Christmas Cookies

I made Christmas cookies!  My mom gave me her Kitchen Aid mixer (!) while I was home for Thanksgiving, and I got the yen to bake.  I made the dough, rolled out the dough, formed the cookies, and baked for about four hours on Sunday, and iced them all day Monday.  It took a crazy long time, and killed any dream I ever had about opening my own bakery, but I freaking love that mixer.  I would write odes to that mixer.

I used recipes that I got off the internet - you can find them here:
Best Rolled Sugar Cookies
Sugar Cookie Icing

The icing recipe is a good one, but you have to fiddle with the amounts of milk to get the right smooth consistency.  I followed them to the letter the first time and it gave me what looked like good snowball packing snow.  But after you figure that out...  The recipe gives you that shiny frosting that you normally get in bakery cookies, but be warned - the light corn syrup gives you the shiny, but if you put in too much it will take hours for the icing to dry.  Long, sticky hours.  (Something to think about: I used the almond extract suggested in the recipe, but that stuff is really sweet.  Too sweet.  I should have just used vanilla.)

The cookies are good too.  I'm usually not a huge fan of sugar cookies, but these are pretty tasty.

Disney Coloring Book Pages, WIP's

(Do I ever post anything that isn't a work in progress?)

All this time I thought that other digital painters must have some secret that they weren't sharing with me.  I thought I couldn't make the really pretty stuff because I didn't have the right program or whathaveyou, but it turns out I'm just stupid.  It's called 'Flow', and it's a brush setting in Photoshop, and all this time I thought it was just another way to say 'Opacity'.  It's not.  *facepalm*

I recently found a really amazing digital artist on Deviant Art.  Her painting style is just gorgeous.  It's all big brush strokes and texture, and I love it.  Anyway, I was going through her stuff and she wrote a bunch of FAQ/tutorial things, and one of them was what brushes she uses, and it was there I learned about 'Flow'.  So I've been trying to mimic her style all weekend to figure out how she does it.  So far I'm an epic fail.  I see chunky brush strokes and my brain goes, 'Gah!  Soft edged brush now!  Smooth that out!'  So that part isn't going very well, but I'm learning stuff through failure, which is a plus.

I've been trying things out using the painting exercise shown above.  You take a Disney coloring book page - Choose your favorite princess! - and you paint it in the style of some work of art.  It's fun and pretty silly, but I've seen it done with impressive results.

I started out this exercise with Jasmine, as I attempted to turn her into a Degas ballet dancer (in the coloring book page she's holding this length of sheer fabric, and I thought it might work), but my digital painting skillz aren't up to imitating Degas, so I gave up.

I moved onto Ariel and Eric.  I'm painting them in the rococo style (you can see the painting I'm drawing from here: Francois Boucher's Venus Consoling Love), because this pose screams 'rococo' to me.  I'm actually really excited about this one.  I don't think it's very accurate as far as being rococo goes, but I think it might turn into a cartoonish version of it.  And anyway, Ariel's hair looks fantastic.

I only started on Alice this morning, because I wanted to try the eye thing.  She's going to be the creepiest version of Alice I've ever seen.  The only part of her that's 'done' is her eyeballs, though I think I need to make the inner part of her irises darker...  But she'll be fantastic and weird when I'm through.

Marie in the Meadow, WIP

Marie in the Meadow, WIP

It's taken a long time, but I've discovered a horrible truth about myself: I shouldn't buy nice things, because I'll never use them.  Case in point, gorgeous gallery wrapped canvas.  I have several of these lying around my office, all languishing with backgrounds for paintings that will never be completed.  Why?  Because when the canvas is so nice then the painting must be too, and I find that creating anything with such a high standard to begin with is impossible.  So I never start.  Thus I haven't painted anything that one could actually call a proper painting since college.  In a painting class. 

So I was at JoAnn Fabrics, looking at the canvases and thinking, 'Oh, wouldn't it be nice and calming to paint something?  Wouldn't that be great?  Then you could hang it on the wall if you like it, or hock it on etsy if you don't... Yeah, that sounds awesome.  Hm, what should I get?'  I was drawn to the gallery wrapped stuff, of course, because it's the BEST, but then I thought about it and realized that it would collect dust, looking lovely and full of potential...  But in the end, a waste of money and depressing.  Instead I got a two for one deal that's got the staples showing on the sides.  UGLY.  But look!  I painted something on it.  And it's pretty great so far!

I took pictures of some of the details with the camera on my phone, so they're crap, but you get the idea.

The painting is based off a still from the movie Marie Antoinette, with Marie and three of her gal pals sitting in a meadow.  They're all wearing gorgeous dresses and hats, and it seemed like a fun thing to paint.

It's been fun so far.  I'm trying to be very painterly with this, as my former painting teacher always complained that I was painting like I was drawing, and that's really not the way to go about it.  I did the trees in the background yesterday, and the faces today.  I'll start on the hats this weekend, and maybe block in the dresses.

Unfortunately, my brain was stupid and I decided to use acrylics instead of oils, so painting the faces has been a trickier process than I would have liked.  Acrylics don't blend like oils, because they dry out too quickly for that, so I've made the same skin color three times and tried to recreate shadow colors a dozen more.  But Marie's face turned out lovely, and since the other girl has the excuse of wearing a hat I don't have to fret too much over the excess of shadow around her eye.

Marie in the Meadow, acrylics on canvas.  Work in progress as of November, 2010.