I’m pretty sure that anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I have been keeping myself insanely busy the last few weeks, and sometimes not on purpose.
A couple of weeks ago my senior dog needed emergency surgery, and I am incredibly grateful that he is now fully recovered. However, since then, my life has pretty much been moving at what feels like a breakneck pace. I’ve worked really hard to create more art to sell prints of on my Inprnt store and I am now proud to say that I have commissions for pet portraits available on my own store here! I have been experimenting with a couple of different styles using some gouache brushes and I’m pretty happy with how these have turned out!
I used a reference photo from the Sktchy app to paint this and I’m really happy with how this turned out! This was a lot of fun to paint and I really love the way the cat turned out!
This one was a littler harder for me to develop because I’m so used to wanting to blend everything, but I think I like the way this looks!
The black cat was the most natural for me to get started on; it was really hard for me to stop working on it once I opened up Procreate! It’s definitely a style I feel much more familiar with. The bold gouache style of the French Bulldog however… That was was really frustrating at first for me because when I use gouache I just want to blend everything together. I really didn’t want something similar to the black cat painting, but I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile what I was used to with what I wanted to achieve. I took a break for a bit, and when I came back I tried to think more of it the same way I would think of a vector illustration in that each spot of color is a piece of a puzzle as opposed to needing everything to be part of one giant piece. I’m much happier with it now, and I hope to improve the technique by utilizing more “tiling” in my style.
I haven’t burned myself out yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll start feeling it if I continue to go down this breakneck pace. I need to take some time to do something that isn’t related to art/something that will make me money, because if I burn out it will be really difficult to start back up again.
Don’t worry, I’m not taking a hiatus at all, I just mean that I’m gonna make a conscious effort to set aside an hour or two everyday to do something for myself that is not art related or money related!