East of the Sun, West of the Moon

East of the Sun, West of the Moon is my FAVORITE fairy tale.
You have to go look up the story if you want to know the ending!

Here's a rough outline: enchanted polar bear, prince, and a castle that's east of the sun, west of the moon - oh, and we can't forget the required poor maiden who goes on an adventure.

I made this in two pieces: one 8.5x11 paper for the bear, another one for the Prince.
Then I colored each one separately, joined them together, colored the Sun and Moon, and THEN threw in the background.

Particularly proud of the bear. I'd never drawn a bear before, much less tried to shade short fur like on his nose. It's hard, and time consuming. You get ONE stroke out of place and all of a sudden it doesn't look quite right.

Sol y Luna

Another mask!
This one was also inspired by a fairy tale (my favorite one!) called East of the Sun, West of the Moon. It's not as literal a mask at the Beauty and the Beast one (no direct relation to the story except with the sun and moon features)
MUCH easier to paint than it's beastly cousin (oh ho ho I'm so witty)
Mind you it was awfully hard to find a shiny gold paint that hadn't separated into gold crust and clear goo - considering how many mom owns I was surprised it took so long!

Beauty and the Beast

We all know the fairy tale - now we can have it in mask format!
I made this out of super sculpey (a really easy-to-use, versatile, oven-bakeable! modeling clay) for my mom one christmas.
It's actually the second mask I've made (the first was a massive, heavy, red-clay mask of an elf) and I have to say I'm really proud of it. Considering I was just making it up as I went with no real idea of how I wanted it to look it turned out okay!
The beast side of the face took forever to paint - the horn was easy enough (it's just a spiral of tinfoil coated in the clay) but the tiny tufts of "fur" at the corner of the eye were really hard to get at (and you can't paint this stuff before baking - it all has to be after the fact)

Since the human side looked so bare I decided to include the ever-important rose on that side, and put only a tiny bud on the other.

But he that dares...

Drew this one sleepless night from some really old figure drawing sketches. It's for a favorite artist of mine on another art site, who held an impromptu art contest just for fun. All we had to do was tell her we wanted to participate, and she would give us a theme to base at least one entry on. We then had to pick one or several of her fictional characters to draw in that theme.
This one's theme was roses.

It happened to be near Valentine's day when I finished it, so it's sort of my obligatory salute to Valentine's.

I also (probably because of the fact that when I posted this originally on the other site it was well past 4am and I was debating just going to find breakfast) gave it a corny quote.
"But he that dares no grasp the thorn should never crave the rose"

Long story short: I love it. Loki loved it. That's a lot of pink.
I never want to draw that much hair again (although I SAY that, and just watch what will happen)

Design and Image - Project 2 - Clusters

This is the second project I did for my Design and Image class. We were each given a topic involving how natural things organize themselves (some of the ones people got were: radials like the slices in an orange, concentric circles like in an onion, branching, spirals like in a seashell, etc.)

We then had to pick a natual object that exemplified our topic, and create a two-page (the image shows only one page because it is meant to be folded down the middle, as if in a book) spread with information about that object and our topic.

It's 17 x 11 inches, and is in only two colors. Black+that pinkish red (white doesn't count as another color because there is no such thing as white ink)

My topic was clusters.

Suprisingly difficult topic to reasearch. Unless you looked for something specificly involving clusters all you would get is a dinky little definition ("a small group of things organized into a group" being about as detailed as I found) and a massive list of scientific clusters (we're talking quantum chemistry type information here, people - and we all know I've had enough of THAT kettle of fish)

I ended up chosing the Pomegranate. WOW are those things ever messy when you open them wrong. The BIG photo in the middle is my own, after I hacked one open with a BUTTERKNIFE. I DO NOT suggest trying that. You get juice in your eyes. The darned things fight back.

If the blog lets you, try making the image bigger by clicking on it - you might actually be able to read all of the words (mind you it WILL be huge - so you're forewarned)

EDIT: Darnit. I found one typo already that I missed before printing. But them's the ropes. You don't always find EVERYTHING.