Mixed Media Tomfoolery.

I love working with mixed media. About the easiest way in the world to make me happy is to give me art supplies of any sort. I'm always on the look out for wood and wood panel that can be used for paintings and drawings, and a new favorite of mine are these cheap little panels that you can find in craft stores with varying degrees of thickness and edge design. Prep the surface with gesso or something similar and you're ready to go! This is a teeny little work in progress picture that I don't really have any particular direction in mind for, but I'm having a lot of fun just doodling and playing around.  I was wandering around a home decorating store the other day and I saw a large custom decoupage-type painting of a chandelier, and the design kind of stuck with me and inspired me to use a similar design for this silly thing. I'm still working on it, and I'll post a better quality picture when I'm done!

So I decided to color the Koren picture from the last update, since I have a good hi-res scan of the lines to use if I decide to mess around with the scenery again. I'm trying to make more dynamic pictures with less white space, so I made a quick little last-minute backdrop.

I have a little block of watercolor paper that has sort of been sitting around collecting dust, but I used it in the past to blot the excess off of my texture stamps. That's the black texture on this page. I have some deep purple ink that I like, so I played around at painting it over the black patterns and used my waterbrush to fuss with the edges. After some soufflé pen detailing and some level-tweaking in photoshop, I was done. Here's the end result:

Yeah! I like my purple background even if it was totally winged, and I'll probably use it again for something. I might even make more with different patterns. 

All of this because I am procrastinating drawing actual comic pages. I guess we'll see if I can actually get shit done tonight without getting distracted by other random projects.