Frank Finished & Custom Graphics Course done

Frank Sinatra Done - Yes his for sale, Email Me if your interested.

Last night was the final class for the year, I finally got to finish of Frank Sinatra although I was pretty close coming up to the final class and that I did some work on the painting the previous day at home it came up better than I was expecting considering that I feel my skill level should be higher than it currently is.  Yeah I am my harshest critic, but hey it's finished.

The Van of Inspiration

Since the weekend of the custom graphics course I have been airbrushing every day beginning on Saturday I didn't post the results of the custom graphics course but I have included the shots of the weekend in this post as well.  Hope you like them, I had a lot of fun working with the automotive paint and producing the classwork.  Not so much fun doing my little art project, I felt that I challenged myself way to much considering what I was trying to do but the result is the result for where I am now.

So Enjoy the photos and leave a comment if you like them.

The first three hours was spent doing this.. I am not happy with the result, but I learned a lot from the process.

Background done with most of the mask removed. 

Final class art work, with all the bling.  Great result.

Pick a happy Face!

Then shoot a gun at it.  Interesting effect,  creating water droplets with real water drops.

Frank Sinatra

Worked on Frank tonight in class, my focus tonight was to complete the hair so that it would give the picture shape, I looked at the reference and filled in the line detail of the hair then used lifting lines to even them out and then blacked out the rest. This seemed to work pretty well enough, I will revisit it later to work out how to put some highlights if I have time next week.

After feeling good about the hair, I focused on the hand see if I could get that nice 3d effect to make the hand pop. I got pretty close with the fingers and the inside of the palm, felt like I was coming into my own as I was doing the lines and shapes.

Levonne demanded that I do the frown lines but use white, I had to turn the picture upside down. Which made it easier to do the half lines, I strained the white through a stocking and also watered it down so that it would flow the the iwatta brush smoother but I think it was too much, it go me thinking about buying a white with its own thinker so that I get a smoother white and that I am not fighting to get it through the brush smoothly.

So I had a very successful night and I am happy with the result. 

More Frank.

Working on Frank tonight was a real challenge, I was unable to just get into the paiting. I did the bottom of the left eye and the left side of the face even some of the wrinkles on his forehead, which I found out later the lines are done with white and then the light grey so o had to fog them back and will give it a crack next session.
I am thinking of doing a day over the next week.

Class work Frank Sinatra

Was a relaxing class night, I wanted to work on finishing his eyes or at least one of them tonight. I asked Levonne to explain how to do the lower part of them and as always she gave me great advice on how to do it which was enough to give me the confidence to finish the right eye. Once done the rest of the shading and highlights just flowed from there, I havent felt so calm and into it for a long time, I feel the result of tonights effort shows.

Day 2 Custom Graphics Course.

It's been a couple of weeks since I did the second day now, I have just found enough time to write about it and post up some of the results of the day.  I had as much fun on the second day as I did the first, this time with two projects, the first was using marbleise to create a marble effect behind a flame. I used the same flame design as I had on the previous day since the stencil was already cut out and easily done, this time using a 3mm outline tape not the 6mm I used the day before.  It was good to have creative freedom to pain this one as well, but the emphasis was on the background on the the flame its self.

Using Green and yellow candies on over
the marble base gives it an amazing look.

Here it is the mask removed,
the blue pin stripe tape is still visible.

Some final choices on the colours and where I wanted the red.

After this project, we went on to create a space scene, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be but result was pretty damn good.  The scene wasn't just what we did, it was also creating the illusion of a metal border with pop rivets and rust where ever we wanted.  The result is below.

Final Result

I really liked it when it was just the space scene so here its, I wasn't convinced about the border but it was more about how to go about it than what the final result was.

The scene before I put the border around it.

Here it is again inside the spray booth
and without the planet or moon.

I had a blast and it has given me so many ideas for future projects.  Hopefully when I get my paints and other bits sorted I can start on my first personal project.

Home session Frank

Worked on Frank Sinatra tonight, tried to work on the hair and the eyes some more and a little on the lapel and the sleeve. I am having a hard time with it all, just can't complete a portion of it like I did the Angelina.
Finally the parts for my iwata arrived today so I fixed it up and had a go with it, I find it so much smoother to use than the badger no clicking when I pull the trigger back also the paint comes out finer so I have to go over the line multiple times but again it feels better to work with.

Custom graphics course day 1

Final Art work, so shinny! I love the automotive colours.

Crumple it and paint it

A relaxed start to the day by working with the paints and creating a shiny crumpled art work like I did at the beginning of the year, always fun to revisit something in a different surface and paints.

The small spray booth - Kelly's in the way of my photo moment

All the paints we used today

The rough lines hand done.

Lavonne explained how to prepare the metal board we were going to paint on, its normally used by sign writers so we had to use wet and dry sandpaper and remove the gloss from it without removing the white paint underneath, pretty easy stuff but needs to be done to prepare the metal board.

I drew a flame stencil, mine looks more like a bird, and used it to form an outline lightly, once done I free handed a line using the stencil line as a guide to give it a nice shape.

Masking Tape Applied

There where are couple of other funky things I did with the lines, like added dark blue to a few of the points but over all it was about getting the lines done. Then finally mask up the the line with thin tape, to give it some shape and because the other parts of the work were going to be different colours it wouldn't affect the line I had just done.




Using the light blue I evened up the inside of the over-spray of the darker colours, them white across the inside of the flame so that the yellow wouldn't turn green.

The blues turn green, all about basic colour mixing. :)

The mask had come off on three of the corners so I had to use the back of my nail to re-stick it down, but the damage was done some of the points had greens and yellows showing through, oh well its all about learning eh?

It was time to get creative with the red, I layed down some flames with in the flames just doing what I felt insted of trying to get some plan in my head, I think they call this being creative, lots of fun not having to plan out every part of art work gives me a feel of creativity. I went nuts with a flame stencil, why not flame inside a flame, reminded me of a Phoenix so I just went with that theme.


We broke for lunch at this time so I was refreshed to get back into it. We had to mask up the entire work cut out the outside so that it could be painted black, pretty easy except I was using a fine needle and tip which took forever, I was going mad, figured at some point I would switch to the medium needle and tip just to make my life easy, this didn't happen until the second peice but I will talk about that tomorrow.  Anyway here are the photos of the processes.

Covered the whole artwork with masking

Cut and removed the outside of the flame

Finally go crazy with the black.

At this point, we were introduced to the pearl colours, I fell in love with the way these look in the bottles, just a white with a hint of colour inside it, when I swirled it around I could see the paterns been made within it, fucken awesome.  I have always loved pearl on cars and bikes, something about that white with a hint of colour when the sun hits it.. All about the bling some say anyway, we were instructed to be creative again withe the masking tape so just did some lines with curves using two different widths just for something different. I wanted to create a sense of flight within the picture not sure if I captured it but hey it's all about the fun.
I forgot to take a picture of the masking with just the black background before applying the pearl colours, but the next two photos give you a good idea of what I was trying to do.

With the mask and the pearl red, viloet and blue from right to left.

The final result of doing the pearl colours.

The pearl colours came out almost ht way I wanted, I really wanted the red on the left to be a lot more vibrant than it appears but all good it still worked out well to give a nice contrast against the black lines.

Finally doing the unvailing of the flame shape was very exciting because I never really felt I knew what I did underneth but so when I removed the big mask and the line mask, it was like opening a gift for my birthday; I knew what was inside but don't appreciate it until I unwrap the gift.

Unwrapping the gift

What picture is complete without a bit of bling - I quote Levonne here - so she gave us a very simple way of adding bling to the picture without over doing it. This was the final result.

It's all about the bling :)

What an amazing day, good people and great fun.  I am looking forward to doing all again tomorrow with new twists to the art work.  Before we closed up for the day we had to use the same stencil but this time create a black background and fill the inside of it with silver paint, I didn't get a chance to take a photo but I will tomorrow before I being to create the second art piece.

Second class session

Started of a little slow tonight, so I focused on the hair after some instruction from Michelle and I started to layer it as told. It seems to be working but I need to build it up softer.
I filled in more black parts of the picture to give me something to work with and to give me more confidence for doing the softer parts of the picture.

Also got some great tips in terms of cleaning the brush and to get in the habit of priming the brush as I work through the night. I also need to get a plastic syringe so that I can clean the head by pulling and pushing metho through the head.

Attempting Hair and Wrinkle Textures tonight

First Attempt

Thought I would give myself a challenge and have a crack at hair and wrinkle textures, I downloaded a sample from one of the airbrush sites that had the lines and the reference texture next to them.

The first one I did, I tried to use the method as explained from the airbrush site, not real happy with the result but it's a result and was hard to try and match up the reference lines of someone else.

The second one was a better attempt, but, for me it lacked style as shown in the reference picture.  I tried going in close to get the fine lines but they just came out too sharp compared to the reference picture. 

The third I attempted it using my own experience and focused on what I saw and what strokes I needed to do so I could reproduce it, not happy with it but I felt a lot more comfortable doing it my way.

Both the wrinkle and hair textures I attempted were doing it with the same mindset for both, the authors way, a mix of the author and mine and finally mine.  

Second Attempt

While not stunning I did learn a number of things tonight:

1.       I really don't like using other peoples mark up as I don't know what they had in mind when they did the mark up.

2.       I gained better control over smaller strokes.

3.       I played around with a ½ reduced black paint, which I found gave me great control over the intensity of the line or shade I was doing.

4.       I LOVE working in my studio with the way I have set it up, I find working in class that there just isn't enough light  for me to see exactly what is going on with the paint.

Third Attempt

Overall all it was a good night of experimenting and practice all rolled into one.

Audrey session 5 - complete

Finally completed her tonight, I was surprised how fast I did the lips then the left eye, had to get some advice from the teacher on it, the the result is pretty amazing.
I played around with the hair some more to try and give it some body and make it pop, but it proved to be a little more difficult than the way it was explained to me, will give hair texture some more attention when I do the next class assignment Frank Sinatra.

Idea for a painting.

On the way home tonight, I had an idea for a painting and figured I would describe it and maybe one day be able to paint it..
It's in the shape of a tree trunk with branches that are in the shape of my tattoo.

With the two major orbs are represented inside a glass spheres;
The yin yan, the black would be a sphere of fire that is leaving a trail of fire with a blue water dot in the center.  The white circle is a sphere of water leaving a tail of water, with the dot as a little ball of fire. This is occurring within the glass sphere which is being held by a branch that looks like 3 fingers.

The wheel of life is also 3 spheres with tails, I haven't figured out how to represent birth, life and death; but the colours white, blue and black.

Each of the star signs will also be in orbs, the colour of the appropriate star sign and a symbol of that star sign.
I am not sure about the outer two orbs, but I am sure something will arise that makes it mine.

Session 4 Audrey

Focused on getting the ear done tonight, happy with it now. Was a real challenge getting all the shapes done the way it is on the reference.  I finished the windows and started to do some light shading on her neck line and also the left hand side of her face.

Played a bit with the hair trying to add some dimention to it as it still looks to flat for me, not sure how to give it some body so that it looks 3d. Might have another look at the photo I found on the web and see if I can re-create it to add that extra style to the art work.

Session 3 Audrey T2

Spent a good amount of time on the nose tonight, very happy with the way it came out.

Looking at the previous version, I feel like I am leading more from redoing the Audrey piece.  I think having read the notes again and doing the excersises that were ment to be done before I even started each section.  I now feel as though it was rushed or there wasn't enough teaching time spent with me during the lessons, I will mention that when I start again middle of October.

I am looking forward to finishing this piece off, so I can start on Frank. I find Audrey not exciting even though she is a beautiful woman, it might also be that I feel that I am not doing the image the justice it deserves.

I am going to work on the ear next, I am more confident that I will paint it correctly, also I have to find the side of a skull that I can use as a reference for the small piece I am doing.

Session 2 Audrey

Spent 3 hours on it tonight.

Class work

Just doing the eyes.

Older Works.