Daily Creativity: Wedding Dress Fashion Art

Side by side look between my wedding photo and my Fashion SketchI was browsing somewhere and came across an etsy store that does wedding dress fashion sketches and I thought “Now that’s a cool idea.”

Most women only every wear their own dress that one day.  It’s a dress often that costs a fortune (sometimes not) and a lot of time is put into thinking about and planning.  Even someone like me who doesn’t often value the girly things in life knew basically what my dress would be from a very young age.  I always knew I would be married in blue, pale blue, just like my two grandmother’s were.  Their husbands loved them to the day they died and I figured you couldn’t go wrong following something like that as a tradition.  So with all of this thought, energy, time, and money going into a dress that’s worn once, it feels like a bit of a waste.

I can’t help but want to do as Kaylee did on Firefly and keep my dress hung up in my living room so I could just sit back and admire it, but that’s not practical, is it?

Instead the idea of a fashion sketch to display in my home sounded much better.  I think I like the idea so much, that if someone wanted to hire me to do this for them, I’d be thrilled and have a lot of fun doing it :)

Now I know often fashion sketches are done on figures that are more stick like and insane proportions to accent the look of the clothes, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that for my dress.  I’m a big woman and that just feels like lying to me, I’m sure it’s fine for some other women, that they just care about the dress not so much about making the proportions accurate, I just know for me, if I am proud of my body, I don’t want to lie about it either.

Daily Creativity: Paintings I did over the weekend

Christiana HendricksThis weekend I did a bit more painting with the ArtRage app on my iPad.  I like it because it has layers and there issn’t any cleanup involved, also, I can paint from anywhere.  Humidity doesn’t effect my paintings and there is no drying time.  Often my oil paintings take forever to dry because I use a lot of paint and I will use linseed oil as a medium too.  I once let a painting dry for three weeks and the white was still tacky when I gave the painting to the owner.
Steampunk Rory with a mustache This first painting was done from a photo of Christina Hendricks.  I don’t think I did her justice but then again who can?  I do love how the brush stroke on her hair came out.

Next I did a painting of Rory as a Steampunked gentleman.  What more does a genteldragon need other than a top hat, a monocle, vest, cane, ray gun, and a curly mustache.

The thing that is great about doing a painting on your iPad is that if you like the basic outline, you’r not committed to just one painting or painting style.  I then took the outline and did a watercolor painting.

Rory as Doctor 11 - WatercolorThis time I painted Rory in watercolors and dressed him up as Doctor 11, Fez, Bowtie, Sonic Screwdriver and all.

I had fun with this, and liked how I could make different incarnations with the same basic outline.  I may just end up using ArtRage for the future children’s book that stars Rory.  Originally I was going to do a series of watercolors but I think I might do better with this app.  For now I’m playing an experimenting with it.  Hey you never know, if I do end up using it for the book, does that mean I can take the iPad off as a deduction from my taxes?  :)

Daily Creativity: Happy Nude (NWS)

Click to see the full painting, full nude.

I painted this painting last night, based on an image I found on tumblr.  Yet now when it comes time to post online I find myself hesitating.  Not because I would classify the painting as R or even PG-13, but because other people might.  The internet can be touchy and since I have tried to keep my presence at a PG rating I wonder.  So if you’d like to see the full panting, either click the thumbnail, or look below the cut.

I like to paint my figures with non representational colors, it lets me accentuate curves, shadow and highlight better.  I chose this figure because of the smile mostly, which is interesting because painting an open mouth often looks odd to me.  The original figure is dressed (and wow does she every look awesome/hot/amazing/sexy/happy/wonderful/beautiful/lively/heathy/fantastic) but I just loved her form and as I painted her I didn’t paint clothes.  I miss painting from a live model, but thankfully the internet gives me many photo models.

Continue reading

THIS Is Girlfriend Mode!

girlfriend mode - the mode when I beat you with my controller A few days ago on twitter (where do you get news?) Some people within the design crew of Borderlands 2 were calling their easier difficulty mode, “Girlfriend Mode.”  Since then there has been a lot of articles claiming people are over reacting, backpedaling and clarifications by CEOs.  You can find the original article here on Eurogamer, with some updates.

I first noticed the story when @SunriseRobin (Author of Zeus, Inc. and founder/blogger of www.fangirlconfessions.com) was tweeting about it.  Now i know many women who are great at video games, and many who suck.  We all have our own preferences, just like I know many men who are good and many men who suck.  It’s not a gender thing, but for some reason there is a big group of people, or perhaps a loud group of people who seem to want to put down women who game.  Not only that, they want to keep women from gaming.  (and there is also a backlash where women now are being expected to prove that they are action gamers and not just posers /sigh)

My reaction to this “Girlfriend Mode” was not to flame tweet, was not to call for a boycott of Borderlands 2 (Borderlands the original game is very good and I can’t see one designer being stupid as cause for a boycott) but this image came into my head.  I was swamped with work so I asked Robin to remind me to draw it later.

I hope you all enjoy it for the fun it is meant to be.