Crafty Crap: Painting Edition

Taking a completely lateral leap, I have been PAINTING!

I had a Girls’ Day Out with some friends in January, and we went to one of those drink-cocktails-and-paint-canvases studios. I was being a bit of a Bad Elitist Hipster about it at first - the entire website looked like it catered to Soccer Yoga Pinterest Minivan Moms, and...well, I have a degree in painting - but I ended up having a lot of fun!

(Okay, I did go a little bit hipster, and brought my own paint. Look, the studio works in acrylics, and acrylic paint is the most evil of all paint media. My jam of choice is water-mixable oils, which get me all the flexibility and blending capabilities of oil, without the need for nasty, dangerous, hard-to-dispose-of solvents and thinners.)

So, this was my result:

(And this was the sample image we were meant to be painting:

I am bad at following directions when there are paintbrushes in my hand.)

But it was fun! The studio was very laid-back (no one cared that I brought my own paint and went wildly off-model), and it was wonderful to be painting again. There's nothing quite like the physical sensation of painting - the tactile sense of pushing paint around on the canvas, manipulating it into the shapes you want, seeing a single brushstroke suddenly become a part of a larger picture. There's a reason painting was my concentration in art school.

So, naturally I had to come home, dig out my easel and supplies, and paint some more!

My first subject was Rawr, a silly little furball character I created back in college. (You can see more of Rawr and his crew here.)

Being a cartoon character best represented by flat colors, Rawr probably wasn't the ideal subject for oil paints, but again. Fun.

And then I went a little crazy. And listened to "Let it Go" on repeat too many times...

This took me forever.  I ended up drawing the pose in Photoshop, printing it out, and transferring the pose onto the canvas via the grid method. Then I spent many many evenings painting Elsa - refining the pose, altering the shading, trying to correctly color her hair...and then I finished by covering it all in a blizzard of painted snow.

This is the first time I've done fanart in oil paint - normally I work in markers, colored pencil, digitally, or watercolor at most. But I knew the image I had in mind would only work with the blending properties of oil, so I went for it.

I ended up going back to the wine-and-canvas studio (thanks to some studio credit I had from my first session) and took The Pie with me for a kids' session. The theme was Monster:

I actually (mostly) stayed on script for this one:

It was Pieface that did me proud. See, after we had laid down the basics of the monster, the instructor told the class to start adding their own details - how many eyes, what kind of teeth, add a hat...

And then Pie went off. She seized onto the word "hat", and painted a black beret onto her monster. Now, Pie looooves the Mythbusters. She's very into science, and scientific exploration + explosions = her idea of a cracking good time. So when I saw this beret, I naturally asked if it was a "Jamie" hat...

Behold, the "Jamie Hynemonster."

She took the idea and ran with it, adding the mustache and the lab coat and of course he's yelling at Adam. I was completely and utterly outclassed in creativity by a five-year-old, and this mama couldn't be prouder.

Of course, now my easel and paints are packed back away, and fabric has taken over my worktable. For those interested in seeing (unedited and generally bad) progress photos, I've started a cosplay-centric Tumblr here: doomandnachos.tumblr.com/. Work on my Doctor Who project has commenced!