It's from Sirius!

Wow- It's been so long! I'm ashamed to say that I've ignored my blog for over a year. I'll admit the simplicity of just snapping a picture for Instagram rather than scanning it at my computer is primarily the reason I've been so negligent. But with the upcoming new year I resolve to do better. I'd like to start with sharing this small painting I did for my daughter, a huge Harry Potter fan (ok, so are we, her parents). In fact, I've been away from blogging for so long that apparently I didn't even share the initial sketch, which I only decided to paint several months later. I did the sketch in about 15 minutes, with a light grey Prismacolor Marker for the rough drawing and a Pentel brush pen for the black lines. A few months later, as her birthday approached, I thought I decided to flesh it out into a full painting. As you can see it's basically the same but with many subtle changes. Check out the video below to see how I refined the sketch in Photoshop before painting.

 If you compare the two versions, you can see some subtle differences. I refined the likeness a lot, and improved on the pose, hand positions, etc...

Here's the final painting. If you'd like to see a quick progression, showing the Photoshop refinements to the sketch, here's a short progression video.

Owl perch and wand holder

This isn't the sort of thing that I normally post about, but I have historically shown a few crafty things I've made, so I thought I'd show this.

 



My daughter is a huge Harry Potter fan (ok, my wife and I are too) and last year we went to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios Florida. She came home with a ton of merchandise. I immediately started thinking about neat ways to display some of it, rather than just shoving it in her closet. It took about a year, but this year for her birthday I finally made her this combination owl perch and wand holder. I wanted it to look like something that might be standard issue in a Hogwarts dormitory, so I stained it red and added a gold medallion and G for Gryffindor. My initial plans called for much more distressing and even fake owl poop to really make it look old and worn. But for time's sake, and making sure it would be something that a little girl would like, I kept the final one nice and clean. Also, the little ramikan was just something I put on there for the picture. I did want to have a worn clay dish or something either filled with birdseed or little mouse bones, for the owl to nibble on, but again, budget and time won out.