as much in Ohio as in Florida. The Faerie in some ways with her crown overlaps with the one of the Goddess Selene and her daughter Pandeia.

Pandeia is associated with the full moon. Her name means all bright and all divine and in addition to the full moon is associated with the earth nourishing dew. She may be one of the 50 Menae goddesses of the 99 moon cycle of the ancient Greeks.

The Luna moth is large and beautiful and a very lovely shade of green with moon like disks in the wings. This moth spends much time around birch in the north. Given the beauty of birch in moonlight, it just all fit so perfectly.

Spent a little of yesterday and today designing and tweeking an image to coordinate my twitter profile to my blog. There are some good tutorials out there. I found that the 1280 px width to be the best for constructing the template and for presentation when uploaded. This also keeps the file size on the faster upload side.

One tip I would share is taking a screen shot of your profile page and then enlarging it with constrained preportions to fit behind what your designing. This will allow you to see exactly where to place images and/or guidelines.

I used photoshop, but powerpoint and many other programs will work very easily.

Well Here he is I am about half way done with my Ram Headed Serpent at this point. These large 22″ x 30″ paintings take a very long time to work on. I am considering dropping down to 11″ x 17″ for these, but I am not certain. I love painting large and love all the detail they provide.  

You can see the original sketch and notes on this mythical creature from the first post: Ram Headed Serpent