Thursday Night Art Jam -- Two ACEOs!
ACEO Summer Reflections was started on the 1st as a Theme Week ACEO, but after dark I didn't want to work on it any more and it took hours getting even halfway done. It's another drive-me-crazy detailed colored pencils painting in Design Spectracolors. Tonight I finished it with Lisa here, while she worked on a weird and gorgeous goddess painting where her pregnant belly turned into the Earth complete with continents and cloud patterns, and the rest of the planets curve around her while the fiery sun sits filling a good quarter of the background with warm gold and red brilliance.
With her fiery sun reference up on the screen, once I finished my colored pencils landscape, I looked through a bunch of photo reference books -- and then had a simple but powerful idea based on her reference:
ACEO Fiery Sun is in opaque watercolor -- Pelikan gouache. Lisa was using opaque watercolor for her painting and doing a lot of interesting tricks with it, and I remembered some astronomical paintings I loved that I saw at various science fiction conventions. So I did one on Fabriano Artistico hot press watercolor paper and then added several thin layers of gloss varnish to complete it, make the colors pop and the black darker. The starfield isn't spattered because that didn't work with the brush I was using. I think it really needs an old toothbrush to do that right. So I dotted the stars in with the point of my brush and succeeded in getting some very tiny ones in there!
I'm really happy with this for tonight's work.