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.