2 Small Paintings - Under the Surface & Reflection (Patreon)

Hi peeps, 

I finished 4 new small paintings this week and wanted to share the first 2 with you! (the next 2 will be up in a day or two). 

All these little pieces are exploration/study exercises for what will hopefully become bigger paintings at some point. 

The final pieces will likely look very different from these, but this process allows me to iron out some kinks and try out various options before jumping into something more ambitious. 

"Under the Surface" was probably the trickiest of the 4 paintings I worked on this week. 

Painting the scaled creature's back breaching the surface of the skin was a huge challenge, and I struggled with the texture and look of the scales for a while. 

One of the difficulties with this idea was making the skin look somewhat fluid and translucent, as well as translating the fact that the creature is supposedly much larger than the body of the character could "realistically" contain. 

There are a number of things I would want to work on before I ever turn this into something bigger and more complex, but this was a very interesting beginning. 

My goal with Reflection was to have the shards mimic the look of glass, which was tricky to achieve, but was also a very useful exercise to practice.
I now feel more confident I can complete that effect in a bigger piece, although I might do a few more studies of transparent objects at some point.

I will have a couple more posts for you before the month is over, but in the meantime, I hope you are all well :)

Take care and speak soon! <3