Pages

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Chinese Brush Paintings

Illustration hasn't been treating me all that great these days, so I've taken up the idea of painting people's pets for $$. It's a little kitschy, but there's got to be some way I can make a living off these grossly impractical skills of mine, and the pet portrait thing seem pretty popular these days.

So here are my first few attempts, using a Chinese brush as my exclusive painting implement:







I find that I enjoy this quite a bit, so who knows, maybe this could turn out to be an alternative source of income? More portraits soon, plus: human portraits. More on that later. (I've actually been doing quite a bit of work lately, just haven't gotten around to getting it all scanned and photographed)

4 comments:

  1. I absolutely love these. I'm a huge animal nut. You're really doing those dogs proud.

    For the record, I draw all my two tone linework in Painter. There are a few videos on my blog of the process, too.

    I'm going to start lurking here, if you don't mind.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks! You're welcome to lurk! Though my posts seem to trickle in at the rate of about one a month. I've got a couple more cat portraits, and a whole bunch of b&w human portraits I've yet to photograph--probably be posting them in the next couple of weeks.

    Ray, the two tone style looks like a really good style for you! Looking forward to seeing more pieces like it! And comics, please!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'll take quality over quantity any day. Very, very solid work. Inspiring!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Really, seriously appreciate it. I do this stuff in a cave, and sometimes you just don't know. Watercolor's a new medium for me (well, I had a couple of classes in school, but was never any good at it), but I think I landed on something with this dry brush approach. Still, taking on the task of doing pet portraits was making me feel a little artsy craftsy. Thanks for the encouragement!

    There's all these little boxes they make for artists that don't seem to reconcile very well with one another--like gallery painting, and illustration, and cartooning and this kind of stuff, but for me they're all related. So, you know, I'm glad that you dig them.

    ReplyDelete