Happy holidays!

This year's Christmas card. A bit of a rush job, but I managed to get it sent out on the 20th!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Happy holidays and an awesome new year to all of you who follow/read my blog. :)

Giveaway! (winners announced)

It's been 24 hours! Thanks for participating and sorry if you missed out this time. :)

The winners are J.M. Martin (comment #12 here on the blog) and CobraVenom (comment #170 on dA). Congrats!

Happy holidays to all of you!

***

Since I'm especially excited for Christmas this year I decided to go with the holiday spirit and have a little giveaway!

All you have to do is comment on this post within the next 24 hours (only once per person please!)
I will then use a random number generator to determine the winner.


The winner gets a painting, something along the lines of the portrait below.
It can be anything from your own original character, fan art of something you like or even a portrait of you or a friend/family member.


You can also comment on this image on my deviantArt to double your chances! (Again, only once per person!)
There will be two winners, one here and one on dA :)

***

Now that this is out of the way, two recent paitings :)

Happy Halloween!

Well, I guess this is the closest thing to a Halloween-themed painting I can manage this year, so here you go! Happy Halloween!

... spooky LEDs!

some not so spooky pumpkins

skull in daylight

And finally, some drapery studies from photo reference. It might seem counterintuitive to study drapery from a statue, but Bernini really knew his stuff.

Update!

To start this off, here are a couple of super quick paintings which I've been doing randomly to unwind.

Ygritte from a Song of Ice and Fire <3

... a weird Barbie-looking girl waving goodbye o_o

... and Marceline the Vampire Queen!

Also, a pretty lame landscape thing I did from memory after staring out the window for a while. I did kind of capture the colors though - a small success at least!

Onto the studies!

Quick-ish John Atkinson Grimshaw master study

Brush economy and some derpy faces :3

awesome horse armor

And finally, one of these quick paintings from the beginning of the post taken to finish. Done after the last two studies :)

Girls, girls, girls!

It's been too long! The studies are piling up.

still life

John Singer Sargent master study

Trying to work on brush economy with these, all between 20-30 minutes.

That's it for now!

Studies and brushes

Here are a couple of more or less recent studies!

First off, a Game of Thrones screencap study - I just love how the series looks, so there might be more of these!

A master study of John Singer Sargent's self portrait to practice some brush economy. For those interested, you can download a tiny brushset containing the brushes I made for this study.

I also used these brushes for this Anders Zorn master study as you can see in the first two steps. (The brush used for the final touches wasn't made by me, but you can get it here.)


If anyone is wondering -  I haven't forgotten about the full brushset I promised a while ago. I'm still in the process of figuring out what could be useful :)

Lyssa the Shaman

At the beginning of February I took the time to do a painting for the Art Evolution Challenge over at the ArtOrder. It was my second time partaking in an ArtOrder challenge - some of you may remember the first one.

The participants were asked to depict Lyssa, "A young female human wizard with black hair who always wears white trimmed in gold." (More info here)
The description is quite vague, yet quickly evokes some clear ideas. I knew this was going to be fun!

This week the results were announced and I'm thrilled to be one of the five winners out of 126 great entries!
The winners will be published in Black Gate Magazine soon - I believe mine will be in May.

Without further ado, here is the painting and the lovely things the judges Todd Lockwood, Jeff Easley and David Deitrick have said about it:

“Has nailed the lighting in this snowy mountain scene. The skin tones are perfect. The movement in the figure and skirts suggest that she might have been running but a moment before; the wind is blowing in any case. “You see that I can summon a mystical spirit ibex, do you not?” she might be saying. “Now what are you doing on my mountain? Be gone before I summon a herd of mystical spirit yeti.” Beautiful balance of colors and values. Excellent!”

Todd Lockwood

“The bones of this painting are very strong, and backed with solid composition in the subject. Warm colors of the figure offset the cold background and had great impact on the scene. A truly stunning piece!”

Jeff Easley

“The warm colors of Anna’s figure stands out against the cool background. Anna’s work makes me think of mornings back in Alaska when the fog is just burning away. I can feel the chill through my parka. Atmospheric perspective adds to the feeling of depth.”

David Deitrick

I'm very honored :)


Now to spice this wordy post up with some pictures...

Progress animation - please click to enlarge!

(More progress stuff like thumbnails over at wipNation!)
... and some very rushed studies!

<3

Too cold outside - let's stay home and paint!

More still lifes...

Swords are a lot more fun to paint than rocks and twigs - who would've thought?
And two RPG covers I probably won't be putting up on devianArt:

As always, thanks for looking! :)