Acrylic Painting

I'm back in Santa Cruz for Christmas vacation, and I found a little painting I did last summer on the beach. It was overlooking a little creek/river thing that runs into the sea, and the water ripples there were very interesting. Sorry the photo is a bit blurry.

I also found a few studies I did that same day. It really helps to do a quick tonal thumbnail before starting a painting.

First Post!

Well, I finally found the motivation to start up my new art blog, Lambunctious! Hopefully I'll be posting at least once a week from now on.

This is the scan from an acrylic painting I did last week for my dad's birthday. The style was inspired by a combination of Tadahiro Uesugi's digital paintings, and the sponge-and-stencil techniques of old Hanna-Barbera backgrounds.

I did a little digital color sketch before I started, to get the look planned out:

It was interesting to see the differences between painting the same thing digitally and traditionally. The value range was a lot smaller for the acrylic painting and some of the effects were too hard to achieve, but it definitely did help doing a digital sketch first to get the gist of what I wanted. Although I think next time I'll use a much smaller paintbrush to paint the final lines on the trees; it looks too sloppy and rushed as is.

Here is another digital color sketch I painted in the same style for this project. I chose the bear idea in the end because it looked more cheerful.

All in all, although none of the paintings are especially polished, I learned a lot and it was fun to experiment!