Imgur CAN be useful..

I browse imgur.com all the time, mostly because it's a great procrastination tool but every once in a while it pops up with a golden nugget of awesome artistry. 

Today while I was browsing I saw this awesome corset that was made to look like female video game armor, which is notorious for being ridiculously revealing, but still the craftsmanship was awesome.

http://romancero.nethouse.ru/products/7929736

I looked at the rest of this man's work and all of it is just incredible. Everything he does is made of leather  and it's all so incredibly intricate. I just can't imagine what it's like to be able to think in patterns like that. 

One of my friends goes to The Art Department and he shared this link to a set of brushes that either one of his teachers or friends designed: BRNK BRSHS Drawing Set. After watching the video I a) want to buy them because they look like they'd be really useful and b) am really curious about whether he was using a mouse to draw with or if there's some sort of pen that one can buy to accompany Photoshop. 

I'd really like to start drawing digitally, mostly because I feel like it makes the creative process so much easier to start also, there's so many more things you can do with it. I'll never lose the love of getting my hands dirty with paint and charcoal but I'm truly entranced by digital drawing.

I went back to the list of horse paintings today because I never actually went through them all, after I found Ivan Biliban's work I got sort of side tracked. But anyways, as I was scrolling a painting by Gustav Klimt came up and it made me stop for a second.

I was taken aback by how rigid and unnaturally straight the golden knight is in comparison to the curved lines of the horse. As always I love how much gold Klimt incorporates and how the background is abstracted.

Illustration Inspiration

I find most of the art I like through social media, generally on my facebook feed from my artsy friends' posts and pages that I have liked. Today as I was scrolling though my feed I saw a woman named Irene Gallo posting a link to an article featuring tons of paintings of horses because it's apparently the year of the Horse now. 
Anyways, one of the paintings was an illustration by Ivan Bilibin for a book of russian fairy tales.

I'm attracted to these illustrations because of their flatness in comparison to other more realistic drawings. I'm also a big fan of the outlines of all the shapes and within each shape is one color, kind of like a Paint-By-Numbers.

And as for this last one, how could anyone not love a drawing with a woman using a skull as a torch and mushrooms popping up everywhere. 

As I was perusing my Facebook newsfeed I saw a link to a blog site called mymodernmet.com which apparently hosts a colllection of art based blogs. I originally went to it following a link for photos that showed a Batman figurine posed in everyday places but also found a woman who does amazing illustrations in colored pencil.

The artists name is Jennifer Healy and her work predominantly features women in fantastical situations. I really love her artwork because of her insane blending skills and the fact that her main subject matter is women. I myself really love drawing women because there's just so much easy beauty to the female form and because it's easy to show a range of emotions with the female features and figure.

 I'm attracted to this one because of the dewy skin tone of the woman, and the use of the page by the hanging knotted braid.

I really adore how this one shows her emerging from somewhere and the diagonal strip on her lip.

I love anything that incorporates bones into a composition. 

Twists on framed portraits are also a love of mine.

The Incredibility of Watercolor

God.
Water colors are incredible.

You take pure paper and add color to it while letting the original paper shine through instead of covering it. And you literally have to since that paper is the lightest tint that you'll have and I think that's the hard part. In most other mediums it's relatively easy to back track and cover up a mistake or to add white.

As if not being able to cover up mistakes isn't hard enough, water colors are alive, the paint moves and I think that's what fascinates me. It's so mesmerizing to trail a loaded brush over a page and watch the color trail and bleed out of its own accord. It's downright hypnotic to watch the pigment swirl around when you dip the brush in a trail of water.

My favorite part of the attached photo is the hat because it lets so much of the original white of the paper shine through while still making the hat 3D. I also really love the soft tones that were used whick convinces the onlooker that this hat is the softest thing in the world.

There's a great blog that I follow called Muddy Colors and it primarily posts how to articles and elaborations on the contributors' works, which I find to be really usefull.

I didn't come into my illustration major knowing all the ins-and-outs of the professional world that I'd one day be jumping into, nor did I really think about how hard it may be to deal with clients or being creatively stumped. Muddy Colors has articles on all of these topics and it's both intimidating me and making me more knowledgeable about the world that I'll be working in.

One of the posts that I've read more recently is one about taking the time to make reference photos. I normally just try to imagine what the person I'm trying to draw looks like and how the light would work but I see the value in actually getting a reference photo, that way one can see how the light and proportions would really work in a real world.