Media Medley Blog

I’m a bit behind at posting on my WIP.

I’ve worked on my demon. After 10 hours of painting I thought I had done a decent job of moving forward. Then I noticed the darn thing grinning at me. That would never do. I’m the artist and I don’t like it. I’m also pretty sure most customers would not enjoy a depiction of the personal attention of a demon.

Besides, the demon is supposed to be looking at the either the driver or the pieces of aura it’s plucked from the driver. This was a disappointing setback. So I wiped out the face, and will re-do it. In the meantime, here’s my latest updates.

As we were hurtling down the road during a recent trip, I glanced over to the car next to us and noticed the driver had a whole bunch of holes in his aura!

It freaked me out. Heebie jeebies! I have never seen an aura like that and didn’t know what it meant, but it was like seeing a real life zombie.

And it got me to thinking… Was his guardian angel crying?
And if yes, then a demon had to be enjoying itself.

The whole idea stuck in my head. So I created a quick sketch of it.

But how to represent the missing aura? Most people don’t ever see one.

To simply things, I wouldn’t try to show the entire area that an aura can encompass. I’d just paint his normal skin area but show some missing parts of the aura in black and white.

But that led to another issue of, “How to ensure that the values between the colors and the black and white sections would match?”

Then I remembered the art technique called grisaille; painting in shades of greenish black and white as an underlayment before painting in color. When I first heard of the process, I remember thinking that would be a whole heck of a lot of extra work. I usually just paint all at once and call it done.

Well, never say never. I am currently painting in grisaille. And when I’m done, will go over it with oil paints blended with a glaze to get my hues.

Wow! This is harder than I thought. What an interesting exercise to get the shades just right.

I’m working very slowly. The photos shown here are the result of many days worth of work. I spent about 5 hours on the angel face, as shown below. I like how it turned out, even if the photo of it stinks! (I really must learn photography one day, even if I don’t want to.)

The angel’s shoulder and arm has been worked on.

I’ve spent a bit of time on the demon. My son really likes what he calls the “Hoof Pumps”. He thinks that would be a cool new fashion for a shoe designer. This photo isn’t great, but is the best of the bunch I took this morning.

And that’s all for now. I’ll try to remember to take pics along the way as I work toward finishing this out.