The power of hot chicks

How lazy am I? To draw the next comic, I have to trace some stuff on the light table. As today's goal was to catch up on TV I missed and netflix, the light table would have taken me out of viewing range. Result: Fuck the comic!

HOWEVER, the thing I do best when going though TV I don't care that much about is painting. If you are a good reader of this blog and not just someone checking it only before seeing me so you can make me feel appreciated, you'll remember I mentioned two paintings I started in DC that sucked. (Not that blog-cramming is a bad thing. I'll take a token effort over no effort any day.) Tonight, the goal was to fix those ugly things!



The original paint sketch was of a angry girl with her arms crossed. She was loosely based on my image of one of my characters, Meret, who is half-Asian. As that sketch was a proportional nightmare, I decided I needed a model. After a Google search for Ziyi Zhang, I was set!

So far, this painting is looking rather nice. It doesn't come across due to crappy photography, but I'll still take the time to say I love her lips. I got the sexy puffiness while still using expressive strokes - as opposed to my normal fallback of forced black outlines. Go me! Now the bad news: The heck will I do for a background? As of now I'm thinking a very gentle pale blue to keep the high contrast look I've got so for. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate them.



The original painting sketch for this one wasn't that bad, really. It was just boring. This began as a wide-eyed gal in a hood looking all fantasy mysterious. At first, I tried to give it a push to see if it could be turned into something decent, but I managed to wreck it completely about five paint strokes. Oh well. I flipped the canvas over and went back to find a babe for inspiration. (You can still see some now-inverted parts of the first sketch behind the current.) Since I'm still on the Neko Case kick, she seemed a fitting target. The only big Neko image I liked enough to save was one of her in braids. There we go. Still, aside from the pose and hair, the features came more from the Top Model I was watching on DVR than Neko.

Hey, it's progress of some sort. Whether these paintings ever get *finished* is another thing...