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Beneath Hyperspider

#art #horror art #acrylicOncanvas #black 2.0 #spider #demon #tentacles #horror

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My desk is covered with unfinished wedding save-the-dates so I have been constipated with painting ideas and confined to doodling at work.

#doodle #painting

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The Duke of Restless Sleep

Acrylic on canvas

13.5″ x 17.5″

The Duke comes humming out of the maelstrom; it is the fever dream of a dying wizard, whose cockatrices have all come home to roost. A scene from a stained glass window of an alien church. I had such a strong image for this painting, burning rainbow chaos with figures and faces all the way down to the shadow of its atoms.

As it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything, please excuse the upcoming onslaught of text I will indulgently refer to as a critique.

The background is a mix of Pebeo fantasy paints and normal acrylics with fluid media. I made the same mistake as before where differing viscosity makes the canvas lumpy in places, but with such a nebulous design, I can use the lumps and troughs to make the painting appear a little more 3D in places. I tried to fill in some troughs with paint and flattening it with a palette knife, but that didn’t really work, so my advice is to just not do that. Be quick with the Pebeo paints because when they start to dry they just get lumpy.

When I started putting down the head part of the Duke I had to decide whether to make it symmetrical or not. I thought that symmetry would make it look more imposing, but compared to the original sketch I think it looks less dynamic. In future I’ll try to mess with this more to get the balance right.

My favourite part of the whole thing is how new figures appeared at every level of the design, from the very beginning right up to during painting some of them just came out of nowhere. I’m also getting much better at translating the rough sketches onto the painting without warping them.

That said, the two areas I think I need to focus on improving upon are lighting and perspective. I started at the top of the painting and worked down, so while the top of the Duke’s head/hood/chitinous shell has a strong directional light, I couldn’t keep that up for the rest of the painting where there was too much going on to keep it in the dark. I also feel that most of the painting looks a bit 2D (obviously), I need to bring some things forward and some back, although I think that is more dependent on my drawing skills. Either way, improving those are the aims for next time.

I wanted the painting to have lots of shiny metallic parts, so it looks like a monstrous version of one of those pictures they sell around the Vatican in those bizarre Catholic merch shops. This worked great, but makes it impossible to take a good photo. The part of the painting I named The Jelly Sphinx somehow always had bad lighting, which is a shame as I thought I did pretty well for having never painted a straight human face before (even if it was painted in the colours of unyielding night).

Lastly, I included a picture of the painting under UV light. I didn’t paint it with UV in mind, but thought it looked cool so had to put it in. I tried to refrain from coating it in glow in the dark paint, because I love glow in the dark paint, but did use a bit to make those orbs linger when the lights go out.

I’ve got two more paintings on the go now, and am hoping neither of them take anywhere close to 6 months to finish. I’m not doing another one like this for a while.

#critique

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The Duke of Restless Sleep (close up)

#painting #acrylicOncanvas #art #pebeo #monster #magic #wizard #psychedelic #sorcery #horror #dreams

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The Duke of Restless Sleep

#art #painting #acryliconcanvas #horror art #psychedelic #space magic #wizard #magic #horror

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I haven't abandoned this blog, just been stuck on some tentacles. I'm still painting!

#art #painting #WIP #monster #tentacles

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New Year’s Day

Acrylic on canvas

14″ x 11″

Wretched creatures convulse and judder in black celebration of inscrutable events. So more or less a standard dance floor.

I have had two paintings on the go for the last couple of weeks; the other one is big and very detailed and will take me ages to finish, so to stay consistent with posting I have been painting double time to get this one done. If by the end of the month I’m nowhere near finished with the big one, I’ll get another smaller one out.

I planned for the dancers to be shrouded in thick fog, to obscure them a bit and increase the horror, but that didn’t work out as I’d hoped. I was originally going to paint the fog in watercolour over the top, but while looking that up I found out about a technique called glazing, which is apparently more doable. I made a few rookie mistakes glazing it up this time around (always wait for each layer to dry completely before adding the next), but I’m not put off. With the power of glazing, the ichor will be more foetid, the flames will be more ethereal, and the eyeballs will pop that bit harder.

I’ve had the New Year’s Day idea for a while, but felt that I should be better at actual anatomy before I disregard it entirely. In the end I liked the designs for all the dancers, so just did it. The lesson here is either:

Do what feels good and eventually get better at it.

or

Do what feels good and slip into bad habits.

Give it a year and I’ll let you know which one it is.

#critique #or the third option where you do what feels good but pay attention to what needs improving and act on it next time.

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The Unlikely Lads

Mixed media (acrylic and Pebeo Fantasy on canvas)

8″ x 10″

An aberrant agglomeration peers nearwards from a nebulous netherscape.

I’m pretty happy with this aberrant agglomeration; It comes together well and I think it gives off a sense of shared apprehension across its constituents. Also part way through painting it I saw it as an accidental self-portrait which I cannot unsee. I haven’t cut my hair in a while so I’m kind of taking on the same basic silhouette. My gaping maw and writhing tendrils are a given.

The background didn’t go to plan. I was hoping that I could pour glow in the dark paint onto the canvas, forming large circles that would push the surrounding Pebeo paints into a thin network, so that in the dark the glow effect would generate a strong silhouette of the creatures against a host of phosphorescent moons. I’m still happy with the result, it quickly became apparent that my plan wasn’t going to work, so I had fun playing with the Pebeo and glow paints together. 

As an aside, the glowing eyes work really well. When I cast a shadow over them they glow slightly, it looks so unnatural and I will definitely use this effect a lot more.

Stuff I learned:

Apart from the obvious mixed media techniques I’m learning in the background, one of the main skills I’ve been working on here is how shadows fall. I am definitely improving. Better planning is a big part of this, painting from the background forward and considering which appendages are going to cast shadows where. While this helps make it look more 3D as a whole, I need to improve my shadowcasting within each limb. As it is, it looks a bit like a diorama, several 2D planes overlapping (which is totally a step up from a single 2D plane).

I’ve also been trying to get over my bad habit of using a single colour gradient per area, which has been limiting the depth and character I can achieve. I haven’t done too well this time for fear of messing it up. In future, I’ll try to keep track of a couple of colour gradients simultaneously, to keep the extra colours from being afterthoughts.

I suppose the main lesson I’ve learned this time is that the exploration of the dimensions is to fear no shadow. In sciomancy we feed our fiends.

#critique

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The Unlikely Lads (in the darkness)

#art #glow #phosphorescent

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The Unlikely Lads

#art #acrylicOncanvas #mixedmedia #pebeo #horror #psychedelic #spooky #creepy

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Coral Wraith

Acrylic on canvas

6″ x 12″

A figure emerges from mystic aether to help me practice using fluid media and a bit of human anatomy.

Well that was the intention. I only got as far as arms and boobs, and even then I fell prey to some of the do nots of those ‘how to draw boobs’ infographics you sometimes see. Overall I could have done better with her, I got excited to move on to the next one and rushed the right arm. The lighting of the purple stomach area is a bit off too. It’s not all bad, I like the left arm and the clavicle teeth. I’ll take it slow next time I do human bits.

The background is a whole different story. I tried using fluid media techniques for the first time, pouring on paints and dunking the canvas underwater to make the colours swirl. I didn’t have too much of a plan, just wanted to understand how it works. I was going for a vague underwater theme though, which I think I got. In future I’ll try to make the fluid backgrounds interact with the foreground more, because good god fluid media is fun.

#critique

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Coral Wraith

#acrylicOncanvas #art #fluid media #sea #witch #water magic #wraith

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Grin of the Slime Ghost

Acrylic on canvas

10″ x 10″

So I had already planned to do a slime ghost in a psychedelic vortex, in a way that might look like Electric Wizard album art if they had fallen on really hard times. Then one night just as I was falling asleep I came up with a great idea: make it turn into a face when you cross your eyes! While I think this worked perfectly, it has since become clear to me that the skill of crossing your eyes at will is a lot less common than I assumed. Still, it really works for those that can do it, and I’ll probably try something like this again in the future.

I think that the grainy detail on the ghost works well against the bright blocky background, and I had a lot of fun doing it, so I’ll definitely try something in a similar style again soon. The background also works well with the edges of the ghost, which helps the whole thing feel a bit less static (especially if you look at it for a long time).

I’m also particularly happy with the background as I’ve applied what I learned the last time I tried out fluorescent pink and green; use a few base coats of non fluorescent paints to make them pop more than they ever could on their own. On the other hand, this time around I’ve learned that the colours vibrate much better when the stripes are thinner.

It does have some areas that need improvement though:

Design - I focused on making the wing parts look like teeth more than wing parts, confusing the overall picture. This comes from me not designing it thoroughly before painting. However, I also didn’t plan on painting the lower set of arms, so the spontaneity did pay off.

Background - If I was to redo this, I’d try to make the background more triptacular, with chunkier pinks and more varied greens. For now, letting the fluorescent colours do their eye-aching thing works fine too.

#critique

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Grin of the Slime Ghost (UV)

#acrylicOncanvas #glow #UV

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Grin of the Slime Ghost

#acrylic #art #slime #ghost #psychedelic #spooky

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The Magicians

Acrylic on canvas

8″ x 20″

It has been ages since I’ve finished a painting, but I am back with renewed vigour. Here we have a meeting of magicians, one of which is human! I wasn’t sure about including any actual humans in any painting I do, but I think as a one off it gives a sense of scale, as well as draws out the horror of the other creature.

There was meant to be a symbol between the Magician’s horns, but as it’s looking at an angle I couldn’t place it right. I will remember this failure, and continue to build up a library of symbols in the future.

Stuff I like:

The background. I’m finally satisfied with a background. To get a decent gradient, it does just require a lot of subtle overlapping shades. What an underwhelming revelation.

The execution. The finished product looks a lot like my design, which is great.

Those eyes. So baleful, so penetrating.

Stuff I need to improve: I need to be more bold with mixing colours. At the moment I am cowardly, not daring to add purple patches to a green arm. I need to get better at that. Shadows! I have just about got the hang of the direction of a light source, but it turns out that light can be obstructed by one, sometimes even two things! I am just not yet down with that.

#critique

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The Magicians

#painting #art #acrylicOncanvas #magic #wizard #occult