Another Ritratto di Bambino

Little Giac is now almost 10 month old. Time to make a new portrait to add to Bella's room. Drawing in ready...I am leasurely working on the inks.

     

It's strange to think that after this I will make just one more portrait, for little baby L., and then the series will be completed.
There will be other kids-themed drawings though...Bella now has her own requests (she wants a drawing of baby Pluto) and I have to start thinking about decorating the new nursery!

Interlude

Just a doodle done in front of the TV, waiting to start the next project.
Have a great Monday (the greatest challenge) and rest of the week!

Ritratto di Bimba (Bella's Portrait) finished

It's done. And I think I sort of saved it.
Thank goodness for my husband's constructive criticisms and the mixed media approach that allowed me to correct at least partially my mistakes with pencils!

What did I change?
-Her eyes were/are not aligned. I used a dark brown pencil to redraw the lower and upper lids outlines to create the illusion of new boundaries.
-Her lips were vampire-like, way to red and dark, like if blood had congealed on them (yuk!). I used a white pastel pencil to tone down the redness.
-Her smile was sort of uncertain, so with a dark violet and brown pencils I pushed the corners of her mouth further sideways and upward.
-Then I used  dark and reddish brown pencils to define better her cheeks and the smile-puffiness under her eyes (what do you call those thigies?...8 month old kids cannot possibly have "bags" under their eyes!).
-After this, I darkened the left side of her face, because somehow it looked too broad before. This also, I think, helped giving a more 3-dimentional look to the face.
-I added wisps of hair here and there, to avoid the impression she was wearing a lopsided wig.
-Finally, I toned down the contour of her face and collar overlapping white pastel pencil to the too severe and bold multiliner sign.

I think that's about it.
I feel better about it, now...so I think I can safely hang it in Bella's room without making her cry in fear of creating an unpleasant "mommy thinks I am ugly" complex. ;)

Hope you guys are all happy and enjoying this beautiful September day. Hugs and kisses,
Astera and family!

Portrait of Bella in progress

Hei there! How are you guys? After my summer vacation, I came back to a ton of work, daycare-born weekly colds, and unavoidable evening exhaustion. The most stressful times are gone, though, so I have a measure of tranquility that allows me to draw again. In fact, I have picked up the portrait I started in June  and am finishing it.

Here is a glimpse to the work in progress:

I got stuck on the inks, because the lamp in the living room that I normally use to work broke and we needed to get a new one. That and the fact that after dinner I just wanted to curl up doze off while watching TV...

Once the inks were finished, the fun part began and coloring has been relatively fast.I enjoyed a lot coloring the dragon!

So, after coloring everything, I started working on the face, which is unusual. Usually, the face gets colored first, because I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I need to do and it's a lot of fun, plus I tell myself that if I make a mess I can start over by transferring everything and giving it another try without too much grief. Instead, this time I was so happy with the lineart that, modestly speaking, I had no doubt, the coloring of the face would be very easy. I started with the skin, with which I was pretty happy. Then I proceeded to the mouth and the eyes...which turned out way too dark...now she looked like a not-so-pretty vampire.  Plus, with colors, all the irregularities and symmetry issues that I could not see in the inks became very clear. Why do I always miss these flaws until the very last moment? Looking at it in the mirror (I know I should have done this ages ago!) showed all the problems even more obviously...how to fix them?

Ritratto di Bimba in progress...

Hi everybody! In little more than a week I will be going to see my parents in Italy! Finally...it's been two years since my last visit and it feels like forever. So much has changed and I have missed my family and friends enormously. I am looking forward to introduce Bella to all and I am curious to see how she will behave during the trip and in a completely new environment (actually, I am mildly concerned about the flight...we've been told to bring lots of little new toys with which to entertain her...I wonder if that will be enough or if she will try to take the airplane apart...my anticipated apologies to our fellow travelers).

I don't expect I'll have time to draw at all (it used to be difficult before the baby!) and my internet access will be limited. These are the last days when I'll be able to post anything. So I though to share the project that I have just started: Ritratto di Bimba. It's the counter part to the Ritratto di Bimbo from several months ago (you can see it here).

Let's see how much I will be able to advance in the next few days...there are so many things I have to organize before we leave...

In case I could not write again before the day of the flight, let me wish you a very happy and sunny June. I'll be back in July!

WIP (with a ton of descriptions!) for "Global fashion"

Premise: this is a long and detailed WIP report...so I do understand if you find it boring and skip all my babbling. ;) However, if you are interested in this kind of posts, let me know and I'll try to write more of them (you can also tell me if you think I should use my time better..I will not get offended! ;)).

I mentioned a few days ago that I intended to participate to a contest. It was about travel and the things we bring back or lose or we find different uses for. When abroad, I tent do by local clothes (so many pretty fabrics out there). Back home, I wear these items separately, to give an interesting spin to an otherwise plain or classic outfit. Here, I decided to pull all my "explorer" wardrobe out all together (ok the glasses are from Italy, and I am Italian, so technically they don't count, but, since I live in the US, I decided to include them too...;)).

You have see the sketch for this in the previous post...here it is again in case you had forgotten about it. ;)

The next picture is the inked drawing. I decided to adopt the mirror image to the one I first chose for the sketch, because I realized that I tend to draw figures with faces looking towards the left (it just comes more natural to me, for some reason) and I wanted to change for once.

Of course, immediately my husband pointed out that her neck is unnaturally long. In this case, I had been aware of it. It was intentional, as a matter of fact. ;)
 I wanted to give her a more "Modigliani-woman" look and focus the attention on the necklace, also separating the collar of the vest from the draping of the scarf.
Also, probably it's hard to see it here, but her face and hand have been inked with gray Copic Multiliner, to soften the line of the skin. I ended up correcting this detail to increase contrast with the background during the final stages of coloring.



In this next image, I put down the main colors of the drawing and started shading the pants and the tunic. I have to say that this is the stage that I am more satisfied of. I think that things went a bit downward from here. I guess I kind of liked the flat colors, Japanese print-style I had there. However, I wanted to experiment coloring a subject against a bright light source (the window), so I kept going, Typically my characters are in full light and I end up shading them in a pretty standard way. That would not do. In addition, a well placed shadow brings to life portraits and creates dynamic impression even in very non dynamic scenes. So, there you have it...I kept working with my markers.







I also used pencils more heavily than usual, to give more texture to the drawing. I have mixed feelings about that. I need to practice more...
Here, I am yet adding more shades, coloring the items of the room. For a while I was tempted to leave the flower motif black and white, then I came to my senses: the whole point of this Peruvian vest is that is so colorful and happy, an uplifting contrast to the winter greyness of the Plains.






In the following picture you see the main reason for me being unhappy about this drawing (good thing I did not have time to submit it to the contest!). You might have guessed that up till this point I had not really planned the scenery outside the window. Well it was supposed to be my garden, always there for me to copy, no? Yeah, but to improvise it directly with markers on an already blocked background was not a very good idea, given my present skill level. The more I worked on the spruces, the more I had the feeling I was messing up...and I was! They turned out rather ugly and out of sink with the rest of the piece. Too bad. Lesson learned: do not leave trees to chance.








My way of fixing it was to draw the glass of the window! I used diagonal strokes of white pastel to achieve the effect. Another advantage of this solution is to give the impression of light coming from the window and contrasting better the character (especially her arm). Oh, well...I'll do better next time! ;)

Here is a final cleaned photo of Global Fashion:

BTW, the sources of the outfit are as follows:

Head-scarf from Egypt
Sunglasses from Italy
Earrings from Taiwan
Necklace and alpaca vest from Peru
Dress from India
Ring from Chile
Teapot and cup from Japan

Enjoy!

Two Cherries...Finished

Sorry for the delay, guys...these past few days we were victim of an awful GI bug that has been plaguing Bella's daycare...No Easter luncheon, no parties, no walks in the sun, no energy for drawing or posting on the blog.

Possibly (I don't feel like claiming victory over the infection yet...it's really nasty) things are getting better and will allow me to go back to drawing. I have a small project I want to complete before our trip to Italy in June.

Meanwhile, here is the picture of the finished Two Cherries piece.

Why the cherries? Bella and Pit look so much alike that they could be siblings: they made me think of two cherries. In addition the cherry tree symbolizes rebirth and new awakening and these two little angels have brought new life to our families, new hope, and new adventures.

Happy Pasquetta (the Monday after Easter is a holiday in Italy...not in the US unfortunately...)!

Ritratto di Bimbo (Portrait of a Child) Finished

This is the finished piece:

In case you were wondering about the symbolism of the border...here it goes:
Gardenias: Joy Daisy: Innocence and beauty.
Stephanotis:...well, my initial research told me it meant good luck...but of course after finishing coloring the whole thing, I found out it means desire for marriage and travel...the first meaning clearly not appropriate to the theme...ooops! But the desire to travel to meet the family that lives in Italy of course applies...so, in a sense, I am saved! ;).
Tooth fairy: Pit like Bella grew his teeth late...the tooth fairy will wait a bit, meanwhile I put her here as a propitious figure and...because I like drawing little fairies so much! ;).
Baby animals: they are so cute and so is he! In addition, his lovey is a super cute little rabbit, Gigi. Grandma brought one over for Bella as well. His name is Bunny Boo...
Tiger: Pit was born in the year of the tiger.
Pacifier: another thing Pit and Bella have in common is their undying passion for the pacifier, hence the pacifier club emblem in the right hand corner. We all need to work on growing out of the habit!

What about the necklace? There is a belief among the grandmothers in my family (although from the web it looks likes it pretty main stream...) that wearing an amber necklace helps dentition. So of course both babies got one. Interestingly enough, it looks like this tradition goes back centuries. Here is Rubens' son wearing one!

As always, thanks for reading!

After almost a year of silence...

...and sleep deprivation, here I am again!

Baby Bella. is growing beautifully and she is the delight of my life.

A moment ago, while reading an old post in which I stated that I was getting my act together I laughed! I surely believed that at the time, but it was before I went back to my full time job! In reality, nowadays I have little time for anything non-family related, but I took advantage of the Christmas holidays to draw something for Bella's new bedroom (we also moved to a bigger house...what a year!).

It's a portrait of her little cousin, Pit, who is two year older than her. He is an adorable child and we can't wait for the two little ones to finally meet (he lives in Italy, we in the USA and unfortunately we haven't had a chance to visit yet...). Meanwhile, I thought  this would help to remind little I. of her family overseas.

Here is the process...in the next days, I'll try to take a picture of the finished piece.

Shakespeare-illus Before and after

So, the other day I thought I was done with Shakespeare-illus and I showed you the "final result". A couple of days later I had a look at the picture I posted here and on deviantart and I realized that 1) the shot I took of it was not very good; 2) There were problems that went beyond my poor skills as a photographer. In other words, the picture was far from complete.

The most egregious issue had to do with the fact the inks had faded under the several washes of colors. The faces were blurred and the details I liked so much in the pencils phase were practically invisible. This was particularly true for Othello, one of my favorite characters. The contours were so dim that all the characters looked flattened and the overall impression was pretty blah. I was also a bit unsatisfied with some of the shading and blending.

I had to do something about these defects. So in the weekend I worked a bit here and there to fix things up. It took longer than it should have because my inking pen (Copic Microliner 0.03) was getting dry and every single line was a pain (although I find that in these adverse conditions I tend to be more precise and the overall look of the lines is more steady...even if my hand is not! ;)).

Finally, I took a new photo of the drawing with better contrast and color balance. Here it is, together with the "before the treatment" version. I definitely thinks I have improved it quite a bit. ;)

BEFORE

AFTER

 What do you think?

Now I have to find a nice frame and pack the gift for my friend.  ^^

Shakespeare-illus

I mentioned sometime ago that I was starting this new rather challanging project on Shakespeare and its characters as an excuse to portray my good friend GP. It's finally done and it took a while because I got stuck several times and almost lost while dealing with the smoke.

I don't really haveWIP pictures because I worked mostly in the evenings of very very busy days and there never was a good time or the proper light to take decent photographs.

However I can tell you that I worked character by character, starting with the lady Macbeth (does dhe look mean enough for you to recognize her? ;)). The most difficult part there was the tartan shawl, which I had to research quite a bit.

I then moved to Romeo and Juliet. I am rather happy with Romeo, but Juliet came out very different from how I imagined her...to me she looks older than she should (Romeo has seduced her Granny by mistake) and her nightgown is definitely too blue (should have been white with bluish shadows)...oh well.

Hamlet is ok, I think...I referenced the costume Laurence Olivier wore in the 1948 movie here.

Next, I worked on Titania, which was pretty easy...I am used to draw fairies, so their queen was not too bad.

I dedided to skip Bottom for a while and to tackle Othello (my favorite), whose dark skin was of some concern to me, as I am not used to render it with markers. On the internet people recommended using the Chamois Copic as a base. I follow this recommendation and used Champagne and a varieties of blues (B91, especially) and blue-violets/greys for shadows and adjustments...

Then I worked on the flaming head of Ariel without too much trouble, fortunately.

Finally I went back to Bottom and added King Lear (right) and Falstaff on the left as figures emerging from the smoke and therefore not fully colored.

By my friend Shakespeare-illus, you can see a small version of Melpomene, the muse of Tragedy giving a few reccomendations (clearly he is not writing something funny at the moment).

The last character I painted was of course the protagonist. His shirt worried me a lot (folds and more folds)and so was the risk of altering his features by coloring the outlines (usually the opposite should happen, but you never know, also because the light source in the drawing was very different from the one of my reference picture).

At this point the hardest part, the background begun. In reality the window and the wall were pretty straight forward, but I knew I was running into troubles with the smoke. First I made it sickly pink, then I added B91 which unfortunately made it sort of uninteresting and flat. So i started adding grey shadows and colored highlights that picked up from the characters' outfits (for example, green from Lady Macbeth's dress, yellowish from Romeo's goden tunic, red from Othello's crimson cloak). Then I kept blending and adding depth with more Blue violets...until I thought a nice grey-green would work well in the mix. As often happens I was working in front of the TV and the light was dim, too dim as I realized next morning. I actually added to much green and the smoke coming from Shakespeare-illus' pen instead of appearing mysterious and intriguing looked rather toxic and stinky. Ooops. I spent quite a while trying to cover up this "minor" error (and I did not completely succeed in this, as you can see...sigh!).
Lesson learned: always use the brightest light while coloring, no matter how good the movie is! ;)
That's all I can tell you on the process...

This is the final version:

I look forward to see the reaction of my friend, who most definitely is not expecting this....;)

Madame Mayple

Dear friends, how are your vacations proceeding? I went back to work a couple of days, but things were pretty slow, as you can imagine and so it was not too bad. Today I am back on holiday and I take advantage of the free time to catch up with you.
Christmas was fun and pleasantly spent celebrating with the Italian friends that have become our family here in the USA. Now we are getting ready for New Year's Eve. This year nobody felt like cooking so we decided to try for the first time to go and eat out...I'll let you know how that works out for us...

Going back to art, I wanted to show you this WIP and final drawing. It's my gift to my friend Mayple (Monika Victoria) of The long lost wood. She is an amazing professional artist I met on the Enchanted doll forum and I greatly admire. This year, she is having the adventure of a lifetime: she left her native Australia to tour Europe. She is now living in Hungary where she is working full time on her art. Her paintings are delicate and daunting, ethereal and full of life. Go have a look if you don't know her already. She is also on flickr.
It has been a particular Christmas for Mayple and I wanted to make her feel she is not alone, although far away from home and her dear ones. I also wanted to thank her for the art she has sent me (still in the mail I am afraid...as soon as it gets here, I'll show it to you all  ;)...sometime snail mail is maddening...). Anyways, since she loves 18th Century costumes and she is now in Europe, I thought I would make an attempt to portray her as a lady in costume with a backdrop of the land of her ancestors. Therefore, I referenced one of the pictures she has published on her blog and that I like a lot for the beautiful light and for the sweet  and intent expression of her face, which I thought well represents her character, even if we never actually met in person. It must have been a good choice of reference because for once I did not have to struggle to reproduce the feature of my subject. In a matter of a couple of hours, I had the pencils and inking done...I know that's not fast by any means, but for my standards it's like being Speedy Gonzalez!


Then the fun began. I wanted to show her as if she was standing on the balcony of a palace overlooking a Hungarian landscape. Thus the drapery on the back and the flowers on the left. At this point I had not yet researched ideas for the background, but I had very clear ideas about the colors of the dress and the flowers in her hair (the latter being a typical feature of real life Mayple...her up-does are adorable. :)). So I quickly worked on these aspects and on the floral composition. I am not sure that the amount of work I put in that vase was called for, because as you will see in the final product, it becomes kind of lost in the background. Alas, you have probably noticed by now that I cannot resist focusing on tiny (and often irrelevant) details...

As I started working on the drapery in the back I realized that more depth of color-shadows was required by the character skin, so every once in a while I went back and add a new layer of color, although i was always a bit concerned about overdoing it. And in truth, there was a moment when I decided to use a particularly dark blue violet shadow on her cheeks and forehead that made me fear for the worst...Immediately after the sudden defection of the beige I was using to smooth things up put me in a panic. You should have see how terribly scarred by diagonal stripes was poor Mayple's face...My husband heard a desperate scream and wanted to see what I had done but I could not bring myself to show him....and I feel I had to act quickly...so I looked for alternatives in the palette and fortunately found a couple of earth tones that saved the whole thing (after tons of layers, of course). Too bad I don't recall the details of what copics I actually used (I worked on this piece before Thanksgiving), although I remember that Brick Beige was the one marker that stopped working and created the whole mess.

After fixing the skin issues and having completed the foreground, I started looking for a background. I found a beautiful picture on Google that depicted the Balaton region and I decided to reference it. I tried to figure out who took the picture but could not...it's a very popular image, used in a gazillion sites...if anybody knows the author I'll be happy to give her/him the due acknowledgement.

The background was more relaxing of a job and everything went pretty smoothly. As you can see in the picture above, I first used a light shade of grey to set out the outlines of the landscape and to prevent the colors of the sky and the fields from becoming too bright and dominant. Despite this precaution, the business of the clouds in the sky was a bit distracting, so I used my Derwent pastels pencils (mainly white) to tone down the contrast there....

And here is the final result:

 

Happy New Year!

In Arwen's shoes completed.

I finished my Lord of the Rings-inspired piece, "In Arwen's shoes". This is the progression from inking to the final piece (if you want you can also see the initial drawing in pencil from a previous post):

Inking: the easy part

Defining a palette

Sticking to the palette: the hard part for me...

The finished piece: copic markers with touch ups in pencils and white gel pen. Enjoy!

Arwen in Turin

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Margherita came to visit us in Chicago from Turin (Italy). Together we visited the comic expo at the McCormick's Center (C2E2). After seeing all the phenomenal artists at work there, Margherita asked me to draw a portrait of herself  and a few other friends as superheroes. Since they all love horses and like The Lord of the Rings, I thought it would be fun to draw them as characters of the books. Of course, I thought Marghe should be Arwen as she is tall and sinuous as an elf. This is the work in progress...there are a few more details to hone, but I hope to have it ready soon!

Little Flat Butterfly-Io Galatea

Little Flat Butterfly-Io Galatea, a photo by Astera T on Flickr.

This is a little flat doll I made for a friend. She owns one of Marina Bychkova's amazing Enchanted Dolls. You should know that I am a fanatic admirer of the beautiful works of this artist. So I was thrilled when Gita (or should I say Tiggy) asked to make a 2D portrait of Butterfly-Io. It took me quite a long time...in part because I am rather slow, in part because I painted the character on two sides. (wings included).  For this piece, I used Copic Markers and pencils on Fabriano Artistico Hot Press watercolor paper.

Coming soon, a post dedicated to Marina's work, which you should go and check out on her website http://www.enchanteddoll.com/