Eureka!

Just started work on a long series. I'm going to create an image for each letter of the alphabet. Each letter will be represented by a job, skill, career, or action based on it's name/title in the 19th century. As such, I think I'm going to start with one of the following:

Apothecary - Prepared medicines and drugs.
Aurifaber - A goldsmith.
Ale Draper - Sold ale.
Archivist - A person who kept records of historical importance.

I'll have to pick and choose, I've got a huge, long list of them, and I'd like to not have them repeat if at all possible, but some of the ones I thought were really interesting, or I liked the name, might go hand in hand with another job or career.

I'll post some progress shots tomorrow perhaps.
Happy Thanksgiving!

-Blake

Ok, calling it a night.

I apologize in advance if anyone on twitter/facebook sees this 400 thousand times. Just seeing what Twitterfeed is capable of doing...hopefully there's only double posts at the most.

Fly in a suit.

After painting the tops of the acorns, I realized they looked like a group mugshot for a terrorist lineup. So I bombed that one (couldn't resist typing that :P).














On the other hand, I'm getting a god hold on how powerful these Hydrus watercolors are. Want to lift some color out once it's down and basically dry? No, forget it, that stuff's for your wimpy tubes...
This stuff is a joy to mix on a ceramic plate though, and reconstituting them once they dry? No problem!

So my latest completed little guy, a fly in a suit. He's trying toclean up his appearance. As much as someone who throws up on their food possibly can...

The beards, they grow on you.

And they also grow on our little friends, the acorns.
Rocking out a 40% coupon tomorrow to get my hands on some Dr. Ph. Martin's. I'm pretty excited. So excited, I haven't stopped reading about them since I sat down.

Oh yeah, the beards...adding the hat, things, acorn tops...tomorrow.

Excuse my mess....

I'm still trying to decide on layout options that suit my needs. I'm a widget fiend, but I don't want to make anyone's eyes bleed. A conundrum to be sure.

Finally ripped apart some printmaking paper, watercolor paper too, from the clearance rack at my job...we're all not too sure what brand they are. The printmaking one is similar to a Somerset Velvet, but softer. The watercolor is just like an Arches 140lb. but the texture is between a cold-press, and a rough. Interesting stuff. No idea who makes/made it.

I'll need to get used to it's water consumption. It's very thirsty paper. I suppose there's no internal sizing layer to the paper, so I can load up a brush but start to get the beaded "dry brush" look pretty quick...I'll just have to go heavier on the water. There's curl, but not much buckle, which is nice.


Will hopefully noodle out the layout tomorrow morning.
Cheers,

-Blake

And so we bein anew...

"The doodles and paints that launched a thousand ships," er, launch, is on hold until Monday. Maybe Tuesday, depending on how my schedule looks.

Maybe I should put a small list here so that every time I inevitably load this blog up, I can see, staring me in the face, what I've yet to do....

- add blog background, tidy up some colors.
- solidify an icon for social network sites that doesn't look like a hack photoshop piece.
- publish the facebook page.

- cut cardboard shipping things, and weigh them, and list everything...

then go from there. Ok, let's get back to cutting apart illustration boards...