Let it Go

Hello everyone! I hope you guys had a great December and enjoyed the holidays. Earlier in December my friend and I went to see 'Frozen'. I am not going to spoil anything, but for those who haven't seen it yet, you must! It's an enjoyable movie and it's great to see Disney go back to their more traditional 'musical movies'.

My friend requested that I should make a drawing of Elsa. Normally I would have had this finished earlier this month, but things where really hectic, and not by just the holiday shopping and whatnot. My grandma was in the hospital earlier this month, and a day before the 24th my mother got really sick. As of this week I've been the errand girl and doing the shopping, which I don't mind. Grandma is on her way to a long recovery, and Mom is slowly improving.

Here are some progress shots of this painting.

                                     Here is the initial sketch. I had this done for awhile.  

I transferred the sketch on watercolor paper and I then taped it down on foam board. Since I'm using watercolor, I don't water the paper to buckle up more than I know it's going to. Plus, taping it creates nice clean borders. :)

Since Elsa is on the small side and I'm going to do a full wash for the background, I don't want paint to get on her. I used liquid frisket to masked her. Liquid frisket is another name for masking fluid, and this one has an orange tint to it, so it's easy to spot when it comes time to take it off.

The background is done. When the background was still wet, I sprinkled some sea salt to create the snow and flurries Elsa is unleashing.

 

I carefully peeled off the mask and started to work on Elsa.

Elsa is mostly finished.

I took out some of my watercolored pencils to fix up and add to a couple things. The sea salt decided to mutiny and refused to work. I then took out my white gel pen and create the snow and flurries myself.

And there you have it!

I hope you guys have a great new year. I will see you next year!

Title: Let it Go

Medium: Watercolors

Paper: 9x12 on Canson Coldpressed XL series

Medusa

I finally managed to get Medusa done.

The story of Medusa is really sad. One of the main stories with her was that Medusa use to be a beautiful priestess for the Temple of Athena. Many men sought after her, but she choose to serve Athena. The god Poseidon found her beautiful as well, and one day entered the temple and raped Medusa. Instead of being angry with Poseidon, Athena set her fury on Medusa for disgracing her temple (it was expected of Poseidon to go after females, so that was why he was excused). In anger, Athena turned Medusa in the hideous monster that she is now. Since then, Medusa lived a solitary life away from people, because gazing upon her turns them into stone.

I did some research to find out what venomous snakes were native to the Greece area, and found about the Vipera Ammodytes (Horned Viper). I decided to reference them for Medusa's "hair".

Paper: Strathmore Toned Gray (9x12)

Medium: Colored Pencils (Faber Castell Polychromos)

  

More Progress on Medusa

 The body of the snakes are mostly finished, so I started working on the skin. My goal is to give the skin a rough look. I plan on having this finished before November ends.

Snakes for Hair

I've started on the snakes. So far it's not as bad as I thought it would be, working on them. Right now, I'm just getting the basic color scheme in before I refine the details more.

Faber-Castell Polychromos are now being use.

Medusa: A Work in Progress

Recently, I got the inspiration to create a Medusa portrait. I've had a book of Strathmore Tone Gray paper, and I believe Medusa will work very nicely with it. This is just the line art for a start. I have a separate sketch book that I used mostly for line art and I then transfer the art on nicer paper. I thought that the gray paper was light enough for the original line art to show through via the lightbox, but that wasn't the case. So I had to transfer it the old fashion way, which is rubbing graphite on tracing paper and then drawing over the lines with enough pressure in order for it to show on the gray paper. Well, now I know.

I think I have my work cut out for me on this one especially with the snakes. It'll be a good challenge. :)

I'll be posting some more process shots along the way with this one.

Olive green Prismacolor Verithin pencil used for the line art.

Alice in Wonderland

This week I went down the rabbit hole to visit some friends. I was looking through my sketchbook and found a picture of Alice that I did. So I figured it would be nice to color it. For this piece I used a combination of marker and colored pencils. Here is the finish product:

 To work on this I transferred the sketch on nice paper and used my colored copic multilinears to do the line work. The colored pens used was sepia and green. I've always found sepia to be a much more natural color when doing line art, so it's one of my often used pens.

 I started laying down the base color for Alice.

 Alice is mostly done.

Working on the mushroom.

With the base all layed down, I used colored pencils to finish it up, and add details.

Rinse and repeat.

The grass was really fun to do. The grass further back it a bit darker. I was trying to be mindful of atmospheric perspective. The further back you go, the more dull and blueish objects become. That's why I didn't ink the grass further back.

Laid down the base coat for the ground. I darkened some areas of where shadows would be.

Ground is finish!

Here are some close up shots:

That's it.

Mediums: Copic markers, Faber Castell Polychromos, a bit of white gel pen
Paper: 8.5x5.5in Strathmore Bristol Vellum

I've always found Alice to be an endearing character. What character(s) (book, movie, etc) do you find endearing?

Watercolor Faeries

Here are some of the pictures I've done in watercolor. These pictures are faeries. One of the oldest accounts of stories about them stated they were near indistinguishable from humans. I like to work upon that instead of always just drawing them with various insect wings.

Fae Child:

A Magic Touch:

These were done on Strathmore 300 series watercolor paper.

About Time

Hello everyone!

My name is Katy Lamatsch, and after months of debating I finally caved and made myself an art blog. A little about myself; I am 22 years old and I've always loved art since I could hold a pencil. Though I do dabble in a little digital art, my preferred is traditional. I will be posting my finish works, but also some process shots as well.

Anyway, I figured I'll start my first post with a bang. Here is a picture of a harpy that I finished the other day. For the design I looked at various photos of hawks and falcons.

When creating this piece I used Copic markers with a little colored pencils for the final details. Here's the line art.

For base of the body I used E41, E81, and E42.

For the wings I used E37, E77, and E47.

 Using the same colors I used for the wing, I started adding the patterns.

 I only used one color for the hair, E87.

 With the skin I gave it a base coat of the colorless blender, and then started the the deepest shadow, BV20. After that I just messed around with some more skin colors until I was happy with the result. The main colors for the skin is E31, E50, E51, and a hint of R12 for blush.

 Working on the moon. Based coat is YR30. I wanted the moon to be yellow/orange color, so I just added some colors where necessary. The darkest shadow has some BV20.

 I darkened her feathers more with YG91(One of my favorite shading colors to use), and then I went in with some colored pencils to darken it further.

 

Close ups:

And I'm done!

I hope you guys enjoyed that. It feels great having a blog, and I do plan on updating. :)

Questions for you:

What mythological creatures do you find interesting?