Month: June 2011

New Product Blog & Twitter Name!

As you may have guessed from my recent poll, I’ve been pondering on ways to better reach people interested in my items for sale. I used to have a forum where I posted store listings, but it ate itself! With my items being spread across my Amazon Shop, Etsy, Zazzle, and Artfire, there seemed no efficient way to get the word out on what’s available where.

Now, I’m pleased to present the solution, the Angelic Shades Product Blog! This is the place to subscribe if you’d like to see instant listings as soon as products and special offers become available. Many of my items are Made to Order, but there are still others (like my jewelry and original art) that are one-of-a-kind, meaning once they’re gone, they’re gone! Watching the blog is the best way to get first dibs on specialty items before they’re gone and to keep up with what specials are going on where across my online outlets.

I’ve also created a Twitter username dedicated solely to product updates, for you Tweeties out there. This will help keep my main Angelic Shades Twitter from being too spammy so it can stay focused on art and fun!

If you hate leaving the safe confines of DeviantART, never fear! I’ll be posting a monthly collection of new items in one tidy Deviation once each month that you can favorite and revisit whenever you like. They’ll look a little something like this:

This should keep people from being spammed (unless they want) and help get the word out for me in a much easier to manage way!
Aah organization! I feel better now.

Sketch Diary: Angel of January Part 3

The ideas have broiled, the sketches have been kneaded to perfection, and now we reach the most difficult phase of this image for me – coloration. Normally, this is the phase that’s the most fun, but this image fought with me tooth and nail to defy my whims!

Problem #1 – Being a monthly series, I have a limited palette of pre-defined colors to work with which are restricted by the main elements, the flowers and birthstones for each month. In this case, my choices for January are garnet, carnations, and snow drops.

Add on top of that I want to have a ‘stepping into sunlight’ theme with sunbeams streaming in and the challenge becomes even more tricky! Lucky for me at least that carnations come in many colors and snowdrops are a neutral white. I’m not sure how lucky I’ll be with the rest of these angels that have flowers available in one color only!

The first idea I had was to have the realm of Spring beyond the ‘doorway’ in the image, so that bright area of contrast was fighting with me as well. I did quite a few color tests in digital and watercolor, the disasters of which I’m almost embarrassed to share:

After doing these, the idea of a glowing halo around her body
was dropped in favor of not going insane from dueling colors
and light sources.
The talented Sam Hogg took a stab at it with her digital awesome powers:

While I like the simplicity and contrast of Sam’s color scheme,
the window felt too dark for my tastes.

Springboarding from Sam’s theme, I lightened it up with
sunbeams and a sunrise themed ‘spring’ realm behind her.

Before the end of this color testing phase, I decided I wanted to try this image digitally instead of in watercolor to help me brush up on my cg skills (and also because the color richness demanded something more bold than watercolors).  To keep that subtle texture of my line art, I scanned in the color pencil outline version to use as a base to color on:

Outlined in Prismacolor Color Pencils. The color of the lines gives a deeper
optical richness to the final piece than simply using black outlines.

Eventually, I arrived at this final complimentary color scheme with orange
accents. The idea shifted to sunbeams penetrating a subterranean underworld
which pushed everything green! (Thanks to Hayley‘s critique)

 It’s at this step that I’ve added textures from free texture sites and my own references to help add texture and interest to my digital shading.  The color pencil outline layer sits above all of my other color layers and is set to Multiply so that all the color layers beneath it will be visible while maintaining their color value and the color tint of the outline layer.

The color layers each have texture layers above them set to Overlay so that the texture will be very subtle and show the colors beneath it. In the next entry, I’ll go more into depth about my digital color process. It’s all very experimental at the moment. Maybe a video will be more helpful here?

Sunbeams, glimmering dust motes, and jewels glittering in the dark await! I’m excited to get started shading this painting digitally. Got to keep my digitalart-fu strong!

Upcoming Appearance: Author Meet & Greet

If you’ll be in the area of Peachtree City, GA this weekend, I’ll be making an appearance at the Books-A-Million in The Avenue shopping center!  They’ve invited me back for a mass book signing event with other local authors.  Come say hello, chat about art, and get a free bookmark while supplies last!

I’m looking forward to seeing what other authors are in my area too.  Should be interesting to see what different sorts of genres we all do.

I’ve created a public event on Facebook for easy access to maps, dates, and location details here.  Or you can check the event calendar on my website to see what else I’ll be up to in the coming months!

Characters on the Couch

I’m taking a bit of a detour today to talk about another aspect of my art that I don’t talk about as much as I’d like on this blog – characters.  You might have seen a few of my muses here and there in my art, but never quite gotten to know them, as they’re all on the sidelines while I sort out the Artist part of my career instead of the Writer.  Eventually, I want to bring characters to the forefront of my art AND writing and that is where the savvy Jeannie Campbell comes in!

Aurora Adonai, one of my
first muses.

Any writer will tell you that research is key to writing convincing, engaging scenes and never is that research more important than when you’re working with characters with psychological disorders.  We can make as many guesses as we like about the textbook definition of a psychological disorder and its effects, but this can come off as stiff, as if we’re recalling a grocery list of symptoms when we write.  That is where Jeannie comes in.  As a licensed marriage and family therapist, she has opened her couch to the analysis of our fictional brainchildren.

Last year, Jeannie did an analysis for Aurora, my unstable Elvish hitwoman.  Her analysis opened my eyes to the possibilities with this character, not only for what she is capable of, but how best to balance the darkness of her past with that element of humanity that would keep her sane and also grounded as a character.  For Aurora’s full analysis, you can read on here.

With so many characters chilling in the backstage of my brain, I plan to use Jeannie again in the future.  For that purpose, I’ll be visiting her newly opened website – The Character Therapist!

Jeannie Campbell, The Character Therapist by Elizabeth Mueller

She offers brief assessments of characters for free or a detailed assessment at $14.99.  If you sign up for her newsletter, you can get a copy of her ebook “Writer’s Guide to Character Motivation”, a handy 28 page guide to help you build your characters from the ground up.

For those of you pondering characters, I recommend giving Jeannie a shout!  Meanwhile, I’ll continue plotting ways to send more imaginary folks to fill up her proverbial waiting room.

Sketch Diary: Angel of January Part 2

You all might remember my last sketch diary entry for this image? If not, go check it out for idea development and thumbnail sketches. Wow, has it really been nearly a YEAR since I’ve come back to this piece? Guess that burnout wave hit me harder than I thought! (More on that later, as it’s been on my mind a lot lately)

My favorite thumbnail sketch.

Next up, developing the final draft! With my favorite thumbnail sketch out of the many in mind, I shot some stock reference for myself with the idea of a veiled or draped figure stepping into sunlight to echo the themes of the emergence of Persephone (which is associated with the gemstone for January with its pomegranate seed-like clusters of garnets).

January is also named for Janus, the god of doorways and transitions, signaling the coming of the new season and new year.

This particular stock pose caught my eye most with the inquisitive angle of the head, the assymetrical sweep of the arms, and the idea of ‘stepping into the sunlight’ echoed in the pose.:

More poses at my stock gallery.
The first base sketch. The wings cover too much of the
stained glass window.

With that stock pose in mind, I did several rough sketches in Photoshop and finally arrived at a base figure, with all of my background elements on separate layers so I could tweak them individually.  This phase also involved doing a rough sketch of the stained glass window pane with its Snow Drop and Carnations motif with no attention paid to exact symmetry just yet, but rather scribbles filling out the main idea of the design and how it might integrate with the figure first.

However, I kept running into a problem with the wings.  They seemed either covered up too much of the lovely window, were too flat, or too cramped into the space I had in mind.

Too cramped and thin…
Much better flow that leads the viewer’s
eye through the figure!

With the main figure taken care of, I refined the window by copying, pasting, and flipping parts of the window as needed to create a more symmetrical shape.  I then transferred the sketch to illustration board, refining the details as I went along until I arrived at this:

Very light pencil sketch…
…which morphed into color pencil outline!