First free membership post of the year! I’ve just had the four year anniversary of starting this membership since leaving Patreon (7th Feb), it’s gone very fast. Not a lot of art here to see, but hopefully will be interesting for you to read, and maybe inspiring…? I will try to aggressively edit all of it so it’s not too long a read!
An App Deletion Frenzy!
I didn’t plan on removing social media from my phone, but I was aware that I had a problem. I would pick up my phone in any kind of rest moment from work, instead of doing other things, like reading or sewing etc. It would be the first thing I did in the morning, check IG, FB and Bluesky – I always wanted to know what was happening (world news being my main drug of choice, traumatic) and it was not a healthy way to wake up.
I thought downloading one of those apps that restricted my app use might be a good idea. Well, I can’t remember what the app was called, but it hooked up to my screen-time use on my phone and told me how much time I would spend on my phone this year if I didn’t make any changes. HOLY SHITBALLS guys, it was really really bad. THEN it said ‘for £84 a year you can use this app and we will restrict your use’ – or something like that. Eighty four quid to do something I could do myself? Absolutely not. I deleted the app and then immediately after deleted facebook and instagram and all the games I had on there (although I only used one of them, COD Warzone, usually playing two or three times a day, once at lunch and a couple of times after work). I had already deleted TikTok a couple of weeks before (around the time of Trump ‘rescuing’ it).
In the first week of being socials free on my phone I did feel SOOO much more relaxed. I really noticed around 10 days in when I got back on SM on my desktop that I started getting sucked into the depressing news on my feed again and my anxiety levels rocketed. This was confirmation for me that I’d done the right thing.
Bluesky
Bluesky has come out on top as the best of the social media platforms for me now (You can follow me HERE) – it is consistently reaching new people and has even pointed sales to my shop when there have been none via FB or IG. It is a pleasant platform to be on as there are no ads too and everything seems to show up chronologically, lovely! The matter of most social media being totally dead for reaching people now is another post entirely!
I’ve now added ‘news feed eradicator‘ – it replaces your fb feed with inspiring quotes 🙂
What Has It Been Like?
I have more space in my brain. SO much more space. I don’t feel anxious. At the weekend when I don’t log into my computer (unless I am working on the weekend which I try not to do) I have a solid two days without it and it is honestly bliss.
I’ve already made several garments at the weekends, normally I take weeks to get a few pieces done – but no, I have a new medieval hood, a skirt, two medieval tunics and one almost done! Gardening will start to take over weekends as we get into March, so I’m whizzing through sewing projects before it gets out of hand. It will be a month on Friday since I deleted I think, I didn’t take note of the date!
Should you also delete your social media from your phone?
YES. Do it. You don’t need to be wired in to it all the time. Now, I absolutely (and intimately) understand the fact a lot of us only have connections online and not in real life, be it due to ill health, family and friends living a LONG way away, or whatever it might be. If it is what is keeping you sane, then obviously this tip is not for you, but for me, it was causing me huge anxiety – and I didn’t realise quite how much till I stopped.
I still have Whatsapp on my phone as this is how I am in touch with my family and closest friends, obviously it’s different for everyone, but I grew up without social media and didn’t have a smartphone till my late 20’s (might have even been later than that!) – you just don’t need to always be online. If nothing else, try it for a month and see how it feels.
But Emily, What About ART? What Are You Making?
Well, Magic The Gathering have an open portfolio application at the moment (closes on the 10th of March), so I’m going to do a couple of wee paintings to add to my portfolio in the hopes of catching their eye, worth a shot right?
I’ve got this dragon idea (Matt did a few briefs for me!) that I’m playing with for one pic:
I’ve got a little idea for maybe the colour direction I’m going to go, do you like it?
Savage Strangehollow!
I’m also delving back into Strangehollow (this one will be called Savage Strangehollow), for those of you who don’t follow my newsletter or socials you might not have heard that yet! I will be getting stuck into the art-making for that next month after shipping all my WANTED books out at the end of this week/beginning of next week! I am SO excited to get into it and have so many ideas. I can’t believe that it’s 8 years since my first book. I’ve already shared a small number of early sketches/ideas with my members, but I’ll have a lot more next month.
Sorry it’s been so long since a public membership post, it’s been about two months, can you believe it? Anyway, thought it was about time I did another, so I present you all with three new aliens and all of them are designs that Matt did for the book. I only have three aliens left to paint! VERY exciting.
You can still pre order WANTED right here in my shop.
The internet is getting WEIRD. Facebook is now rather dead for me and instagram, I’ve almost stopped bothering, are you guys getting any luck on any platforms? I have been having great success (in growth at least, and interaction) on Bluesky. I joined it about a year ago when I left twitter and never really made an effort, but there’s a mass exodus over there so it’s brimming with life! You can find me on there if you’d like to follow HERE.
Here’s one of Matt’s aliens painted in watercolours, starting with the sketch. I think I went a little overboard with textures, but pretty pleased with the final piece!
Finished Scan:
Then we have this chap. It took SOO long to do the textures and the suit on this OMG. We still don’t have names for this lot, so you’ll have to wait till the book gets to you next year for that!
Finally this one:
2025
After my worst year for my business since 2016, I am going to be having a very hard think about how to approach my year plan. Every year I do this amazing little exercise by Lauren Panepinto from Muddy Colors called ‘How to get what you want; know what you want’ and it is an excellent way to focus the mind. I keep each year’s plans and see which ones I succeeded with each year, it can be very illuminating!
Being someone with a brain that finds it very hard to focus (well, I’m either hyper focused or focusing on many things at once!), it is very helpful to do exercises like this, so I recommend doing it if you struggle with this stuff too, or even if you don’t. If nothing else it clears the mind and helps you figure out what it is you ACTUALLY want to work on over the next 12 months.
I am definitely going to be returning to fantasy after my rather disastrous foray into sci-fi. I mean, it’s not disastrous, but it’s obvious that the stuff that my current followers like is the earth based classic fantasy. Which is ok, you don’t know till you try right? I STILL want to do my own version of Beowulf at some point but I need to be in a better place financially to tackle that as it will take a LONG time.
I also have a notion of a fourth Strangehollow book… it would be centred around the mountains of Strangehollow… What say you?
What would YOU guys like to see from me in the future? Anything specific?
I Feel like I need to explain the slight detour from my usual subject matter. Despite the fact it still involves imaginary creatures, aliens might seem a little bit of a change from my usual.
I also want to point you to my first public Mysterious Corner Post about the new book from a few weeks ago HERE.
Us creative types always have a very long list of projects that I want to get stuck into at some point. I will never get to the bottom of this list, which is very frustrating, but such is the lifespan of us human beings, there’s a limited amount of time we have to create things!
Maybe venturing in to the realms of Sci-fi might be a little risky, since those of you who have followed my work over the past few years since I made my first Strangehollow book will likely be big fantasy genre fans. However, for me at least, Sci-fi belongs in that genre too.
WANTED started off having a working title of ‘Mugshots’. I have always loved the really old daguerrotype photos of criminals and gangsters from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Some of them have SUCH swagger and style which I love. I really fancied the idea of creating a collection of mugshots of various criminal alien characters. Matt then made the excellent suggestion that it should instead be called WANTED and show the characters who hadn’t been caught yet. This worked much better with what I had in mind.
Don’t Miss The Launch!
If you haven’t yet signed up to get notified over on Backerkit, then now is your chance. Head over to THIS LINK HERE and make your interest known.
A New Character
I’m introducing another alien this week! I am trying to be careful about when I share these things as I won’t be revealing all the aliens before the book launches and it’s no fun if you get to see it all before it’s finished, right?
Introducing Pardy Durr. Wanted across the galaxy for teaching illegal dance moves! This one was SO much fun. Matt came up with the idea of the name after thinking pas de deux would work as an alien name if it was spelt differently. I’m still not sure about the spelling yet, but it works to let the reader get the right pronunciation I think!
First Pass
The first stages of this painting were to get going on the unitard. Turns out painting spandex is A LOT of fun. I might have to do a whole book of creatures/people wearing spandex? Hmm, not sure, would that even be appealing?
Anyway, red is a pain in the bum for some reason, it lifts REALLY easily and doesn’t seem to stain that well, I mean it DOES stain, but it really likes to bleed and lift if you paint over it. I’ve used a mix of Daniel Smith’s Opera Pink, Deep Scarlet (a favourite) and Permanent Red. Oh and a touch of Holbein’s Mineral Violet (another favourite).
Here I just got into describing his form with the wrinkles and seams in the ridiculous outfit.
Got started on the skin and started building it up to give you the impression that he has bones and a skull!
Describing The Form
More sculpting of the face, wasn’t sure about the mouth at this point, it didn’t convey his personality enough. Began to add colour to the flash on his chest (a nod towards Flash Gordon, probably my favourite Scifi movie of all time).
He looks a little uninvolved in what his body is doing here, have to change that mouth! I also began adding some background (again very simple as with all the others using granulating pigments).
Yes, I am a ridiculous person. But how else was I gonna get the mouth right? I think this works ok, although he is a little creepy due to no nose, but hopefully the rest of him will make it giggle worthy.
Here he is scanned in and finished!
Imagine the dance moves you could do with two extra arms? I realise that this anatomy wouldn’t actually work in real life, but shhhh, this is just for fun 🙂
Social media has got weird hasn’t it? I don’t know about you but I’m sick of seeing Ai images in my feed, sick of adverts, and more than that, despite having a good healthy following on some platforms I have almost no reach anymore. I had WAY more reach back when I had around 1500 followers in 2017!
So I am trying something new, public membership posts! A different vibe from my blog which I seem to only post on once every million years, it will be posts showing processes and new art from the projects I’m working on.
It is a wobbly state of affairs when you’re someone who relies on social media for reach, so I need to evolve with it and try new ways of getting people to see my artwork.
My membership is £2 to join (access to anything I don’t share anywhere else plus first chance to buy originals and access to secret shop!) and there are other tier options too if you want to pay a bit more, OR you want to join the top tier where you will get an original painting every 3 months! (You don’t have to keep on that tier though, it can be a one off 3 month cycle if you chose it – there is one space left in this tier). If you’re interested in any of that, all you have to do is click ‘membership’ in the menu above 🙂
MY BRAND NEW PROJECT!
It’s time to reveal my next project! This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a few years but my other projects beat it to the top of the list until now. I have been DYING to show you my new characters but this time I’m trying to eek out the sharing, and teasing it out as long as possible! This will be in book format and the plan at the moment is to launch it on Backerkit. I am reluctant to go back to Kickstarter (and have said I won’t..!) since they support Ai projects (and Backerkit do not), but being seen is also very important, especially as currently things are a bit difficult with regard to getting seen on social media!
Originally I was calling this project Mug Shots, but Matt Dixon (artist and husband extraordinaire) thought of naming it WANTED instead, and then the subtitle evolved from that. So instead of characters who have already been captured, it is going to be those who are wanted for their shady shenanigans!
Matt will be collaborating with me on this project which is hugely exciting as the last time we collaborated was on our mini books and back then I was painting digitally! So over 7 years ago now! He is ridiculously good at coming up with ideas and also will be doing a couple of the characters too (with me painting them).
This guy, Admiral Pimpleneurker, might be my favourite character I’ve painted so far. He is wanted for smugling contraband space-fruits called Wertlecumbers throughout the galaxy. However this is a fairly low grade crime so I don’t think he’ll get long behind bars if they do manage to catch him.
Here is my process for one of my characters. (Descriptions are under the picture that they are about).
He started off as a wee thumbnail in my sketchbook:
I then transferred that sketch to Procreate and detailed him out a little bit ready to transfer the pencil lines to my watercolour board. I also roughed out my idea for colour at this point.
Transferring to board is a case of printing out the linen drawing on paper, then I rub the back of that paper with graphite powder, making sure to get rid of any excess. I then place that on the board and transfer it like a carbon copy.
First steps with watercolour for me usually are laying down a base wash. I will wet the whole area that I want to paint and get some colour on there. It’s very wishy washy at this stage and I generally always go a little easy at first so I don’t find myself not able to undo anything! I do use gouache for lighter areas sometimes but I generally will try to use the white of the paper as much as possible.
Now more base washes and blocking out the shapes ready to be painted over with hundreds of glazes. I am mostly painting wet in wet here still (within the head area) so I can get soft blends with the colours more easily. I do this by painting over areas I’ve already painted and it doesn’t tend to lift the lower layers (depending on the pigment I’m using, most of the time it’s fine).
I painted as much detail on the brain as possible before then adding the blue wash over it. Once the wash is on it I then had to rework some of the brain detail that was lost with the wash. I begin to get stuck into the creases and folds and markings on the alien’s skin. SO much fun doing this as this guy really starts to come to life.
More detail added, making the growths on his head look more round and adding more depth to the colour of his throat and back of the head. Starting on the helmet attachment round his neck too.
Yet more detailing to the head and adding a background. Normally I’d do background’s first, but not with these! Just a neutral pigment with lots of granulation for the backgrounds.
Almost there now! Adding details to the suit and white gouache highlights to his brain dome and other lumps on his head!
All finished at this point, more gouache added onto the suit to indicate folds and highlights. He’s now ready to scan. Here’s some detail shots:
And the final piece, scanned and cleaned up:
EDIT: Added an updated final with a more interesting background!
Screenshot
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this post and the new project I’m creating, I am so inspired right now it is such an amazing feeling! Remember you can comment below and do share if you like it!
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A big thank you to Sandra for the fun prompt for her commission for this cycle! I had so much fun painting this little guy!
I made a timelapse of the process of this guy – normally I won’t do Timelapse’s as they really do take up so much time (and I have to work around the camera a little), but I managed to set it up so I didn’t think about it too much! I also have some ‘real time’ painting in here too.
First of all, a big warm welcome to my newest patron, Lisa! Thank you so much for joining my special little place on the internet!
ALSO my Kickstarter goes live a week tomorrow and you can go and ‘follow’ it so that you get an email as soon as it goes live (I will post in here too when it does, but it won’t be as fast as following the project!). You can follow it HERE.
As requested by Isabelle – here is my tutorial for you guys! I know most of you won’t necessarily be interested, but for those of you who will be, I hope that it is clear enough!
I’ll be doing the hangout this week – I don’t know if it will be Wednesday or Thursday yet.
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