#once i got all the proportions outline and i got to the shading? everything just comes together

[gon-and-killuas-mother]

sometimes, when it feels like you've lost that inert, artistic spark, all you need to do is go back to an old but warm and familiar medium.

sometimes, if the moment is kind, you'll think, "ah, that's where i left it"

[a-n-conrad]

Painting (Steve Rogers x Reader)

[Summary: You decide to paint your friend, Steve Rogers, realizing that no one had ever painted him without his uniform. However, things start to get heated after you start to daydream during your painting session. (She/Her pronouns)

Warnings: SMUT (18+, but with emotions), Not Canon Compliant (Because fuck you, Marvel.), Swearing, unprotected vaginal sex

Request: From my request survey (https://forms.gle/D9rsJtkERoBPaKvv8)]

You and Steve Rogers were widely considered to be an unlikely pair. There were a lot of things that you didn’t exactly agree on. Steve was a lot more social, being bold and outgoing. You were a bit quieter, preferring to avoid the company of a crowd. Steve was prone to waking up early to exercise. You stayed up into the quiet hours of the night, choosing instead to get a majority of your sleep in the morning. You weren’t exactly fond of Steve’s workout routines either, though you would join him on a short jog on occasion.

While you were technically considered an Avenger, you were really only brought out to fight for emergency circumstances. You had some incredibly powerful, incredibly volatile powers, but you really had no interest in using them unless it was completely needed. So you ended up making a few deals. You’d be treated like an Avenger, but you were basically benched unless some drastic, world-ending issue came up. So until then, you were kept on hold in Avengers Tower, spending most of your time painting in the studio that Tony had gotten set up for you.

Despite this power, and despite your title as an official Avenger, you were still a bit of an outsider among the team. You tended not to talk to them a lot, becoming a bit easily overwhelmed by the chaos that the team seemed to radiate. But surprisingly, you and Steve got along incredibly well.

You had originally bonded over your love of art. You loved Steve’s drawings. You admired the linework and shading in his drawings. He could do so much with just a pen, let alone if you gave him a few colors. He admired the amount of emotion you managed to instill into every single painting that you made. No matter what you painted, whether it was a portrait, a landscape, or something entirely different, it was always filled to the brim with the emotion that you had felt while painting it. It was like looking through a window into your soul. It was so honest and refreshing.

Eventually the two of you started to talk a bit more while you worked. It started pretty tame, just discussions of how your day was or general questions about each other like “What’s your favorite color”. But eventually you moved on to the harsher topics of your lives. Steve would talk about how exhausting it was to be the face of America, to be held on such a pedestal while also being expected to sacrifice everything at the drop of a hat. You talked about how cold and dehumanizing it felt to be seen by the American government as nothing more than a weapon, a walking nuclear bomb.

Your struggles overlapped at certain points. You both spent a lot of your time being used by the government. You were both seen as tools more than you were seen as people by a lot of the general public. You were a weapon and he was an idol, some sort of trophy. So you bonded a lot over your shared struggles as you talked to each other and worked on art side by side. And when the hard stuff got a bit too heavy, you’d sit and talk about art. About subjects that you just loved to add to all of your work. About what each shade of every color meant to you, about the emotions that you saw in every tiny color shift.

It was so nice, for both of you, to have something like that. The studio that you spent time in was so safe and peaceful for both of you, since the other Avengers tended to avoid it. And the two of you had started to see through each other’s masks enough to truly get to know each other. Steve couldn’t remember the last time someone had known him as Steve Rogers more than they had known him as Captain America. He had Bucky, but Bucky was far too busy with his own issues for Steve to even consider burdening him with anything else. But with you he could truly be himself, even if that meant getting angry, sad, or frustrated.

So the two of you had become incredibly close, despite your differences. And every day that you had some free time without any big meeting or mission, you would be in the studio helping each other with art. It was a good way for you to relieve stress, just relaxing with each other. It was one of those days that you came to a realization.

- - - - -

“Has anyone ever painted you?” You asked suddenly one day as the two of you sat side by side in the art studio. He looked a bit surprised, and then he looked confused.

“Of course. There are murals of me up all over the place, (Y/n).”

“No, there are murals of Captain America,” you responded, shaking your head, “They don’t really look that much like you. You really only look like that when you’re working as Captain America. So has anyone ever painted you? As Steve Rogers?”

He looked surprised again. And you could tell as the emotions cycled through his face that he didn’t really know how to respond. You supposed it was a bit of an odd question. And you knew that it was a bit odd to think of someone and their superhero persona as two different people, but Steve couldn’t disagree. He wasn’t Captain America all the time, and he loved that you understood that, “I suppose I’ve never really thought about it, but I guess not.”

You hummed a bit, “That’s a shame. It feels like a waste that everyone paints a costume. You should let me paint you sometime.”

You said it in a way that he wasn’t sure if you were serious. Your face was entirely serious when you said it, but you said it so casually, not even really looking at him, “Really?”

You finally looked up at him, noticing the pure confusion on his face, “Of course. I mean, you’d have to sit still for a while, but honestly, you could probably just sit and sketch for a while. You just seem too good of a subject to not be painted without the costume.”

Steve wasn’t really one to blush, but it was quite the compliment coming from you. He had women trying to hit on him all the time now, being Captain America, but that never really felt heartfelt. It had been a fairly long time since he had actually felt a real connection with someone. But to hear you compliment him, thinking of him as Steve Rogers instead of Captain America, made his heart flutter a bit. And the fact that he knew that you were rather picky about the subject you painted only made it more effective.

“I, uh, think that’d be cool,” He responded as soon as he was sure that he could trust his voice not to crack, though he couldn’t hide the slight stutter. It was honestly endearing how much his personality changed when he wasn’t working. While he was still headstrong and stubborn, he was a bit less confident. He knew he could win a fight. He knew that he looked good on television. But he didn’t really know how to interact with people in the new modern age. He was lucky to have the friends that he did. At least, that’s how he felt about it.

“Wonderful,” You hummed, starting to put away all of your supplies, “Why don’t we pack it up for the day and I can start painting you tomorrow if we aren’t too busy?”

“Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

- - - - -

The next day was surprisingly slow. You had to say that you were thankful. You had been looking forward to getting to paint Steve, even though you knew it was making him a little nervous. You were honestly excited to have a new project, and part of you was excited for the opportunity to stare at Steve for a bit without it being considered weird. He was easy to admire, both physically and on a personal level, so you found yourself staring more often than you’d like to admit. You were pretty sure that you had been lucky enough to avoid being caught though.

He was physically gorgeous. Obviously. But something about the way that he looked when he was drawing was nearly angelic. The way he furrowed his brows just a little and turned his paper at odd angles to make sure that the proportions of his sketches were right was adorable. The look in his eyes when his work started to come together made your heart melt. When he got a bit frustrated and would run a hand through his hair you could feel your heart skip a beat. You felt a bit dumb to be drooling over your friend, but you had to admit you were falling pretty hard for him. So you’d use this painting as an excuse to admire him without any questions.

He was already blushing a bit when he came into the studio, and you had a feeling that part of it was from Tony teasing him. He had a habit of giving the two of you a bit of a hard time about how much time you spent together. But the blush was still adorable. Something about Steve when he was nervous stole your heart. He was surprisingly soft when he had the space to be.

“So, uh, what’s the plan?” He asked as he strode over to your work station that you had already gotten set up.

“Just pull a chair up in front of me. You can get comfortable, start sketching, and I’ll get a base outline and block out as much as I can. Just let me know if you need a break and try not to change your pose too much. At least until I can get all of the base shapes right,” You instructed, trying to keep your voice even. You were surprised at how well you managed to hide the fact that you were completely lovesick.

“Alright, sounds good,” He responded, pulling up a chair and getting himself situated. He crossed one of his legs over the other, resting his ankle on his other thigh to give himself a place to set his sketchbook. You tossed him his pencil once he got himself settled, and then you got to work.

You had to admit you had started to get a bit frustrated with how easily you managed to get distracted by him while you were trying to paint. You had hoped that maybe painting him would help. You had no reason to get distracted from your painting when you were painting him. At least, that’s what you had thought before you started sketching out the form.

You felt yourself losing focus as your brush moved smoothly, the incredibly thin, light paint building a form that you found yourself wanting to know a bit more intimately. You tried your best to stay focused on the canvas in front of you, but you couldn’t stop your mind from drifting. You imagined what his body looked like under his clothes as you blocked out the lights and shadows of the fabric that rested over his abs. And the vivid image in your brain, the detailed picture of his body that you had conjured up in front of you, followed your brush as you worked.

The brush slid smoothly across the canvas, outlining his muscles, almost all of which showed through his thin t-shirt. Your brain almost instantly conjured up a matching image, the fantasy becoming more and more dynamic as you went on. It shifted from regular images of what his abs looked like when he was shirtless to more detailed images. Thoughts of his biceps flexing a bit as he held himself over you, his arms covered in sweat. Thoughts of his hands sliding across your skin. It only got worse as you moved down, eventually reaching the point between his legs.

“(Y/n)? Are you alright?” Steve’s voice finally broke you from your thoughts, his eyes which had been focused intently on his drawing when you had last looked were now trained on your face, scanning for any sign as to what was causing you to space out, “You don’t normally get distracted when you’re painting, is everything alright?”

“Oh,” You tried your best to pull yourself back to reality, though the fantasies seemed to be burned into your brain, “Yeah, sorry. I was, uh, spacing out a bit.”

“Do you want to take a break for a bit? Maybe we should get up and stretch,” He suggested. You nodded in response, hoping it would help you refocus on your painting.

It didn’t help much, though, as Steve stood, stretching his arms above his head. His shirt lifted up just enough to show some skin, and his pants were riding fairly low. Your eyes almost involuntarily moved to look at him, landing right about the button to the jeans that he was wearing. The muscles in his hips and stomach formed an almost perfect V shape leading into his pants.

“(Y/N)?” You had been caught staring. You tried your best to look casual, relaxing your posture. Your mistake was to try to lean on the table, setting your hand directing on your palette, which was covered in paints.

You froze, and Steve’s eyes landed on your hand, the red and blue paint gushing out from the sides. You felt like an awkward teenager, doing stupid ridiculous shit in front of your crush. You watched intently for a reaction from Steve, not really knowing what to do and hoping that the way that he reacted would give you something easy to respond to.

He raised one of his eyebrows at you, a look of confusion, with a small hint of amusement under the surface painted across his face, “You seem to have set your hand in your paint.”

“Uh, yes, it would seem so,” You responded awkwardly, finally lifting your hand out of the paint. You still really weren’t sure what to say, and not knowing where to put your hand so that you wouldn’t smear any paint anywhere wasn’t really making you feel any better. You cleared your throat a bit, trying to think of something smart to say, something that wouldn’t signal exactly how far gone you were into your fantasies, but instead you just signaled to Steve how flustered you were.

You knew that Steve had never been the biggest ladies’ man. From what he had told you, he was actually pretty awkward growing up, but the confidence that washed over him as he finally figured out what was getting you so flustered was visible. He walked closer to you, standing close enough to emphasize how tall he was, “Got something on your mind, sweetheart?”

“Oh, uh,” You stuttered, not sure what to say. You could tell that he knew from the smirk on his face, but you could feel your face heating up as you thought about explaining your fantasizing to Steve. He smirked even more as you got visibly flustered.

“It’s okay, honey, I don’t mind if you stare a little,” He said, standing a bit closer, his hand moving to hold your chin. You swallowed deeply as his fingers brushed against your skin softly. Your eyes locked with his as his hand tilted your chin up just a little.

As much as he was keeping up his confident, masculine persona, you could see the complete warmth in his eyes. He softened completely when you looked at him, pure admiration in your eyes. He had to admit it warmed his heart to see you looking at him like that, like he was your whole world. And maybe it was because he felt the same way. He had been falling in love with you slowly, and as he looked at you, he wanted to find every way possible to express it.

“Can I kiss you?” He whispered, his voice soft.

“Please.”

His lips were much softer than you thought they’d be, but you didn’t think about it too much as his lips moved against your own. It was soft at first, but it began to escalate quickly, getting rough and more passionate. His hands moved to your waist, pulling your body into his own, and your hands moved to his face, too focused on the kiss to notice the fact that you were smearing paint across his cheek.

He pulled back, allowing you to get a breath of air. That was when you noticed the red and blue streaks across his cheek, “Shit, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about,” He brushed it off, before pulling you into another kiss. He truly didn’t seem to care at all about the paint, choosing instead to focus on you.

This kiss started off much more passionate, building even further. Before long he pulled away again, pulling a groan from your mouth as you instinctively wanted more. Your complaints were silenced, though, as he began to kiss down your neck, nipping slighting at a few select spots, leaving marks for you to see later.

“If you want me to stop, just say it,” He said, as his hands started to move towards the hem of your shirt. He was moving slowly, giving you the chance to stop him at any point. You didn’t.

Before long, your clothes were entirely discarded, scattered haphazardly across the floor. Steve’s followed shortly. Neither of you could keep your hands to yourself, feeling the curves of each other's bodies as you continued to kiss. Both of you were desperate, the tension that neither of you even realized had been building finally crashing to the ground around you, any sort of restraint being thrown out the window.

However, you had to take a few moments to admire his body. You knew that it was perfect, he was a super soldier, of course it’s perfect, but you didn’t really know how perfect until it was right in front of you. There was no way you could’ve imagined it in a way that did it true justice. The warmth under his skin, the pace of his breathing, the firm feeling of his grip on your waist. Those were things that you could never have imagined fully.

He lifted you up without any issue, placing his hands under your thighs, carrying you to the work table and setting you on a clear section of the table without breaking the kiss. His hands slid across the tops of your thighs before grabbing your hips. Yours moved from his cheeks to rest on his bare chest, smearing a bit more paint across his scalped chest. You could feel his erection brush against your leg as he leaned over you, the two of you trying to get as close to each other as possible.

You were breathing heavily, your brain clouded with need, both new and left over from your earlier fantasies. Fantasies that were coming true, “Please, Steve.”

“What is it, Sweetheart?” Steve asked, looking down at you, his pupils blown wide with desire, “What do you want?”

You began to grind against his thigh without really thinking about it. He had to admit that something about you needing him this much turned him on, but he wanted to wait until you said it before he did anything, “Please fuck me.”

He would’ve liked to have a bit more foreplay, but both of you were so needy, having built up to this for so long with so little release until now. So he complied with your request. He pulled you quickly to the edge of the table. You were forced to lay your upper body down completely so that he could pull your hips to hang over the edge a bit. He took a few moments to rub himself against the entrance to your pussy, coating the head of his cock with liquid that was practically dripping from your pussy. Finally, he pushed himself into you slowly, making sure to monitor your reaction for any sort of discomfort. You were indulging in the feeling of him slowly stretching you out, completely enjoying the feeling of having him as close to you as possible.

He started moving after he was sure that you were comfortable, his hands beginning to wander your body, squeezing at your hips and breasts, basically any part of you that had a bit of squish, something for him to grab. His mouth latched on to the base of your neck, leaving a deep, dark hickey. You could feel every movement of his hips, his cock brushing against your internal walls again with each thrust.

You couldn’t hold back your moans as he found the perfect spot to hit, one of his hands gripping one of your hips tightly to hold you in place as his thrusts gained momentum. He started picking up speed a bit, taking care to continue to hit the spot that made you moan the loudest. His other hand slid down further, his fingers making their way between your folds. He was surprisingly quick to find your clit, not that you were complaining. Your eyes practically rolled back in your head as he started to rub small circles over it, keeping pace with his thrusts.

You were practically putty in his hands, falling apart as he found every way to make you moan. Touch, squeezing, kissing, and biting exactly where you needed him to. You had no idea how he knew exactly what you wanted, but you didn’t really care as a knot began to build in the pit of your stomach.

You practically screamed his name as the knot finally snapped, Steve continuing his motions, continuing to rub your clit, as you rode out your climax, your whole body feeling as though fireworks were shooting through your veins. Your walls tightened with the waves of your orgasms, the fluttering feeling clear to Steve as he continued to bury himself inside of you. Soon after your climax finished, you could feel his thrust begin to get a bit sloppy, focus clear on his face as he tried his best to hold on longer.

He couldn’t hold on that long, though, soon giving in to the building pleasure. He came hard, his hips snapping into your own and his head being buried in your neck to hide his curses as he came completely undone. You could feel the thick hot ropes of his cum coating your insides as he finished. You both stayed like that for a few moments in order to catch your breath.

As you started to come back to reality, you finally noticed the mess you had made. Steve’s hair was a mess, blue paint sticking some of the tips together. You couldn’t even remember when you had grabbed his hair, but the paint smears left a clear map of where your hand had wandered. The blue and red stripes across his face and chest were clear, too. In fact, you had gotten paint all over his sculpted body, the blue smears outlining his muscles.

“We should probably clean up and get back to work, huh?” He eventually sighed, his eyes never leaving your body.

“I suppose.”

(A/N: Thanks for reading! If you want to send me a tip for my writing feel free to tip me over venmo! My venmo is Al3x13l. Tips aren't required, but as a broke college student, they are appreciated.)

[theres-no-protocol-for-this]

Amusement Park

Part 11 of the Guardian fanfic (and we’re almost to the end)! If you would like to read this in chronological order and don’t feel like tag surfing, this is also available on AO3.

Not everything my humans do ends in tragedy. Occasionally, they have something resembling fun.

Digging in the Archives led them to one of those traveling amusement parks that sometimes took over parking lots for a week. I'd seen it at a distance but frankly, the screaming and the smell of cotton candy hadn’t instilled much confidence.

You'll hate it, the house informed me. It had given me a pendant through which it talked, sometimes. I was still getting used to the mansion’s constant presence.

For once, the entity was uncharacteristically wrong. I didn't totally hate the amusement park.  The place was loud and there were far too many people, plus it all smelled vaguely of vomit. But my humans had a good time, and that somehow made up for the rest of it.

Arada and Overse held hands and bought themselves giant hot dogs. Baradwahj kept stopping to doodle in her sketchbook. Even Gurathin, who as far as I knew didn't like anything that entailed having fun, was having a good time as he argued air resistance and thermodynamics with Volsecu.

I was walking alongside Dr. Mensah, on two legs at that.

"Have you ever been on a Ferris wheel?" she asked.

I shook my head. If wolves had been intended to leave the ground, we'd have wings. And seeing as how we didn't, I didn't want to chance it. It must've shown on my face because Mensah laughed and touched my shoulder.

"You look like I suggested an execution."

"Yeah, maybe."

"It's perfectly safe."

"It doesn't look safe." How was I supposed to protect my clients if they were going to get on something that rickety?

The house offered unhelpful information, starting with when Ferris wheels were invented and the statistics of accidents and injuries.

Mensah shook her head, clearly amused at the whole thing, and stopped in front of a food vendor. Money exchanged hands, and suddenly she had this puffy ball of sugar on a stick. It was a hideous shade of pink.

"Want to try a bite?" she asked.

"Hell no!"

She snorted. "You could use more meat on your bones, you know."

"That... thing isn't food."

The rest of the group was up ahead, stopped in front of a small building that read "Fun House of Mirrors." These words didn't look right together, but fuck it, I don't understand humans and I couldn't care less what they considered fun.

"Over here!" Arada yelled, waving her hands.

Mensah waved back and started walking again. Normally, I do at most a half-assed version of my job. A decade in, I've come to the conclusion that humans are somehow drawn to danger, and frankly, stopping them is a waste of breath. But these humans... I didn't want anything to happen to them, so I'd been paying attention.

So, when a clown walked between me and them, I growled at the weirdly-dressed human. Except, it didn't smell human at all. It smelled... like me, like another were-creature. I didn't see a collar, so it wasn't a guardian. Just a free were-creature, one that hadn’t been caught by the department.

We’re supposed to report unregistered users of dark magic to the department. But, my binding almost never picked up when such a creature was around—it certainly wasn’t reacting now—and I had no plans of telling the department a damn thing.

The clown planted itself in front of me. "Oh wow," it—correction, she—said, suddenly excited. "Oh my god, you're like the only other shapeshifter I've met. Shit! This is awesome. Oh, god, can I...uh, take a picture?"

The team noticed my absence and came over, and then, there was nowhere to run. I stood around awkwardly while they chatted with the other were-creature, whose name was Tasha and who turned into a bear but had started as a human. And then they exchanged phone numbers. And I was just standing there, trying not to look as uncomfortable as I felt.

"You OK?" Tasha wanted to know all of a sudden.

"Fine."

"You look about a mile down the road from fine," she pointed out. "I can practically see you trying to crawl out of your skin."

"So?"

"So, you need to relax a little," she told me, oblivious.

Mensah carefully explained that I was currently working. Tasha patted my shoulder, and I almost jumped backward. It took effort to stay still and not bite the were-bear's hand off.

"Stop that," I growled.

Tasha handed me a balloon, one of the many she was holding and giving out to kids. I just stood there, string in hand, and tried to puzzle out what the fuck I was supposed to do with it. You can't really kill anyone with a balloon, and you can't eat it.

Ratthi said, "It's very purple."

I looked up at the floating ball. "What do you do with it?"

"Hold it for a while and then let it go and watch it fly away."

"What for?"

Humans often engage in rituals that bring them joy. It doesn’t always have meaning, the entity told me like I didn’t know. I wished I could glare but there was no one to glare at.

"Fun." Tasha was in my face. "The whole purpose of this place is to have some fun. It makes living a little easier, a little lighter."

I looked at Dr. Mensah like I needed rescuing all of a sudden.

"Come on," she said quietly. "Let's go see if we can find you something that's actual food." She smiled at the were-bear. "It was a pleasure meeting you, Tasha. Feel free to reach out to us anytime."

After lunch, we entered the funhouse.

I know humans are supposed to be delighted in things that bend the mind, but the house of mirrors gave me the creeps. I felt sufficiently unnerved to switch back into my wolf form. On the off chance that we got attacked three steps past the front door, I was ready.

I walked ahead of the rest of the investigative team, using my superior senses to seek out our target. But, frankly, I doubted the sanity of any creature that would make its home in this horrible place.

I stopped in front of a set of mirrors that distorted human proportions. Standing on four feet and only half as tall as the floor-to-ceiling mirror, I could still mostly identify what I was looking at. Trust humans to enjoy something as convoluted and mind-bending as this place.

And then a shadow walked straight out of the mirror and past me toward the investigators. It was a silhouette of a person, outlined in gray and green sparks of light. It sang as it moved, each word visible in the fog-shrouded room.

The words were literally spilling out of its mouth like confetti and falling on the ground.

I decided that this monster had bigger problems than a group of curious investigators to deal with.

"Indeed," said the strange spirit and the word plopped on the ground like a meatball. "This is what you might call a curse."

I yipped at it softly. "What kind of curse?"

It, of course, had no idea what I was saying. The mansion helped translate, somehow able to communicate with the creature just because of the pendant's proximity to the monster.

"The kind born of ill intentions," the spirit answered just as the humans caught up.

I placed myself squarely between them and the spirit, moving so that, if it tried anything, it would have to go through me.

Mensah put a hand on my back, between my shoulder blades, as a heads-up that she was standing beside me. I shivered at the unsolicited touch. Baradwahj was taking notes, and in the brief silence I could easily make out the sound of her pencil scraping against paper.

"I wondered why so many beings of light were suddenly in my domain," the creature said, and the words floated away, carried by an unseen breeze. "But now, I understand. The humans beyond these walls never cease to surprise me."

Overse, whose magic also had a connection to words and writing, stepped forward. "Who are you?"

"A difficult question, human." The cursed being rose above the floor on bare feet and twirled before us. "Once, perhaps I was human. But then I was cursed, for speaking the words that needed to be said. And the curse is renewed with each passing moon. For fifty years now, unceasing and unfailing."

"Can you tell us who cursed you?"

"I never knew her name. But she was... beautiful. Like the light of a new moon falling on a still, silent lake."

I heard whispers among the group. Finally, Overse said, "If we could find the one who cursed you, perhaps we could convince her to lift it."

"Perhaps."

The spirit flittered past me and between the humans. It passed through them untouched and didn't appear to cause them any harm. Sparks of green light landed in her wake.

I knew the humans wouldn't leave this alone, so I shapeshifted and became human. The spirit turned to face me now that there were eight people between us, haphazardly arranged and staring.

"So you're more than a wolf."

"And you're more than a prisoner," I countered.

"A curse is a curse." The creature shrugged.

"Not every curse is the same. Why the mirrors?"

"So that I might remember the importance of the human shape, the wonder of what it means to be born a human being." She spit the words out.

I had a sudden, inexplicable moment of clarity. "The head of the department did this, didn't she?"

"You're a smart one, little wolf."

No, not smart. Just good at remembering terrible things at inappropriate times. Mensah did this complicated thing where she got a little closer but didn't touch, like just existing would somehow prop me up. I don't know why. It's not like I cared what happened to this spirit or the uptight asshole of a human who chaired the department.

Overse and Arada grasped hands. Ratthi looked so very, utterly sad.

Mensah made a decision. I like how she thinks hard about her choices but once she's chosen, it's full steam ahead. I hate humans who waffle about things.

"We're leaving," she told the team. "There's nothing more we can do here. The Archives got it wrong this time. Guardian, we have some things we need to do tomorrow. So you have the day off."

[sootbird]

Hey Rox, random question. How can one learn to draw? I mean, I got the whole take a pencil and a paper and practice everyday but I mean, after doing that you understand proportions, light, perspective? Naturally? Just by practicing everyday?

Artists telling people just to practice art and not giving them any solid starting place is a bullshit cop-out and something I’ve probably said at some point, but I’m going to rectify it now by giving you a comprehensive guide to starting art.

Some people may disagree with me (and honestly I recommend asking other artists this same question to see what they say and what you yourself agree with), but I think no matter what kind of 2D art you want to make, you should start with traditional, realistic drawing or painting. The reason for this (aside from anecdotal evidence of it working for me) is that learning to draw things that occur in real life gives you a foundation for branching out into different styles or media down the line. Even if you want to draw cartoons or anime, learning realistic drawing will help you, because it will familiarize you with the complicated shapes that more cartoony drawings simplify or exaggerate. For example, if you learn to draw a realistic nose, then you can see different ways to turn that realistic shape into a simplified version of itself. Practicing realistic art can also help train your eye and get you accustomed to different techniques such as line quality, shading, color theory, composition, and various types of art materials, or media, as I will probably begin referring to it as.

So, the next step is to figure out how the hell to start learning to draw realistic stuff. I will help, using written descriptions, tips, and videos I have found online to help you.

First off is Materials/Media.

You can make art with practically anything. Anything from the humble paper and pencil to the most expensive and high-end art supplies. You can burn a piece of wood in a fire for a bit and then use the charred end to make marks with. You can use mud to paint with. You can dip your toe in ink and use that as a paintbrush. My point is that you can really get creative with it and I think creating art should be a joyful experience, not a painful one.

Art supplies can be very expensive, so for beginners I really do recommend a paper and pencil. Not a mechanical pencil either, but one of those wooden ones. They work well for drawing because you can use both the point and the side of the lead to make marks with. I also recommend getting a good eraser. My favorite kind are the grey kneadable ones, because you can squish them into any shape you need for any particular area that needs erasing. I’ll link to some on Amazon later on.

You can practice pencil drawings on lined paper (I have a whole lot of sketches I did in high school that are just on lined paper), printer paper, cardboard, etc, or you could invest in a sketchbook. Cheap sketchbooks are pretty easy to find, like they have them at my local grocery store, but you can also find them online for fairly cheap. Sketchbooks are made of different paper depending on the media (drawing materials) that you’re using. Paper intended for pencil drawings tends to have quite a fine grain for smooth blending, whereas paper in watercolor sketchbooks is rough and absorbent to suit the wet medium. You can get a sketchbook with any paper you want, really. I’ve done pencil drawings on pastel paper before, because it was the only paper around, and it still looked nice, just different than it would on finer grain paper. What materials you choose to use depends on the look you’re going for, and you’ll figure that out more with experience.

To start with, just grab some paper and a pencil and start making marks on it. See how many different looking marks you can make on the paper. I’m not really talking about shapes persay, but literal marks with the pencil. Thin lines, thick lines, scribbles with lots of pressure or just a little bit of pressure. Scrape the side of the pencil along the paper and see what it does. Try blending the lines with your finger. Just take some time to play with the material without getting hung up on creating anything. Do this sort of experimenting with any new art material you’re introduced to. The first thing you should do with a new tool is acquaint yourself with it, and that’s what this is doing. Get used to how the pencil feels in your hand and what motions feel comfortable with it. Keep in mind that you don’t have to hold the pencil the same way as if you were writing. Often if I’m shading with a pencil, I will hold it with all of my fingers around it and use my thumb to put pressure on it.

Now, shading.

Shading and mark making go together, because shading is basically using the marks you’re making with your pencil or pen to indicate lightness vs. darkness. To practice mark making and the techniques that are used for shading, I recommend watching this video and drawing along with the exercise. The artist uses pens in it but you can do it with pencil too! 

When you’re ready, you can start trying to shade basic forms (shapes). Shading gives a two dimensional shape a three-dimensional look. It turns a flat circle into a sphere. Once you learn how to shade basic shapes, you can pretty much figure out how to shade just about anything. For example, once you learn how to shade a sphere, you know how to roughly shade a head! And what is an arm if not a cylinder? A nose if not a pyramid?

There are lots of videos online for practicing this. Here’s one that’s pretty good.

This is where I recommend starting. Once you are more comfortable with that, here is a list of things that you can look up and try to get a handle on, in what I think is a pretty alright order.

Perspective (one-point, two-point, three-point)

Value, Tint, Shade

Drawing negative space

Foreshortening

Composition

Drawing from life

Color theory

It would take me a very long time to outline all of this stuff, which is why I’ve given you that list of stuff to look for online. There are a lot of great resources out there and I recommend searching for them and comparing them. I can’t go into depth on everything right now because there’s a LOT of stuff, but I hope the little outline I gave you will help give you a foundation and know where to look and what to look for! If you have any questions about specific stuff, feel free to come and ask me about it and I’ll try to help.

Here are links to some cheap art materials on Amazon:

Grey kneadable eraser

Sketchbook for pencil

Pen set

There are lots of other listings for stuff like this online, so do check around for what you want! The ones I linked are just options.

I hope this helped! Thank you for the ask anon, and good luck!

[wulfrann]

Contrast (AFTG Exchange Winter 2019)

All for the Game

Relationship: Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard

Additional Tags: Meet-cute, Painter!Neil Josten, Journalist!Andrew Minyard, Bonding over Shared Trauma

[One-shot - 5452 words - Published 2019-12-16]

I wrote this for @sofiescastle! You asked for a meet-cute, so that’s what I tried to do. I’m not that good at writing rom-com-y situations, but I gave it my best and I hope you’ll enjoy it!!

( @aftgexchange Sorry that I’m posting this on the last day possible. I’m really bad at deadlines.)

Summary:

Painting is everything for Neil. It’s what’s kept him going while he was on the run, and it’s what pays for his flat and his food nowadays. So when the man who made this dream a reality asks him to paint a mural for his shopfront, Neil is more than happy to say yes - and that’s before he realised that Wymack actually inteded to pay him.

Neil gets more than he bargained for, however, when a normal day of work ends up accidentally involving one angry, blond Minyard with a taste for expensive shirts.

Read on AO3

* Neil shut the trunk of the van and wiped his hands on his pants, leaving spots and specks of paint at various stages of drying upon the rough fabric. Better his work clothes than the steering wheel, although the inside of the van certainly wasn’t spotless. Neil had only so much energy devoted to keeping things clean, and he tended to use it on his possessions that weren’t part of his work, like dishes and his couch.

(Granted, he’d found the couch next to a garbage can, but once his friends had helped him get it cleaned up and brought into his apartment, no one could have told the difference. And it’d made the space look permanent, which wasn’t a word Neil’d ever had a habit of using for the places he lived in. But now? Now he had a carpet.)

Neil got into the van and grabbed his phone. He went to his contacts, clicked on one of his favorites, and counted the ringtones it took for Wymack to pick up.

“Hey, kiddo,” Wymack’s gruff voice said after the third beep. “You at the shop yet?”

“Not yet. I just finished loading the van, I should be there in ten minutes.”

As he spoke, Neil put the key into the ignition and checked the time. He’d told Wymack he would be there by 9, and he would be.

“Alright. Text me when you’re parked, I’ll help you unload and show you what you’re working with.”

“I can-”

“Nope, don’t even try,” Wymack’s voice cut off. “You’re doing me a favor, kid, I’m helping you get your shit out of your shit car whether you like it or not.”

“It’s not a favor,” Neil pointed out.“You’re paying me.”

“Damn right I am, so you better do as I say,” Wymack concluded, then hung up before Neil could say anything else.

Neil pulled the handbrake and started the car.

It took him exactly 7 seven minutes to reach The Foxhole’s block, and barely another to find a practical parking place nearby. At nine in the morning on a monday, he hadn’t expected anything less.

Neil debated unloading the trunk by himself after all (he estimated that he had about five minutes before Wymack got tired of waiting for his call and showed up to check the premises), but decided he was grateful for the job and for Wymack in general, and dutifully sent the text he’d been asked for.

Wymack arrived two minutes later. They had all of Neil’s supplies by the coffeeshop in five, and Neil wasted no time getting it all ready once that was done.

Wymack picked up a roll of masking tape. “You can paint over everything from here,” he said, putting a piece of tape on the pavement roughly one meter to the left of the coffee shop's shutter door, and then another one on the right, “to here.”

Neil glanced up from the bucket of soap water he was hunched over to check. Wymack had shown him the surface he would be working with already, when he’d come over a few days ago to talk it out. The coffee shop had been open though, so he hadn’t been able to see the whole thing. As far as canvases went, it was pretty great..

“You can paint as high as the ground floor goes, since I don’t own the whole building,” Wymack added. “And keep the sign clean.”

Neil unfolded the stepladder and propped it next to the wall, a few centimeters left of the paintable surface so it wouldn’t be in the way at the beginning when he didn’t need it.

“Anything else?”

“Just make it look good. I’ve already approved the sketches.” He clapped a heavy hand on Neil’s shoulder. “You’ve got talent.”

Neil breathed in, blowing the tension that Wymack’s gesture had awakened out of his system and into the sunny morning air. “Thank you, sir.”

Wymack squeezed his shoulder once and let go. “Now get on with it. I’ve got accounts to review.”

“Yes sir,” Neil said, earning an eyeroll.

Then Wymack was leaving, and Neil was smiling as he turned to the wall. He grabbed the mop and started to clean the dust and grime off of it.

The Foxhole’s shopfront was already painted a solid color, a green that Wymack wanted to keep for the background, so all the prep that was left after that was taping the borders and protecting the sign and the ground with tarps.

Neil had used grids before, to help him stay accurate and faithful to the proportions, and he had to admit they were useful, but he’d decided early on that he wouldn’t use one for this mural. It wasn’t heavy on perspective or placement like some of his work could be, for once, but mostly he just liked it better when he was working freehand. It left more breathing room for the instinctive changes Neil liked to bring to the designs as he transformed the idea into the real thing. Sketches never translated perfectly onto their medium, especially murals. It could be frustrating, as they never turned out exactly as he’d expected, but that was what he loved most about it.

The design for The Foxhole’s mural was simple enough. Wymack had asked for ‘foxes and flowers’; Abby had wanted it ‘wild and welcoming’. So that was what Neil had given them.

Foxes, small ones, ran and played and grew strong on the shutter door, with azaleas all around and peach blossoms above. One bigger fox sat watching them on a bed of mayflowers. Proteas stood behind it, mirrored on the opposite side of the mural where an oak tree stood guard. It was a sunny scene and there was peace there, but the foxes had teeth and claws and their edges were sharp enough to cut.

Neil started with a pencil. He sketched the rough shapes according to his template, taking care not to smudge the lines, then worked his way to the finer details and rearranged a few things as he went. Once he was satisfied with it, he finally got to uncap the cans of paint. He started with the base colors, filling the lines with orange, pink, white, brown and dark green, taking care not to let the paint drip anywhere it wasn’t supposed to.

Once the base was done, he had to take a break. The acrylic needed about an hour to dry completely, so he figured he’d stretch his limbs and eat a late lunch. He couldn’t wander too far off without risking a theft, however, and ended up buying a cheap and bland sandwich from the bakery that faced the coffee shop.

It was only then that his favorite part began. Now he could blend the colors, mix them, work out the details and the shading, add movement and life to the scene. Now he got to play with textures and patterns and lighting, with the bark of the oak and the bite of the fox and the brightness of the mayflowers. On a whim, he decided to add a thick, black outline to the foxes, jagged and irregular, stylizing it so it looked almost like a flame. He made the flowers look brighter in contrast, turned the tree into a foil, tweaked the light so it flirted with the mystical.

At some point, Neil edged out of his frenzy long enough to take several steps back and look at the whole thing.

It was perfect.

Except for all the ways it wasn’t.

Neil picked up the smaller brushes and went in again, correcting details here and there, chasing a perfection that would remain out of reach for as long as he’d keep looking for it. That was fine by him - Neil didn’t actually want the mural to be perfect. All he was after, all he needed, was that moment - that there it is, where he’d take a step back and exhale, and everything would just - settle. And he’d knew that was it.

He was getting close, Neil could feel it, so very close, when the stupidest thing happened.

Neil had just noticed something off with the color of one of the proteas and had stepped down the ladder to retrieve the brush he’d been using for the deep pinks, rushing back towards the mural immediately, when someone had run into him.

Or, perhaps more accurately, when he had crashed into someone. With a paintbrush dripping pink and his hands (and everything else) covered in paint.

There was a rough sound from the someone as they collided, and then the wet sound of a paintbrush full of paint landing against a hard surface. The someone was shorter, so Neil looked down.

Very, very annoyed eyes met his.

The guy stepped back with a scowl, letting his hand drop from Neil’s arm, where it’d landed, Neil assumed, to steady the both of them. He was blond, and broad, and dressed in all black from head to toe. It made the large pink stain on his chest all the more conspicuous.

In terms of contrast though, Neil couldn’t help but notice, it worked. Pale hair, pale skins and golden eyes set against a vast darkness, dominating the whole but for one splash of vibrant color. It was threefold, and ridiculous, and Neil wanted to paint it.

Which is why Neil said, “I think I found your color,” instead of apologizing like a normal person. 

But to be fair, he hadn’t been ‘normal’ since his birth. Being born into the mafia tended to do that to you.

The man’s eyebrows twitched, and the corner of his mouth curled ever so slightly down. “What you did is ruin my shirt.”

Neil felt a smile pull at his lips. “I don’t know. I think it looks better that way. Makes you look more... approachable. Less like a criminal, what with all the black.”

“I don’t care about looking ‘approachable.’ And you’re the one vandalising someone else’s private property.”

“I’m not vandalising anything. This is my job. I have a permit and everything.”

“Congratulations,” the man deadpanned.

“I’ve done it before,” Neil said, smiling sharply. “Painting illegally. It’s not typically done by daylight.”

“How surprising. I take it you’re Wymack’s new stray.”

Neil’s smile vanished. “I’m not a stray,” he said, though he had been. But he’d worked hard to make sure he’d never be again. Then the rest of the man’s statement struck him, and he couldn’t help but ask. “How do you know Wymack?”

“I used to work for him,” the man answered, laconically. Neil waited for him to say more, but he just turned around to stare at the mural instead. Something itched in Neil’s hands - an urge to hide it, protect it from all eyes until it was perfect - but he let it go. He took a step forward so he was standing next to the man instead of behind him, and looked at the mural for himself.

One of the proteas was paler than the others. There was a leaf he’d forgotten to highlight. One of the azalea’s pistil was barely visible. The outline of one fox could use more precision.

They were little things - inconsequential but nonetheless present, and he felt a pull to correct them - but even then, something in his chest just - settled.

“Kitschy,” the man’s voice drawled on his left. “But I suppose that’s fitting.”

Neil shrugged. He was happy with it. It did fit the place, but also the vibe he’d wanted for it. “It’s done.”

The man’s gaze flickered down to the paintbrush Neil still held in his hand, one eyebrow arched in question although his face looked bored.

Neil shrugged again. “I thought it needed more. I was wrong,” he stated, and smiled at the man, half-grinning by the end. “Thank you for the change of perspective. I could have ruined it, if I hadn’t run into you.”

“How… fortunate,” the man said, flat-voiced and not meaning a word of it.

Neil took the whole mural in one last time, then slightly shook his head and turned to clean up his mess. He dumped the brushes in the bucket of water he’d used to clean the wall, then picked up one of the rags he used to wipe paint off and handed it to the man. He’d turned away from the wall as well, and took the rag with both eyebrows raised.

Neil gestured at his own chest, around where the stain was. “So you can wipe the worst of the paint off,” he explained, then pointed at the bucket. “Dunk it in the water there, it’s got soap in. It won’t take it all of, but I’ll take you to my place once I’m done packing up and you can wash it there.”

“Why would I do that?”

Neil blinked up from the paint can he was closing. “Because I live like ten minutes away and I have a washer and dryer?”

“I don’t know you.”

Neil shrugged. “I’m Neil,” he said, holding out his hand. The man stared at it without moving. Neil looked at it, noticed the amount of paint smeared on it, and took it away. “Neil Josten. I’m a painter.”

“I noticed,” the man said, then rolled his eyes at Neil’s expectant look. “Andrew Minyard.”

Neil grinned. “I’ve heard about you. Are you the journalist, or the doctor?”

Andrew scowled. “Journalist.”

Neil hummed. “Thought so.”

Andrew went back to wiping his shirt with the wet cloth, and Neil walked over to the bucket so he could start scrubbing the brushes clean.

He always lost himself in the task. There was something cathartic about sitting there, rubbing the paint off and seeing it swirl and mix in the water, after spending so many hours with his mind directed solely at the mural, attention and focus held so taut that he’d sometimes forget to blink. Tidying up, in contrast, was a mindless task. It set his brain at rest and allowed him to come back down to earth.

By the time he was finished, Andrew was long done with his shirt and stood leaning against the wall with his cellphone in hand, waiting.

“Changed your mind?” Neil called out to him.

Andrew barely even glanced at him. “I’m not the one inviting a stranger into my home.”

Neil shrugged. “You know Wymack. That’s enough for me.”

“Your survival instincts are disastrous.”

Neil’s grin split his face in half. “You have no idea.”

That earned him a look, but nothing else.

Loading everything back into the van took longer without help (Andrew looked up a few times as Neil came and went, but that was it), but soon enough everything had been put away and all that was left for Neil to do was to tell Wymack he was done. When he looked up from his phone, he found Andrew standing some ways in front of him, his own phone nowhere to be seen.

Neil tilted his head towards the passenger door. “Ready to go?”

All he got in reply was a soft huff, and then Andrew was opening the door and getting in. Neil was smiling as he walked over to the other side of the van and hopped in.

“The paint will wash off,” Neil offered as the van rumbled to life. “It resists to the rain, but not the washing machine.”

“We all have a breaking point.”

Neil supposed that was true. He’d seen plenty of people break, and had come close himself several times.

Unlike paint, though, people could get back up. Even when there was more scar tissue left than skin, muscles would pull and pull at the the body until it stood.

Neil didn’t say this. He didn’t know how, and doubted Andrew would understand if he had. 

Then again, if he’d worked with Wymack, maybe he would.

It was this thought, and the comforting manoeuvering of his van through an itinerary he knew in his sleep, that pushed Neil to try.

“People are more like bones than paint,” he told Andrew. The look he got in response was so intentionally bored it pushed Neil to try harder. Like maybe, if he could find the right words, Andrew’s blank surface would crack and he’d get a glimpse at the colors hidden beneath. “Paint washes off. Or fades. And if you want to, you can always cover it up,” he said. He wasn’t looking at Andrew anymore, but the attention directed at him was unwavering as he spoke. “People aren’t so easy to get rid off. We bend, and we give, and we break,” he took a steadying breath, eyes intent on the road even as the mangled lines marring his hands pulled at the skin, “but we mend. We scar. We stand back up. And we keep going.”

Run, his mother had told him more than once. Never look back. There is nothing for you there.

It had worked for him, for a while. As long as he hadn’t looked back, all that had existed for him was a narrow path forward, and the impossibility to slow down. His survival had depended on it. But when she’d died - Neil’d stumbled. She had died and Neil had tripped over her corpse and nothing would ever wash that landmark off the surface of his life. Neil had slowed down. The path had still been there, but everything around it had been there, too. A little blurred, a little out of focus, but the longer he had stared, the clearer it had become - and the slower he had run.

Of course, it’d meant that they caught up to him.

But he’d survived.

He had found help and had gotten back up and he had kept going.

And through it all, he’d learned to stop running.

“Not all of us do.”

Andrew’s voice startled Neil. It brought him out of autopilot and pulled his thoughts back to traffic as efficiently as if he’d been pinched. It took several seconds for the words to make sense.

“No,” Neil agreed. “We don’t. My mother didn’t,” he added, flicking a glance at Andrew’s profile and smiling when Andrew turned to look at him and stayed. “But I did. And I have a feeling you did too.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“That’s not true,” Neil countered. “I know you worked for Wymack. I know you’re a journalist, and that you have a twin who’s a doctor and whose name also starts with an A. I also know that Kevin thinks your diet’s disastrous and your journalistic skills impressive. Judging from the articles I’ve read, I’d say he’s right.”

“So you really are Neil Josten,” Andrew retorted, something tense in his tone. “I wondered. Tell me, are you this obsessed with every acquaintance Kevin has, or should I feel flattered?”

“I’m not a stalker,” Neil protested. “Kevin just can’t shut up about you. And I get why. That piece you did on the Moriyamas -” Neil cut himself off before he could say you were right. He was not ready for that conversation. Maybe later, if their paths crossed again, which - Neil was surprised to find out - he was hoping they would. He faltered for a bit, before settling for an honest, “It was brilliant,” and hoping Andrew wouldn’t question it.

No such luck.

“Was it now,” Andrew droned. It wasn’t said like a question.

Neil tensed. He knew Andrew had noticed when he met his eyes, but stubbornly refused to acknowledge it as he started to park his van in the exact same spot he’d pulled it out of in the morning. He was thankful when he started to unload his equipment and Andrew didn’t pry. He just stood there and smoked.

When you feel yourself start to spiral, focus on what your senses tell you, not your mind, his therapist had said. Neil dutifully focused on the task at hand and the smell of ash until the taste of blood had all but vanished from his mouth.

When he’d locked the door to the shed he kept all his work stuff in, Neil finally felt centered enough to speak again.

“I hope you’re not allergic to cats,” he told Andrew. “Sir’s very affectionate.”

Andrew arched an eyebrow. “You’re cat’s name is Sir.”

Neil grinned. This was a topic he could relax into. “Sir Fat Cat MacCattherson. She’s fat.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed.”

Neil led them to the stairs. Andrew didn’t protest.

“I’m not the one who named him. Do you know Allison?”

“Yes,” Andrew said, distaste evident in his voice. “Tragically.”

Neil shrugged. “She’s not that bad.” Andrew apparently had nothing to say to that. Neil wasn’t deterred. “Do you have a pet?”

“I have a cat.”

“What’s its name then?”

A pause. Then an aggravated sigh. “King Fluffkins.”

Neil stopped. He turned around to catch the expression on Andrew’s face, and raised both eyebrows. “I’m going to guess it wasn’t your idea.”

Andrew looked unimpressed. “Congratulations, it was my cousin’s. You guessed correctly and win nothing,” he deadpanned, and pushed past Neil.

They stopped on the first floor. Andrew remained silent as Neil opened the three locks on his door, and didn’t question it when Neil locked them back up once they’d slipped inside.

Sir came up to them to investigate as soon as she’d heard the door, as Neil had known she would. She headbutted Neil’s shin first, then wandered over to sniff Andrew. He waited for her to rub against his leg before offering her his hand, which she sniffed some more, then rubbed against to ask for petting. Andrew dutifully indulged her. The softness that came over his features was subtle, but unmistakable. It caught Neil by surprise.

Once Sir had had her fill and wandered off, however, all the tension that’d left immediately returned to Andrew’s shoulders.

Neil could sympathise. Entering someone else’s space always left him on edge the first few times. It’d taken months for him to feel at ease in the flat Matt shared with Dan, and they’d already been friends. Andrew and Neil were strangers. Allowing him in his flat would have been unthinkable years ago; now it simply left Neil unbalanced. At least he’d have something to report to his therapist the following week.

“Is it okay if I throw some of my stuff in with your shirt?” Neil asked to distract himself from the feeling. When Andrew nodded, he retrieved the laundry basket in his room.

He pointed Andrew towards the laundry/storage room with his chin and Andrew held the door open for him, since his own hands were occupied with the laundry basket. He emptied it into the washing machine, then picked out the few items that would need some stain-remover to go back to their original state.

“I’m surprised we didn’t meet earlier,” Neil mused out loud as he poured the detergent into the little plastic drawer and pushed it shut.

Andrew was leaning against the wall when Neil turned around, watching him. “Kevin likes to keep his life compartmentalised.”

“He’s dating a former Raven,” Neil pointed out, frowning.

“Former. Why do you think they haven’t tried to transfer into the same team?” Andrew said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Neil thought about it. He’d assumed Kevin had tried, but had never been curious enough to ask. It made sense now. It’d also explain why they still hadn’t made their relationship public.

“I just thought Kevin was emotionally crippled,” he said.

“He is,” Andrew stated, then gestured impatiently with his hand. “But I’m done talking about Kevin’s boring life.”

“He’s a gold-winning olympic athlete,” Neil pointed out.

Andrew made a disgusted sound. “ He’s Kevin. He could be the queen of England, and I’d still be bored discussing his life for more than two minutes.” He shifted against the wall so he was facing Neil, eyes narrowed and suddenly sharper than they’d been. “I’d rather we talk about you, Neil Josten. I can’t figure you out.”

Neil’s hand tensed on the edge of the washing machine. He put it in his pocket and leaned a hip where it had been, smiling to hide the learned anxiety that was rising in his guts.

“I’m not that interesting.”

“Oh, but I think you are,” Andrew said, leaning slightly forward like he wanted to tell Neil a secret. “Everything about you says damaged goods, yet here you are. Bringing a stranger into your home on a whim. Doesn’t exactly align with the amount of locks you’ve got on your door, now, does it?”

Neil bristled. “I’m not defenseless.”

Andrew looked into his eyes without flinching. “No,” he said, a thoughtful tone to it. “I don’t think you are.”

Neil frowned. He didn’t know what Andrew meant by that. Was he talking about his scars? Had Neil let his past show, somehow? Had Kevin talked more than he should have?

Neil shook his head. Relax. Took a deep breath. You’re not on the run anymore.

He leaned away from the washing machine and gestured at Andrew’s stained shirt. “I’ll get you a shirt or something so you can take this off.”

Andrew said nothing. He followed Neil to his room, stopping at the entrance to lean against the doorframe as Neil rummaged through his clothes. He had the nagging feeling that he was being evaluated, somehow. Andrew was judging him. Neil decided to ignore it and focused on finding a t-shirt that would fit Andrew’s broader frame, settling on a grey hoodie that’d always been a little oversized on him.

“Here,” he said, handing the hoodie to Andrew, who took it without a word. “You can change in the bathroom over there.”

The hoodie fitted Andrew fine. It was a little tight around the arms and shoulders, but not enough that it looked uncomfortable. Neil took the shirt from Andrew and sprayed the stain-remover where it was needed, then threw it into the machine and started the cleaning cycle.

“It’s gonna take about an hour for the cycle to be over,” he told Andrew. “And then another half-hour for it to dry.”

Andrew’s brows furrowed slightly, but he did not otherwise complain, so Neil told him to make himself comfortable on the couch and slipped into his own room to change. He threw his work overalls on a chair so the fresh stains from the mural would dry, and exchanged it for a pair of sweatpants and an old t-shirt.

Andrew’s eyes trailed over his arms when he returned to the living room, a spark of interest in his gaze as he took in the mismatched mix of tattoos and scars that covered them. If he noticed that Neil had caught him looking, it didn’t show. Maybe he didn’t care. Neil brushed it off either way and made his way over to the kitchen part of the room, pulling one glass out of a cabinet then turning towards Andrew.

“Do you want something to drink? I’ve got tap water and juice.”

“Depends on the juice.”

Neil opened the fridge to check. “I’ve got apple, tomato, orange, ananas, or grapefruit.”

“Apple. That’s a lot of juices.”

“I like juice,” Neil said, and shrugged. He got the brick of apple juice out of the fridge and poured two glasses of it, shutting the fridge’s door with his hip. He stuck the juice under one armpit then and brought the glasses over to the coffee table, setting one of them down in front of Andrew. He sat down on the other cushion with his own glass.

Andrew sipped at the juice. Neil leaned down into the back of the couch and sighed. He could feel his body finally allowing itself to relax after the hours of painting. He turned his head towards Andrew and was about to ask him if he wanted to watch a movie or something while they waited when Andrew glanced down at his exposed forearm.

“What does this one represent?” he asked.

Neil followed his gaze down to the tattoo. It was one of the first ones he’d gotten: the outline of a card, with a burning car trapped inside. Below the card was a date.

Neil swallowed. He could almost feel the heat radiating off of it now, even after all those years. It burned his eyes. He looked away from the tattoo and found Andrew’s eyes instead, studying him. Brown eyes, like the earth. Unwavering.

He didn’t know why, exactly, looking into Andrew’s eyes made the words spill. But they did.

“It’s my mother’s funeral,” he said. His voice was low. Barely above a whisper. Andrew was listening. “She died in that car. I was too weak to pull her out, so I burned it.” If Neil closed his eyes, he could see it. The vast expanse of sand and the sea, rolling back and forth in rhythm. The flames filling up the car like they were trying to eat it. The smell.

Andrew bumped his knee with Neil’s and the beach disappeared.

“I buried her ashes on the beach.”

Andrew held his gaze for a little while longer, and then he turned away. His other knee - the one he hadn’t used to bring Neil back - jumped three times. When he spoke, his voice sounded oddly distant.

“The woman who gave birth to me abandoned me to the foster system. When we were ‘reunited’, I found out she’d been abusing my brother for years.” Andrew took a sip out of his glass. “So I killed her.”

Neil wasn’t as surprised as he probably ought to be. There was something about Andrew that spoke of violence. Not right here. Not in the present. Yet it was etched into him like a giant scar.

“What about your father?”

Andrew shrugged. “Doesn’t exist.”

Neil sighed. “I wish I’d never known mine,” he said. “But at least I got to see him die.”

The weight of Andrew’s gaze on the side of his face was strangely comforting. When he raised his glass in the air, Neil turned to follow the motion with his eyes.

“To dead parents,” Andrew said, and tipped his glass back.

Neil laughed.

*

They watched Grey’s Anatomy. Neil managed to make it through the first two minutes of the first episode before starting to roast the stupidity of the cast. Andrew joined in immediately. Neil laughed too many times to count, and managed to make Andrew snort several times in return.

They were well into the third episode when Andrew’s phone rang. The phone call itself couldn’t have lasted more than thirty seconds, but by the time Andrew had hung up, it was clear that he needed to go.

They’d forgotten to check on the laundry, however, so it’d just sat there in the washing machine for at least half an hour, which meant that Andrew’s shirt wasn’t dry. It also meant that Andrew couldn’t trade it for the hoodie he was still wearing.

In the end, Neil told Andrew to keep the hoodie, and Andrew gave Neil his phone number so they could meet up and return their respective items of clothing. Neil didn’t have a habit of inviting people over, but the flat felt oddly empty once Andrew was gone. He went for a run. It helped.

They traded the hoodie and the shirt a few days later. They’d agreed on the coffee shop where Andrew got his caffeine fix every day, and sat down to wait for their drinks. Neil asked what Andrew was working on, and just like a whole hour passed.

There was no reason that they should meet again after that. Sure, they’d probably cross paths sooner or later due to their intersecting social circles. But there was no reason to make it happen on their own.

Except - well.

There was no reason that they shouldn’t meet again, either.

*

[5:24pm] Hey, Andrew.

[5:26pm] Neil.

[5:26pm] I need a favor.

[5:27pm] Careful, Neil. You already owe me a shirt.

[5:28pm] Like hell I do. Your shirt is fine.

[5:29pm] Easy for you to say. You don’t have to wear it.

[5:30pm] The shirt is fine, Andrew.

[5:31pm] Would you go to art therapy with me next weekend?

[5:32pm] Why?

[5:36pm] My therapist thinks I should try it. She said it could ‘help me address some of the more repressed parts of my trauma.’

[5:38pm] Sounds fun.

[5:38pm] Ha ha.

[5:40pm] Are you coming with or not?

[5:42pm] Sure. But I’m not painting.

[5:43pm] You won’t have to. I’ll text you the address and time.

[5:44pm] Thanks, Andrew.

[5:46pm] Don’t mention it.

[mysticsparklewings]

Ziggy Crossing

Still not quite sure I'm 100% back into the swing of things (posting regularly and being more present) yet, but time will tell. For now I'm testing the waters. Anyway. In the time I've been away, I ended up talking to some friends about (to the surprise of absolutely no one) Animal Crossing, and in that conversation, the idea of drawing my cat, Ziggy, as an Animal Crossing villager came up. I'd toyed with it before after seeing some other people draw their pets as villagers, and that conversation more or less sealed the deal for me to at least try it, even if my attempt didn't pan out and see the light of day. Obviously, things went pretty well because here I am posting this. The first step, as it is 90% of the time for me, was to come up with a sketch and go from there. I primarily used Olivia and Lolly [pre-existing Animal Crossing cat villagers] as my references--Olivia for the pose and eyes, Lolly for the stripes and some details regarding the ears and face--but I also checked certain things across the various cat villager models so that details could be consistent where they needed to be. I think if I missed the mark anywhere, it's probably in the proportions. Namely the size of the head and length of the body. But I think it's close enough that unless you compare it directly to Olivia's model that I referenced for the pose, the proportions aren't so off that it's distracting or off-putting. I did originally have trouble figuring out what pattern to put on her shirt though because the real Ziggy doesn't really have anything I could pull a pattern from. These days she does wear a white and silver collar, but that's not a whole lot to work with. So I left that alone while I pondered how I wanted to go about coloring the whole thing. My plan at the beginning was to use this sketch as a test piece for some acrylic paint markers I recently acquired (which you will be seeing me talk about in the future), but once the sketch was finished and I went back to check the colors I had (you know me; gotta have a swatch chart for everything), it was pretty obvious that if I want this to be my dear Ziggy and not just a random tabby cat, I needed to figure out a different coloring method. I could have just done regular acrylic paint, but that sounded like a chore and thus I was not interested. Same with gouache. Colored pencils were on the table, but the main problem I have with those is that they can be pretty slow and personally I think their texture really lends them better to replicating the 3DS/Animal Crossing: New Leaf style, as opposed to the look of New Horizons, and that's not what I was going for here. That left me with two main options: Watercolor, which was a hard pass for this kind of art (at least for Ziggy herself), and alcohol markers, which I did use quite a bit on the last Animal Crossing artwork I made, and they had worked out fairly well. Alcohol markers it was! Of course, even after that decision was made, there was the issue of how to handle the lines of the drawing. When I was planning on using the paint pens/acrylic markers/whatever, that seemed a lot simpler because, in theory, I could just use the same pen I wanted to color with to do the outlines and then fill them in. And because that would be using mostly opaque paint, if I needed to I could just cover up any overlap with relative ease. Alcohol markers don't play by the same rules though, so I had to re-think all that. In the end, I pulled out a pale warm gray Polychromos pencil close to the main color of alcohol marker that I had picked out that I figured would also be light enough to blend in everywhere else. That way I could have the defining lines that I needed without having to worry too much about them being visible in the final product. [For clarification: I picked a Polychromos because once sharpened they tend to hold a point longer and better than the other colored pencils at my disposal and I really needed to keep a sharp point as long as possible to do the lines here.] In retrospect, I do think it might have been to my benefit to pick out a pink for doing the inner ear lines, but the end result there isn't so awful that it single-handedly (paw-ed-ly?) ruins the drawing for me. It's just something to take note of for next time if there is a "next time." Once I had my lines (including doing the eyelashes and mouth with one of my usual black fineliners), the next challenge was the actual coloring. Mostly because I had to be very careful around the edges so that the marker ink didn't feather out too far (as alcohol markers do on any paper that isn't marketed as "bleed proof" because that's what bleed proof in paper actually means--not that it won't bleed through to the other side, though that is less common with that kind of paper, but that it won't "bleed" across the page), and I also had to be a little careful and choosy about how I did any blending or shading. Again, my blending and shading plan was going to be different had I used the acrylic markers. The main thing I ended up doing here was trying to find areas that needed to be layered so that the one-color shading could act as a line/barrier between sections. Best example: Where the ears meet the head, I shaded the bottom portion of the ears. You can also see this a little bit where Ziggy's tail meets her body and where the legs intersect at a few different points. By no means did this turn out perfectly, considering that I really wanted to stick to use as few colors as possible (which means pretty much all the shading is just layers of one color to darken it) which means there isn't as much distinction or variation as there could be. And I feel it necessary to note here that I was worried when I first finished the lines that the eyes looked wonky, but after coloring pretty much everything else in that concern dissolved because 1. It's harder to tell and 2. Even if they aren't exactly the same, it makes visual sense because it looks like her head is slightly turned, meaning the eyes wouldn't be identical anyway. Never underestimate the power of coloring your work in! Speaking of which, you might be wondering about her shirt by now. Well, after toying around with some ideas I got it in my head that a good way to tackle that problem might be with washi tape, as I've used it in this manner before and worked out pretty nicely. Even though it wasn't a lot to work with, I did like the idea of the base color for her top being white like the real Ziggy's collar, and that narrowed down my tape options considerably. Of the options I had that I thought would be suitable, I ended up having a choice between one with small rainbow-colored polka dots and the decidedly less vibrant small triangles that you see here. The polka dots seemed a little too peppy for Ziggy, so I went with the triangles. And this, I must say, is one of those artistic decisions that I feel even better about the longer that I see the end product.   The main issue I have with using washi tape, and thus why I don't use it in this way that often, is because cutting the washi tape to fit a specific shape is a process that doesn't get much easier even with practice.  And even if it did, that wouldn't eliminate the very real possibility of cutting or indenting the paper underneath while you're cutting the tape. Of which, I have not yet figured out how to totally avoid short of forming the washi tape on a separate piece of paper, cutting it there, and then moving it to the final piece. But that method comes with its own problems too, so... Still, I made the decision to go through with it here and just accept the rough edges/lack of precision and all that. Before I put the tape down though, I did do a little shading with some light gray markers that I was counting on showing through the tape to give it a little more dimension. Seeing it now, I do think I could've stood to go a little darker, but again this isn't something that totally ruins the end result for me. Just something worth noting. After all of the above, I was left with one lingering problem: The background. Which I've noticed seems to normally be a "problem" area for me in that I don't always have a solid idea for what to do with it. I did consider what exactly I wanted to do earlier on in the process, before I started on Ziggy on the final paper, even. Briefly, I thought I might cut her out and put her on a separate background as is sort of a go-to background method for me. Something just didn't feel right about doing that here though and it feels like I've done that a lot lately (you know, when I've not been drowning in mandalas for NaPoWriMo...). So it was at this early stage that I locked in the idea of adding in the background in later, probably doing something kind of loose to give a general idea that hopefully wouldn't take too much time or effort. We've already established that I wasn't super keen on the idea of using acrylic paints or gouache for this drawing, and that remained true for the background too. Although, I don't really like using alcohol markers for backgrounds either because it can be tricky to keep things smooth and consistent. That left me with colored pencils and watercolor. Colored pencils are usually hard pass for backgrounds for me for a number of reasons. So! Watercolor, hmm... I drew Ziggy here on my darling Strathmore 400 series mixed media paper because I love how it handles markers and it has enough weight and texture to it that it handles a lot of my other go-to options with little fuss. Watercolor is really the only thing I have trouble using on it, the main problem being that sometimes (not always) the paint doesn't like to blend out super smoothly and certain watercolor techniques don't work the same on it. This doesn't mean it's useless for watercolor (at least not for me), that just means I have to be more careful about how I choose to work with watercolor on it. In this case, the blending issues lined up with the idea I had of letting the background have more texture since Ziggy came out a lot smoother by the very nature of alcohol markers. Somewhere in all this, the idea struck me to use my Gelatos to leave behind some crayon-like texture. That idea seemed fitting to me since Animal Crossing is a fairly light-hearted and child-friendly game, themes that crayons go along with. The gelatos are water-soluble but not every color dissolves completely when activated with water. This should be pretty evident here because I didn't try to hide it. I wanted quick and easy, and without a doubt just letting the texture do whatever it wants is the quick n' easiest method to use with the gelatos. Once I'd done a bit of back and forth with two greens and two blues to give me the solid suggestions of a sky and ground, it still felt like it was missing something. Ultimately, it seemed like a good idea to me to try and mimic the triangle pattern/texture that New Horizons features. (In past games you could get squares or circles for a grass pattern at random.) And while I as per usual I had to think on how to go about this, in the end, the best solution I could come up with turned out to be drawing the triangles in with alcohol markers. Truly, I'm surprised to be reporting this because I fully expected the creamy nature of the gelatos to make using alcohol markers on top feel disguising and unproductive. But not so! At least not with the limited gelato use here. The creamier areas do soften the color of the marker, but I think that worked to my advantage. Although, I did end up using a little bit of my yellow Moonlight gel pen because I felt like I needed some yellow triangles for balance and I knew transparent yellow markers wouldn't do what I wanted. But that brings us to the final product. I'm happy with it. And I do really like how the grass ties in with Ziggy's green eyes. It's just a nice little touch of visual cohesion in my book. As I always say, I'm sure it's not perfect and there are some missteps here and there or things that could be improved. Nevertheless, it was a fun experiment and serves as good encouragement for me to continue playing with the lineless look, among other things. I do have to note though that it feels super weird to just leave the eyes like this with no indication of shine on them! I made the choice not to since it's not a common trait with the official character models (at least not for eyes in this same style) but part of me still feels like it's incomplete. As I've said before recently and I'll probably say again, I can't promise I'll be getting back to a regular upload schedule now, but it's on my mind. I want to get to that point soon. I do have the acrylic markers I mentioned to talk about and another supply in the mail, and some other art in my backlog. So if you can be patient with me a while longer, there will be more from me to look forward to. In the meantime, please be kind to yourself and others. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram 

[bondsmagii]

so picture the scene. online horror is at its height. creepypasta everywhere and the good stuff too. Marble Hornets is in its first season. I'm a prolific horror writer on /x/. I also just got my driver's license, and I have a close group of online friends who I met mostly through /x/. eventually some of us find out that we all live close enough that meeting up every so often isn't impossible, so we start doing this. we go to reputedly haunted areas (hauntings: confirmed) and abandoned buildings, and spend a couple of nights fucking around and sleeping in the car and shit. it's a wild time and everything is absolutely saturated with the potential of Spooky Shit going down.

one day we're at this abandoned house. there's not much of it left, just a bunch of crumbling stone and the outline of the rooms inside, as well as some old junk and a rusting car outside. it's pretty standard as far as abandoned houses in the countryside go, but its vibes are rancid. still, we're young and dumb, so we hang out in the field in front and get roaringly drunk. the vibes remain kind of off but nothing major happens. eventually we all pass out. it's warm enough for once that we just sleep outside.

when I wake up suddenly, it's just beginning to get light. where we were, this is about 3:30am in high summer. the sky never gets truly dark, and now that the fire has died down, I can see it's a beautiful deep blue. there's enough light that I can see fairly well. my eyes are drawn to the house. it has changed.

now, bear with me here, because this does sound completely insane. for a solid three or four blinks, I saw the house as it was. it wasn't solid, because I could see the shades of the ruined structure through it, but I could also see precisely how it once looked. it even had a fence and a gate. and on the footpath leading to the gate, there was a figure. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. it was entirely black, like deep shadow, in shapeless clothing, and it moved in a way that made me think of a glitching film -- jerky, unsteady. its proportions were off in a way that I still can't really figure out. and the rancid vibes were worse than ever.

now, using my superior intellect, I figured I was dreaming. this was why I was blinking rapidly, but the image didn't fade. I then looked away and looked back, and it was still there. I looked away again, and I saw my friend Conor was also awake. he was looking at the house with the sheerest look of terror I have ever seen on another person. seeing that expression sent my own fear to new heights, and I jumped up and started booking it. Conor did the same. the others all woke up and understandably started yelling about what the fuck, but our terror must have come through because they ran for it as well. we ran across the field, into the trees, and didn't stop until there was no way we could see the house. (or it could see us?) we waited there until the sun was up fully, and then went back, got in the cars, and got out of there.

so where does the book come in? my friend Conor had just bought a copy that day. in our haste to get away, and in the stunned disbelief that characterised the drive home, he totally forgot about it. he left it in the back of my car. a month later I left the country, for various convoluted reasons that I summarise to most as "university" to save getting into it. occasionally Conor messaged me like, "hey, give me my book back", and I would respectfully reply, "no <3". there is no way I'm getting rid of a book with a story like that attached. I do however plan to send him a full-colour version of the book in the mail, just when I think he's finally forgotten about me. having a copy of House of Leaves appear in the mail anonymously with no context aside from a half-remembered memory of a friend you haven't spoken to in over 10 years is also a fitting origin story for such a book, I think.

speaking of House of Leaves lately, I really do think the story of how I got my copy is very fitting

[miss-m-winks]

A Drawing Tutorial

I thought maybe there would be some of you who might appreciate seeing some of my artistic processes. So this is a quick tutorial about digital art! This is how I do a single-layer picture, and I’ll also be discussing composition a little.

First! doesn’t matter what program you use or what size your canvas is or what tools you use, that’s all personal preference. Experiment with different brushes and brush settings until you’ve figured out what you like best.

I have recently started thinking of a digital canvas as being just as much a part of the artwork as the subject itself. This is something that holds true in any art form. If you think of the surface you create on as being another art tool, it can really help you create nice compositions and use the space effectively!

so, with that in mind my first step is to tone my “paper” so the colors I’m going to use for the main subject will have a nice backdrop to contrast against. I toss down a few soft colors and blend them out so they cover the whole canvas

If you vary the colors, it also gives a nice ambient lighting feel. So now comes the base colors, this when I make my gesture sketch. A gesture is important because it is the blueprint for the whole drawing! Gestures are not just for people, but can also include any objects in a picture! I pick a color that stands out from the background without being too high in contrast and lay down a solid gesture with a big blendy type brush so it has a softer edge. This helps it look like it really belongs here. I’m also thinking about how I want the composition to look, and usually I do this all in one go, never lifting my stylus, so I better be committed to it because if I hit the undo button it’s all gone. I’ll be drawing my oc Kouto Loryck, who is in fact an art model.

it’s important to be committed to every stroke, be bold and confident with your art. Even if it doesn’t turn out the way you want, you should at least be able to say that you were committed to it. Don’t worry about mistakes, thinking too much will only keep you stuck on one little part when you could be working on the whole thing. I had another drawing here about composition but I accidentally saved over it so I had to move that explanation to a different step haha 

Next I lay out the highlights to pull out the details of the subject. I used the same brush for most of this drawing, just changing the size to accommodate what I was using it for. Since the base color is orange, I used a really pale icy blue to highlight, and the blending quality of the brush I used kept it toned down properly so it didn’t look psychedelic. There is nothing wrong with psychedelic coloring, I think it’s really fun, but it’s not the look I wanted this time.

Now let me talk about the composition a bit. The most common composition tool is triangles. Triangles make for really pleasing compositions. And composition is all about balancing the positive and negative space in your picture, as well as creating a pathway for the viewer’s eye to follow. b

I kept this one super simple. Two main triangles in opposing directions, the eye is drawn to the head of the subject and follows the body down to the bottom of the page. Plain, simple, aesthetically pleasing. Keeping a small negative space on the other side of the subject and making a small negative space within the subject also adds a little extra variety to it. One surefire way to make an interesting composition is to place the subject off-center, because it varies the weight of the picture and makes it feel more dynamic, even if it’s a really boring pose like this one; he’s just leaning against  some vague object behind him. But I’ve got him off-center and at an angle to the viewer, so it adds interest to the composition. 

Once I’ve got highlights done, I go in and add shadows, and then I blend things smooth.

It’s important to use just a few colors to keep things simple. They should be colors that compliment each other in some way. Unless you want the color contrast to look discordant, of course. But even when you’re intentionally using colors that don’t blend nice, make sure you have some neutrals to balance with.

Now it’s really easy for me to decide exactly what I want to do with this,  so I lay out a line layer on top to plan my next steps.

This helps me figure out if there’s anything that needs to be adjusted, see if I’ve got my proportions how I want them, etc. I can then use this as a reference later to keep everything in line with my plan. Now I can go in with a smaller brush and add in any extra colors to help separate the different parts of the drawing.

And I add in extra shading to bring out the details here

Blend, redraw, add color as necessary until it looks good.

And at this point I can call it a finished drawing if I want. Or I can keep lining and shading and detailing until I think it’s really done. 

I’ll just zoom in on the face area now to discuss detailing. I have some specific brush settings I like to use for details like hair. And with the hair I draw layers of a dark shade, the color of course depends on the hair. Draw the hair in layers, first laying down a solid color a college art teacher of mine called “the hair helmet” and then go on top of that with a thin, non-blendy brush to give it the look of lots of individual strands. A brush that already has the look of multiple strands is best because you don’t have to do as many strokes.

and then I go back over it with my softer brush in the main hair color, do a few more strand layers on top of that, and this time add highlights in a few places, then blend all of that very gently so it still looks like hair.

Next is the eyes! I use a pencil type brush to bring out the lash lines and eyebrows. For the eyes themselves I layer in pale yellows, pinks, and white highlights, leaving a little of the skintone near the upper part of the eye to blend into a shadow.

Time to color in the eyes! I start with a dark circle in each eye, depending on the eye color. the iris is a funky little shallow bowl in the eye, curving inwards so actually the light hits it on the opposite side from what you might expect. But the shiny white highlight is on the same side as the rest of the lighting because over the iris is a clear dome that curves outward, giving the eye two layers to highlight on different sides.The upper part of the iris is also usually in shadow because of the eyelashes

Draw in the pupils, add a few dark lines radiating out from it to give the eyes that realistic texture, and then toss on that nice bright highlight.

Next, I detail the rest of the face with extra highlights and shadows. Here I’ve mapped out where the main lights and shadows would fall.

And finally I add in extra outlines on the nose, mouth, and ears, as well as the darkest side of the face and anywhere else that might need it

I ended up adjusting his lips quite a bit to make them the right width and shape. The upper lip is always darker than the lower lip because of the way light falls on faces. Except perhaps in cases where all the light is coming from below.

But anyway, that is my basic digital painting tutorial! Hope you found it useful!

[mcmansionhell]

McMansion Hell Does Architectural Theory (Part 3): British Palladianism

Hello Friends! Today we’re going to talk about a rather short-lived movement in late 17th, early-18th century architecture: British Palladianism, which is v “Palladio is great and I, an aristocrat, will only pay you if you design in reference to his style.” Of course it goes deeper than that, so, let’s begin! 

Background

In previous installations of this series, we’ve talked about the Italians and the French, but what the heck was happening in Britain all this time? Well, the answer is:

Seriously. The dang Brits were at war all the time - colonializing everything, sinking all of Spain’s ships, creating their own cool church bc their king wanted a son etc. 

Because of all this dang war, architecture in Britain for a long time was a messy hodgepodge of stylistic elements. Examples range from Henry VIII’s Windsor Castle Gatehouse (OG Tudor, though ostensibly Gothic) to the more classically-oriented but still rather Gothic Old Somerset House (completed in 1552) (demolished).  According to Mallgrave’s Architectural Theory (a great anthology), most of the classically inspired elements on pre-17th Century British buildings can be traced to Italian or French artisans. Oh well. 

Early English Classicism (Late 17th Century)

It wasn’t until the 17th century (v late) that classicism became a big deal in England. The first real-deal English classicist was the badass-ly named Inigo Jones, who actually went to Italy for a year (1613-14) where he encountered the work of Palladio for the first time -- which, needless to say blew his damn mind. Jones became the first British architect to have designed buildings in accordance to Vitruvian teachings and classical proportions.

The Dude Jones got into architecture through a weird angle: he was first a prominent set and costume designer for several English theatres. His Italian journey proved fruitful for him career-wise - many of the higher-ups were impressed with Jones’ knowledge of Italian aesthetics, and he was shortly appointed as the Surveyor to the Prince of Wales, before hella upgrading to being Surveyor of the King’s Works in 1615.

Jones’ earliest known architectural work (appropriately called Queen’s House), built for James I’s wife, Anne (who died before it was finished), was the first ever classically styled building in England. I mean, it’s great - just look at it. 

Photo by Bill Bertram (CC-BY-SA 2.5)

While Jones would go on to design a smattering of buildings, a great deal of his work was lost both in the English Civil War and in the 1666 Great Fire of London. Despite these minor setbacks, Jones’ is still considered to be among England’s greatest architects whose influence would span two centuries worth of British architectural technique.

Get it? It’s lit? Because half of his stuff got torched? I’m sorry.

As far as architectural theory goes during this era of budding classicism, the closest clue we have is the work of Henry Wotton, the British ambassador to Venice, who got so hellaciously sloshed on Italian architecture while he was there that he decided to write a book about it called The Elements of Architecture (1624), outlining his special interpretation of classical architecture. 

Wotton’s book was mostly a translation of Vitruvius with a little bit of Renaissance thought (a la Alberti and Palladio) thrown in. The most well-known snippet is his translation of the Vitruvian triad as “firmness, commodity, and delight” - an architectural catchphrase that often finds its way into contemporary architectural histories, though more accurate translations have been proposed:

Change in this line of thought came with Jones’ later successor, Christopher Wren. Unlike Jones who was rather rigorous in his classicism, Wren was a bit more...capricious. In fact, he even built in the Gothic style at the end of his long career (the dude built 45 churches alone) - a move that would have likely put Perrault and Blondel both in an early grave. 

Dude doesn’t even need the sunglasses, he’s throwing so much shade in this pic.

Wren’s ideas about architecture, encapsulated in his Tracts on Architecture (1670s) are varied. In Tract I, Wren opens up with the ballsy af statement: “Architecture has its political Use,” - that is, buildings form the national identity of a country and inspire patriotism amongst its citizens. This itself is a hot take, but it gets even hotter.

Like Perrault, Wren’s ideas about beauty are split into what he calls “natural” and “customary” beauty. Natural beauty consists of geometry, aka Proportions, following in the Platonic tradition® of an absolute beauty or harmony, inherently pleasing to all of us. Customary beauty, however, is more vague - Wren describes it as: “the use of our Senses to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes, as Familiarity or particular Inclination breeds a Love to Things not in themselves lovely.”

Basically, we like certain things for some dumb reason like feelings and stuff.

In his second Tract, Wren gripes about architecture being “too strick and pedantick.” This makes sense, because Wren was really into blending a variety of interesting styles together, which was perhaps problematic to some.

Enter the Moralists

One person who was particularly sick of Wren’s sh*t was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who, in addition to being an Earl, was also a writer and philosopher. (He was notably taught at a young age by none other than John Locke, the guy you learned about in Civics class once.)

Shaftesbury hated (!!!) the Baroque stylings of Wren’s late work, as well as the next generation of architects including John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, deeming the pair’s Baroque-leaning Blenheim Palace “a new palace spoilt.” In fact, he wrote a very amusingly scathing essay in 1712 basically saying that Britain was literally *THE BEST* at all of the other arts except for architecture, after which he proceeds to take a huge dump all over the architecture of the day.

Photo by Derova, (CC-BY-2.0)

Shaftesbury tried to sniff out a philosophical basis for Platonic thought regarding absolute beauty and harmonic proportions. What he came up with is essentially moralism, claiming that in order to be able to perceive the naturally good and beautiful ideas in art, one must themselves be naturally good and beautiful on the inside.™ Good taste comes from good inner resolve® to be true to what we know is true beauty and not be swayed by the evils of fashion™ blah blah blah.

The Height of British Palladianism 

This line of thought continued within what was now deemed British Palladianism (a movement whose discourse consisted mostly of wealthy Earls tutting at each other). British Palladianism saw several architects (Colin Campbell, Nicholas Du Bois, and William Kent, specifically) launch their own careers by releasing translations or new editions of works by Vitruvius, Palladio, and Jones, respectively with some pithy bits in the introductions haranguing the “ridiculous mixture of Gothick and Roman” of the previous generation thrown in for good measure.

Like all movements, the Palladian movement had its own shadowy figurehead, who funded the work of several of the architects working in the 1720s - Richard Boyle, Third Earl of Burlington.

Burlington was extremely wealthy, and spent most of his time being a total dilettante architect, traveling to Italy to collect manuscripts of Palladio and the like. In fact, Burlington fired Colin Campbell (the English Vitruvius!!) from working on his Piccadilly Villa because apparently Campbell’s classicism was **just not pure enough** for the good Earl, who decided he should just build his damn villa himself.

Burlington’s ruthless aesthetic commitment had a huge impact on the contemporary architects of the day, most of whom he fired. Of the ones he did not fire (aka he did not hire them in the first place), Robert Morris, the most prolific writer of the Palladian movement, is perhaps the most significant. Morris’s work chronicles not only the dawn and spirit of the movement but also its decline.

Morris’s 1728 essay “An Essay in Defense of Ancient Architecture” is about exactly what you would expect:

(((Tutting intensifies)))

The essay of course devolves from tutting critique to legit 17th century fanfiction:

I-Inigo-sama!!! <3

The End of an Era, I Guess

Jokes aside (yours truly used to ship historical figures back in my 7th grade fanfiction days and is not proud), Morris would take a rather different tone in 1739, in an essay commonly cited as a hint to the movement’s end, “An Essay upon Harmony.”

This essay breaks away from the Platonic ideas of absolute beauty, and instead breaks beauty up into several different categories - a relativist aesthetics coming from a contemporary movement (mostly in landscape architecture) called the picturesque, or picturesque theory, which will be the subject of next week’s post.

“In Harmony,” writes Morris, “there are three general Divisions, which may be distinguish’d by the Terms, Ideal, Oral, and Ocular.”

The Ideal is of course numbers and, duh, proportions. Oral harmony is how things are related to each other, with a v Plato allusion to musical harmony. Old news, right? 

But it’s Ocular harmony that offers a glimpse into what will ultimately be a much more powerful movement, spanning (serious, not dilettante) philosophy, art, and of course architecture: the picturesque and the sublime, supported by John Locke & Co.’s empiricism (but we’ll get to that).

Ocular harmony is the harmony of nature in its natural state - both “Animate” (animals, insects, also beauty and perfection, apparently) and “inanimate” (hills, woods, valleys, scenery - “noble, rural, and pleasing.”)

Morris’ ideas are ones of subjectivity, blind sensation to what is and is not lovely, rather than dictated ideas of aesthetic morality. He later goes on to say that in architecture, “The Proportion should be with respect to the Situation; the Dress, Decoration, and Materials should be adapted to the Propriety and Elegance of the Situation and Convenience…”

If that’s not the antithesis to Burlington’s objective classicist purity, I don’t know what is. And so, the bell finally tolls on British Palladianism.

Photo by Chris Nyborg, (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

I hope you enjoyed this bit of (admittedly long-overdue) tutting. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s Maine McMansion, and next Sunday’s installment where I trash talk a bunch of dudes who are way too into gardens.

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 30% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photos without captioned credit are from the Public Domain. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email kate@mcmansionhell.com before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

[endlessarchite]

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

Today, I’ve got a bit of an unusual post for this blog: a guest contributor!

Over the last 7 years of blogging, I have let maybe 3 or 4 contributors come and share something about themselves on the blog. And it’s not because there aren’t other amazing DIYers out there, or that I wouldn’t love to have a regular contributor or two sharing their cool DIY projects with you guys (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so more on that later). It’s because working alone on this blog has always been a juggling act — planning and actually doing the projects on my to-do list, writing about them, editing photos, getting the behind-the-blog business to operate smoothly, maintaining the site, managing the finances of it, and of course, dealing with lots of emails — it’s minutes here and minutes there, and then there’s no more time in the day for new stuff (and duh, Charlie needs a walk or two).

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the behind-the-scenes stuff with blogs, “guest post” requests are WAY TOO OFTEN nothing more than thinly veiled attempts for spamming you guys with marketing content. And since all of us are smarter than that, I got annoyed, frustrated at sorting through them, and just stopped taking guest post requests altogether. But here’s the not-so-fun-part of that: any blogger could easily tell you that my policy has solved nothing, because spammers love to follow up on emails no one wanted to even read the first time. My inbox still stays full, unless I pen a response somewhere along the lines of “to be 100% honest, I would rather eat rusty nails than publish this for you.”

But then, on a very rare day when just the right sunlight comes through the window and I’ve had enough coffee to not hate email, I will find a real post worth sharing. And this is one of those things. A reader-slash-interior-designer named Ruth Stolerman reached out about a recent project she did for a children’s bedroom. She does really fun, custom murals for her clients, and offered to share some of her secrets for a DIY tutorial, for no other reason than you guys might enjoy seeing how they’re made.

And, it got me thinking that I’d love to see more posts like this from readers who are proud of their work. So, I said yes. And she was super nice and sent me everything in a neat little package, and I managed to still get bogged down for months before getting it onto the blog. So I’m finally sharing it (with apologies to Ruth, of course). I hope you guys enjoy! *Affiliate links may be used in this post.*

———————-

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

I love painting murals for my clients – they’re great above a bed because lots of people worry about heavy artwork falling on them in their sleep. The key to a successful mural is planning. Before you get started, make sure you have a clear vision in your mind. Even if you would like to freestyle it, look at images that will help formulate an idea. I will walk you through a mural I just finished (see above) where we had a clear vision from the start. This mural is in a children’s bedroom and we decided I would paint a scene from the amazing Roald Dahl book, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Materials Needed:

pencil

paint brushes of various sizes

a water glass to clean your brushes

a palette or makeshift palette (plate, etc.)

a kitchen towel

cling wrap

acrylic paint

I like to use acrylic paints because they dry quickly and are water resistant. If you make a mistake before the paint has dried, you can dab it with a damp towel and completely remove the error.

If you’re nervous then I would recommend sketching your ideas on pieces of paper in the size you want, which you can then use as a 1:1 guide. I just dove straight in but I have done quite a lot of these!

When you have finished planning, start off by painting your wall in the color you would like it to be, using the paint brand of your choice. Alternatively, just work with the wall color you’ve got!

Let any paint dry and wipe down the wall thoroughly so that you have a clean surface. If you have to use a little water for this, make sure the walls are dry before you begin. Don’t forget to move any furniture out of your way, or cover anything you might drip paint on.

Now, using a light pencil, mark out the rough area you would like to paint within to make sure your drawing doesn’t get too large or small. If you have done sketches, stick them on the wall using masking tape in the position that you would like them to be in, to make sure you like the layout. Copy or trace them on to the wall.

If you are copying an image, have it in front of you and start drawing. I started this mural in the bottom left hand corner because I wanted to be sure the image sat just above the duvet. Keep stepping back from your drawing throughout to make sure your dimensions are correct and that you are filling the allocated space in the right proportions.

Once you have finished drawing, it’s time to get your paint ready. I like to put kitchen towel on my palette and wet it slightly with water. This means that the acrylic paint doesn’t dry out too quickly and if you want to keep painting the next day you can Clingfilm the palette and it will stay damp. I then work round the edge of the palette with paints, going from light to dark, leaving as much of the palette untouched as possible. This way you can mix colors below easily to get the perfect shade. Don’t have your paints too close to each other or they will inevitably get muddled together as you go. Try to use a good range of colors; I decided I wanted a bit of blue in my painting so instead of using black to make the grey areas, I mixed blue and a little brown with some white.

It’s time to paint! If your image suits an outline, paint it in your color of choice using a thin brush. I like to paint from left to right as I use the wall to steady my painting hand and this avoids smudging.

Now it’s just painting by numbers. Pick one color to start with, I like picking a light color here because if your brushes aren’t 100% clean when you switch colors, there is less contamination going from light to dark. Paint all the areas in your color of choice first.

For your second color, just move to the next darkest color and do the same as you go on. If there are small details in your painting, wait until the paint is dry and add these last.

Keep adding colors one by one until your image is complete. Good luck, and happy painting!

Before

After

———————-

Image credits: http://ift.tt/2qyVPQ9

Thank you so, so much to Ruth for sharing her amazing work! And if you’d like to follow her, you can check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

P.S. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and want to show off your work, feel free to email me. I’m a sucker for a good before and after, and I’d be happy to share your story! (but if you spam me… see the rusty nail thing above…)

The post An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural published first on http://ift.tt/2qxZz2j

[chocdono]

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

Today, I’ve got a bit of an unusual post for this blog: a guest contributor!

Over the last 7 years of blogging, I have let maybe 3 or 4 contributors come and share something about themselves on the blog. And it’s not because there aren’t other amazing DIYers out there, or that I wouldn’t love to have a regular contributor or two sharing their cool DIY projects with you guys (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so more on that later). It’s because working alone on this blog has always been a juggling act — planning and actually doing the projects on my to-do list, writing about them, editing photos, getting the behind-the-blog business to operate smoothly, maintaining the site, managing the finances of it, and of course, dealing with lots of emails — it’s minutes here and minutes there, and then there’s no more time in the day for new stuff (and duh, Charlie needs a walk or two).

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the behind-the-scenes stuff with blogs, “guest post” requests are WAY TOO OFTEN nothing more than thinly veiled attempts for spamming you guys with marketing content. And since all of us are smarter than that, I got annoyed, frustrated at sorting through them, and just stopped taking guest post requests altogether. But here’s the not-so-fun-part of that: any blogger could easily tell you that my policy has solved nothing, because spammers love to follow up on emails no one wanted to even read the first time. My inbox still stays full, unless I pen a response somewhere along the lines of “to be 100% honest, I would rather eat rusty nails than publish this for you.”

But then, on a very rare day when just the right sunlight comes through the window and I’ve had enough coffee to not hate email, I will find a real post worth sharing. And this is one of those things. A reader-slash-interior-designer named Ruth Stolerman reached out about a recent project she did for a children’s bedroom. She does really fun, custom murals for her clients, and offered to share some of her secrets for a DIY tutorial, for no other reason than you guys might enjoy seeing how they’re made.

And, it got me thinking that I’d love to see more posts like this from readers who are proud of their work. So, I said yes. And she was super nice and sent me everything in a neat little package, and I managed to still get bogged down for months before getting it onto the blog. So I’m finally sharing it (with apologies to Ruth, of course). I hope you guys enjoy! *Affiliate links may be used in this post.*

———————-

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

I love painting murals for my clients – they’re great above a bed because lots of people worry about heavy artwork falling on them in their sleep. The key to a successful mural is planning. Before you get started, make sure you have a clear vision in your mind. Even if you would like to freestyle it, look at images that will help formulate an idea. I will walk you through a mural I just finished (see above) where we had a clear vision from the start. This mural is in a children’s bedroom and we decided I would paint a scene from the amazing Roald Dahl book, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Materials Needed:

pencil

paint brushes of various sizes

a water glass to clean your brushes

a palette or makeshift palette (plate, etc.)

a kitchen towel

cling wrap

acrylic paint

I like to use acrylic paints because they dry quickly and are water resistant. If you make a mistake before the paint has dried, you can dab it with a damp towel and completely remove the error.

If you’re nervous then I would recommend sketching your ideas on pieces of paper in the size you want, which you can then use as a 1:1 guide. I just dove straight in but I have done quite a lot of these!

When you have finished planning, start off by painting your wall in the color you would like it to be, using the paint brand of your choice. Alternatively, just work with the wall color you’ve got!

Let any paint dry and wipe down the wall thoroughly so that you have a clean surface. If you have to use a little water for this, make sure the walls are dry before you begin. Don’t forget to move any furniture out of your way, or cover anything you might drip paint on.

Now, using a light pencil, mark out the rough area you would like to paint within to make sure your drawing doesn’t get too large or small. If you have done sketches, stick them on the wall using masking tape in the position that you would like them to be in, to make sure you like the layout. Copy or trace them on to the wall.

If you are copying an image, have it in front of you and start drawing. I started this mural in the bottom left hand corner because I wanted to be sure the image sat just above the duvet. Keep stepping back from your drawing throughout to make sure your dimensions are correct and that you are filling the allocated space in the right proportions.

Once you have finished drawing, it’s time to get your paint ready. I like to put kitchen towel on my palette and wet it slightly with water. This means that the acrylic paint doesn’t dry out too quickly and if you want to keep painting the next day you can Clingfilm the palette and it will stay damp. I then work round the edge of the palette with paints, going from light to dark, leaving as much of the palette untouched as possible. This way you can mix colors below easily to get the perfect shade. Don’t have your paints too close to each other or they will inevitably get muddled together as you go. Try to use a good range of colors; I decided I wanted a bit of blue in my painting so instead of using black to make the grey areas, I mixed blue and a little brown with some white.

It’s time to paint! If your image suits an outline, paint it in your color of choice using a thin brush. I like to paint from left to right as I use the wall to steady my painting hand and this avoids smudging.

Now it’s just painting by numbers. Pick one color to start with, I like picking a light color here because if your brushes aren’t 100% clean when you switch colors, there is less contamination going from light to dark. Paint all the areas in your color of choice first.

For your second color, just move to the next darkest color and do the same as you go on. If there are small details in your painting, wait until the paint is dry and add these last.

Keep adding colors one by one until your image is complete. Good luck, and happy painting!

Before

After

———————-

Image credits: http://ift.tt/2qyVPQ9

Thank you so, so much to Ruth for sharing her amazing work! And if you’d like to follow her, you can check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

P.S. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and want to show off your work, feel free to email me. I’m a sucker for a good before and after, and I’d be happy to share your story! (but if you spam me… see the rusty nail thing above…)

The post An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

from mix1 http://ift.tt/2q3BSO3 via with this info

[sherlocklexa]

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

Today, I’ve got a bit of an unusual post for this blog: a guest contributor!

Over the last 7 years of blogging, I have let maybe 3 or 4 contributors come and share something about themselves on the blog. And it’s not because there aren’t other amazing DIYers out there, or that I wouldn’t love to have a regular contributor or two sharing their cool DIY projects with you guys (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so more on that later). It’s because working alone on this blog has always been a juggling act — planning and actually doing the projects on my to-do list, writing about them, editing photos, getting the behind-the-blog business to operate smoothly, maintaining the site, managing the finances of it, and of course, dealing with lots of emails — it’s minutes here and minutes there, and then there’s no more time in the day for new stuff (and duh, Charlie needs a walk or two).

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the behind-the-scenes stuff with blogs, “guest post” requests are WAY TOO OFTEN nothing more than thinly veiled attempts for spamming you guys with marketing content. And since all of us are smarter than that, I got annoyed, frustrated at sorting through them, and just stopped taking guest post requests altogether. But here’s the not-so-fun-part of that: any blogger could easily tell you that my policy has solved nothing, because spammers love to follow up on emails no one wanted to even read the first time. My inbox still stays full, unless I pen a response somewhere along the lines of “to be 100% honest, I would rather eat rusty nails than publish this for you.”

But then, on a very rare day when just the right sunlight comes through the window and I’ve had enough coffee to not hate email, I will find a real post worth sharing. And this is one of those things. A reader-slash-interior-designer named Ruth Stolerman reached out about a recent project she did for a children’s bedroom. She does really fun, custom murals for her clients, and offered to share some of her secrets for a DIY tutorial, for no other reason than you guys might enjoy seeing how they’re made.

And, it got me thinking that I’d love to see more posts like this from readers who are proud of their work. So, I said yes. And she was super nice and sent me everything in a neat little package, and I managed to still get bogged down for months before getting it onto the blog. So I’m finally sharing it (with apologies to Ruth, of course). I hope you guys enjoy! *Affiliate links may be used in this post.*

———————-

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

I love painting murals for my clients – they’re great above a bed because lots of people worry about heavy artwork falling on them in their sleep. The key to a successful mural is planning. Before you get started, make sure you have a clear vision in your mind. Even if you would like to freestyle it, look at images that will help formulate an idea. I will walk you through a mural I just finished (see above) where we had a clear vision from the start. This mural is in a children’s bedroom and we decided I would paint a scene from the amazing Roald Dahl book, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Materials Needed:

pencil

paint brushes of various sizes

a water glass to clean your brushes

a palette or makeshift palette (plate, etc.)

a kitchen towel

cling wrap

acrylic paint

I like to use acrylic paints because they dry quickly and are water resistant. If you make a mistake before the paint has dried, you can dab it with a damp towel and completely remove the error.

If you’re nervous then I would recommend sketching your ideas on pieces of paper in the size you want, which you can then use as a 1:1 guide. I just dove straight in but I have done quite a lot of these!

When you have finished planning, start off by painting your wall in the color you would like it to be, using the paint brand of your choice. Alternatively, just work with the wall color you’ve got!

Let any paint dry and wipe down the wall thoroughly so that you have a clean surface. If you have to use a little water for this, make sure the walls are dry before you begin. Don’t forget to move any furniture out of your way, or cover anything you might drip paint on.

Now, using a light pencil, mark out the rough area you would like to paint within to make sure your drawing doesn’t get too large or small. If you have done sketches, stick them on the wall using masking tape in the position that you would like them to be in, to make sure you like the layout. Copy or trace them on to the wall.

If you are copying an image, have it in front of you and start drawing. I started this mural in the bottom left hand corner because I wanted to be sure the image sat just above the duvet. Keep stepping back from your drawing throughout to make sure your dimensions are correct and that you are filling the allocated space in the right proportions.

Once you have finished drawing, it’s time to get your paint ready. I like to put kitchen towel on my palette and wet it slightly with water. This means that the acrylic paint doesn’t dry out too quickly and if you want to keep painting the next day you can Clingfilm the palette and it will stay damp. I then work round the edge of the palette with paints, going from light to dark, leaving as much of the palette untouched as possible. This way you can mix colors below easily to get the perfect shade. Don’t have your paints too close to each other or they will inevitably get muddled together as you go. Try to use a good range of colors; I decided I wanted a bit of blue in my painting so instead of using black to make the grey areas, I mixed blue and a little brown with some white.

It’s time to paint! If your image suits an outline, paint it in your color of choice using a thin brush. I like to paint from left to right as I use the wall to steady my painting hand and this avoids smudging.

Now it’s just painting by numbers. Pick one color to start with, I like picking a light color here because if your brushes aren’t 100% clean when you switch colors, there is less contamination going from light to dark. Paint all the areas in your color of choice first.

For your second color, just move to the next darkest color and do the same as you go on. If there are small details in your painting, wait until the paint is dry and add these last.

Keep adding colors one by one until your image is complete. Good luck, and happy painting!

Before

After

———————-

Image credits: http://ift.tt/2qyVPQ9

Thank you so, so much to Ruth for sharing her amazing work! And if you’d like to follow her, you can check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

P.S. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and want to show off your work, feel free to email me. I’m a sucker for a good before and after, and I’d be happy to share your story! (but if you spam me… see the rusty nail thing above…)

The post An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

from car2 http://ift.tt/2q3BSO3 via as shown a lot

[mysticsparklewings]

The Dream Crosser

Surprise! NaPoWriMo didn't kill me (and I'm not abandoning dA because of the incoming Eclipse update either, more on that situation here), I just needed a week off to recuperate...and obsessively play Animal Crossing: New Horizons... Admittedly, I actually drew this well over a month ago (and wrote up the majority of the description!), not just before NaPoWriMo but before I actually had New Horizons in my grasp. The plan was to post it the day I got the game. Which was supposed to be much closer to the game's launch (March 20th). That ended up not happening and the day I got the game was the first day of NaPoWriMo, but 1. I messed up with the non-uniform prompts and spent all of the day trying to catch up so I couldn't even play the game yet, and 2. As a side effect, I ended up having two posts that day and a lot of work to do to catch up the second, and I hardly had time to think about posting this. And even if I had posted it, it would've been drowned in the incoming NaPoWriMo posts. And so, here we are. Really, really, I do have to mention that I truly feel for anyone else still waiting on the game for whatever reason. You have my deepest sympathy and I'm so sorry I can't just give you the game right now and make it better.  I know the wait was hard enough for me, being this is the one game I highly anticipated in over a year and I essentially had the rug yanked out from under me. But I'll save that story for after I talk about the art itself since I'm sure that's what most people are here for and not my pre-order frustrations. So in case you don't know or couldn't tell, this is the lovely Luna from AC: New Leaf's Dream Suite. From what we've seen of New Horizons since it's release, the Dream Suite's functions and purpose have been mostly absolved into the Airport and Dodo Codes, and so I'm very doubtful Luna will actually be in the game in any capacity, which makes me sad. A typical player (including me) wouldn't even necessarily interact with Luna that much in New Leaf unless you really enjoy visiting other towns using Dream Codes, so I'm not sure what it is, but for some reason I just really like her. That's why I picked her to draw to celebrate. I very nearly drew her a long time ago when I was on an Animal Crossing kick in 2018, but at the time I didn't like the idea of pressuring myself into drawing all and/or multiple AC characters just because I wanted to be "fair" to them all (much the same reason I don't draw Pokemon very often), so I ended up drawing One Little Spark, a crossover of the Disney character Figment drawn in the New Leaf style, instead. So in a way, she's had this coming for quite a while. At the time I started working on her, (way back in early March, because I was hoping beyond hope my pre-order would arrive to me actually on launch day, but ha ha ha look who's got egg on her face for that ) I was running a bit dry on artistic motivation, and so while I tried to draw her in my usual manner: Making a sketch, transferring the sketch onto different paper with finalized lines, then picking whichever coloring method I was most into at the time), I was struggling with the sketch. I've had days where I have to work on a sketch for a really long time before I can get something I'm happy with, but this day I was just so not into the whole sketching process. I wanted to create, but I wanted it to be quick and easy and simple. I didn't want to have to poke at it for hours and hours and then still maybe not be happy when I was done. So when I got discouraged enough, I broke away from trying to draw Luna and just drew mandalas instead. (As had become my art-block crutch for a little while.) Somewhere in me, as I worked on other things, I kept going back and forth on what to do about Luna, though. I did still want to draw her, but my usual formula just wasn't working for me. Not for her. I even tried briefly to draw her linelessly, digitally, as what was supposed to be a quick and simple experiment, but that went downhill even faster than sketching did. Although, for some reason, the lineless idea wouldn't leave me alone after that. Finally, I decided to try something completely different. I was going to try and free-handedly draw her, without lines, traditionally. With, primarily, alcohol markers. Honestly, the thought minorly horrifies me now just as much as it did before I started. And yet, here we are and I actually like how it turned out. Allow me to explain how this came together: So, since I wasn't sure how this was going to turn out once I decided to try it, I opted to use my not-so-great mixed media paper so I wouldn't feel guilty about wasting better paper if I ended up hating it. Naturally, this did lead to some notable limitations, but not enough to discourage me from trying. I dove right in with the dark brown for her head and body, focusing on getting the general shapes down. I'd noticed some glaring mistakes in my mostly unproductive sketching when it came to Luna's body proportions, so I tried to keep those things in mind and adjust accordingly as I went. It was scary because there is no erasing this way short of using white paint and because this paper feathers pretty noticeably with markers. Then once I got to a certain point, I had to switch and bring in some pink and off-white markers to draw in parts of her dress so I knew where to put her other arm and her legs. And here is where I technically cheated; I did use my "clear" Stardust Gelly Roll pen to do most of the outlines for her dress. I needed some kind of guideline, but pencil tends to get yucky when you put markers on top and at the time I couldn't really think of a better option. (The joke was kind of on me because somehow I still got a nasty gray line that looked like pencil under her bust that I had to gently edit out later in Photoshop, but I digress.) As I went with the markers, I was also doing some light shading. Not too much, because this paper is really fussy with layers and blending, but enough that I felt like it didn't look completely flat and I could tell where one shape ended and another started. Though, for her nose (trunk? I believe Luna is supposed to be a Tapir) and her raised arm, I had to get a little creative and I used a white brush pen meant for glass/ceramics to put in the lines so you could actually see them. And later I would use the same pen in 3-4 layers to add the white back in for her eyes. With the base for her body, dress, and the bun part of her hair done though, then I had the task of figuring out what to do for her shoes and the details of her face. (Without having to mix and use specific paint for those tiny details.) In the end, I opted to mostly use my classic red Gelly Roll pen for her shoes, and a little bit of a dark red alcohol marker for shading. And then I got to experiment with mixing the classic red and one of the Moonlight Gelly Rolls for her lips so that the color would be visible and not just a dark lip-shaped "what is this." This was because the classic Gelly Rolls don't show up super well on dark surfaces and the Moonlight ones do, but I didn't have the right color straight out of a Moonlight pen. It did take 2-3 careful layers, but I think I managed well enough in the end. I used just one black pen, a Prismacolor brush-tip fine liner, for her eyes, though in-person the white base underneath makes her pupils look about a shade or two lighter from certain angles, which was a very unintentional nice touch. My answer to everything else ended up being gouache, although I did try to come up with pen colors for her eye shadow and the blue dots on her cheeks before admitting defeat that I just didn't have the colors I needed. Originally, I had actually been thinking of trying a lineless art piece with gouache, as I think it would work particularly well for that look, but I wasn't ready to fully commit to the idea, mostly because I seem to be even worse at mixing a non-excessive amount of a specific color with gouache than I am with acrylics, and that sounds like a fantastic way to waste a bunch of palette space because I mixed too much but it's gouache so it can be re-wet and re-use it and I don't want to just throw it away...  (Although I suppose this could be half-way solved by getting a bigger palette specifically for mixing gouache, but I also don't want to have to buy yet another palette when I have some perfectly good ones...If I could just use up all the paint in them already...) Anyway. Point: This is kind of a step between a full lineless gouache piece and not doing one at all. Baby steps, yes? I knew from fairly early on that I was probably going to have to use gouache for the front part of her hair/bangs, since I did not thoroughly plan ahead enough and didn't leave a gap there to do it with markers. Fortunately, I didn't have to do much mixing since my gouache already has a nice yellow ochre color included, and I could use a bit of the other two browns and one I had some leftover mixed already from Roses in Your Eyes for shading. (White for the flowers, too, thank goodness.) And I actually ended up going over most of her bun with gouache too since, by comparison, the marker didn't look like it had much shading and it was bothering me. I did have to mix my own blue and pinky-purple for her makeup, and I ended up with a lot of leftover pinky-purple. But it's kind of okay because by itself it's such a pretty color I'm sure I'll find an excuse to use that one. After that, I just had to do some minor tweaks where the gouache had gotten a bit away from me and then I went ham on the shading for the dress based on my reference photo. Then I realized I wanted some kind of background because this seemed awfully boring without one. And, naturally, I hadn't really planned ahead for that, me being me and being in habit of doing the background last... At first, I wanted to do something hot pink, since her official Amiibo card has a hot pink background, but then I thought that might be a little too loud and I wasn't really sure the best way to apply one without potentially messing her up. And also, this isn't watercolor or paper thicker than 140 lb, which immediately threw watercolor out the window unless I wanted a very uneven paper when I was finished. I'd already pushed my luck with the gouache and been very careful about not using much water with it; I decided it was best not to push my luck any farther. Also, I couldn't use my pink PanPastel, despite that being maybe my best option, because it is still perpetually screwed onto the little Pan Pastel stack with no hope of getting unstuck anytime soon. (One of these days I swear, I will order either another set like the one I have or an individual Pink one to solve this problem, but until then, I am going to bring it up every single time as a caution to others to please be very careful when screwing and unscrewing your own Pan Pastels if you store them screwed together.) And I didn't feel like dragging out some of my drawing pastels and/or makeup that's too expired to use on my face and very slowly building up color and hoping it'll do what the Pan Pastels do. With no better ideas coming to me, I decided I'd leave the drawing for the night and come back to it the next day. After yet more brainstorming the next day, I finally settled on doing a glittery rounded rectangle and filling it with washi tape stripes. This plan did change a little as I figured out which tapes I wanted to use (a purple-y, champagne gold, and light pink ones, the latter two of which look more different in-person than they do on the scan) and as I actually started applying the lines. Partially because this tape is a bit thin and partially because I'm not used to cutting tape around very specific shapes, it took a very long time to both place strips of the tape and then get them cut to fit right up to Luna without looking strange. Once I got to a certain point going in one direction, I realized my next couple of cuts were just going to be too hard for me to stand. I had a choice: Ditch the tape, or figure something else out. Taking a risk, I decided to try and salvage it by doing an almost-plaid/checkerboard with the tape, specifically leaving out certain areas where I knew it would be too tricky to cut the tape. This also turned out to be a good way to use up some of the pieces of tape I'd already cut off that were too small to be used the other way. It's still not the greatest background solution I've ever come up with, but it does the job of making it look less empty, and that's really all I wanted anyway. And you know, compared to official images her proportions look wonky, but by herself (meaning, without comparing the two) I think Luna looks pretty good, actually. (Though, I admit I did have to tweak her right ear in Photoshop because it came out entirely too long and there wasn't really a good way for me to fix it by hand.) To think, this piece started out as such a mess. Or rather, I was such a mess when I started. And yet, here we are, and it looks kinda okay. Okay enough that I finished it and am posting it, at least.   I have no idea if I'll be returning to this style/method for art-making in the future, but even if I don't it was a nice experiment to try, and that's what art is really all about isn't it? Experimenting, trying new things? Speaking of experimenting though, about those pre-order frustrations I mentioned now that I've covered everything about the art itself...(in small text for those that don't care to easily skip over) Back in February I tried twice to pre-order New Horizons from Target, since they were running an ad where if you pre-ordered the game you'd also get an AC themed journal with it, and that combined with my family member's employee discount made it the cheapest/best value way for us to buy the game. As I said, I tried to order it twice. Both times, it was sold out. My family member had even tried to go to the store and have them order it before then, to no avail. After the second time, which was the day after Target sent out the sale paper with the new ad in it, while I was still frustratedly wondering how on earth do you sell out of a pre-order?? I kept refreshing the page every so often just to see if by some fluke it would miraculously not be sold out. I got very lucky around 3 in the afternoon and we managed to get the order in before it sold out again. Now, we're a relatively cheap family, so we didn't pay for the "express shipping" or whatever. Although, this was a $60 game and we were ordering it three whole weeks (on March 2nd) before release. If you ask me, the least they could do is have it shipped out either on launch day (March 20th) or the day after. Especially if I can pre-order a book on Amazon with three days' notice and they can still get it to me on release day. But, okay, I could live with waiting an extra day or up to maybe three if I had to. (And, to be fair, this was all before a certain virus exploded into chaos here in the US.) Much to my dismay, a week before NH release day, I checked the order status with Target only to be told I wouldn't get it until the 26th. A week later. That was pretty disappointing at the time, but it didn't really bother me until the day before and the day of launch when some people were getting their pre-orders early from places like Amazon and Best Buy (and some of them didn't even pay for the express shipping option from their selected source). If those two companies could plan around virus constraints to do that, why in the heck couldn't Target? But, okay, fine. Maybe the virus had something to do with it and they were really doing the best they could. Whatever. A week. Fine. I'll wait a week. A few days later though, we got an email saying: Surprise! Don't expect your dumb video game until April 3rd because we couldn't get our act together! (Okay, that's not what it really said, but that's what it felt like.) And I know, I promise I so know there are much more serious issues going on in the world right now and a video game about talking animals isn't exactly a priority shipment. I know. But it was still massively upsetting after I'd already waited so long. And, honestly, I feel like they had plenty of time and notice to take care of the game before everything else exploded and messed it all up. Again, especially if other companies already had time to even ship orders early and/or get the games to people on launch day. Or the day after. TWO WEEKS after launch, and you don't tell me about the secondary delay until the week I started expecting the game to already be in the mail on it's way to me? The only tiny silver lining is that as I was checking the order to make sure it didn't miraculously get pushed back to sometime in 2021 (because I really had no faith in Target's time estimates at this point) is that it did get bumped back up to April 1st. Although, I did think that it would be the absolute least funny April Fools' Day Joke ever if the day came and it was late because screw me.  But it did arrive to me on April 1st as promised; I just had a million other things to do before I could play it. ) And I will say, I know I could've just canceled the pre-order and bought the game digitally, but it was enough of a hassle to order it in the first place, and if I did that I'd also lose my pre-order bonus. And all that aside, I specifically wanted a physical copy to begin with. I always prefer that when it's possible. So people on the internet that want to eat me alive for not canceling when the shipping got screwed up, there are my reasons. Take 'em or leave 'em. (Seriously, I've seen some people be really rude about this just because they didn't like hearing people upset that they didn't have the game yet...when they already had it themselves or didn't care about AC in the first place...) Moral of the story: Don't pre-order from Target. Or, at least, don't expect the item to actually get to you right around release day. Account for at least two additional weeks of not having the thing. ...Seriously though, how do you sell out of a pre-order?? At least, when it's a highly anticipated game and you're a big company and not some small indie company with limited resources! Sheesh! Anyway. I have the game now, I've been playing it as much as possible and enjoying it. I still have a ways to go before my island is "complete" per se, but it's coming along nicely and I feel more comfortable now taking some more time away from it to get back into the swing of making art and things like that. So hopefully I'll be getting back into a regular posting schedule and you'll have that to look forward to. 

____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[noambouzaglou-blog]

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

Today, I’ve got a bit of an unusual post for this blog: a guest contributor!

Over the last 7 years of blogging, I have let maybe 3 or 4 contributors come and share something about themselves on the blog. And it’s not because there aren’t other amazing DIYers out there, or that I wouldn’t love to have a regular contributor or two sharing their cool DIY projects with you guys (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so more on that later). It’s because working alone on this blog has always been a juggling act — planning and actually doing the projects on my to-do list, writing about them, editing photos, getting the behind-the-blog business to operate smoothly, maintaining the site, managing the finances of it, and of course, dealing with lots of emails — it’s minutes here and minutes there, and then there’s no more time in the day for new stuff (and duh, Charlie needs a walk or two).

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the behind-the-scenes stuff with blogs, “guest post” requests are WAY TOO OFTEN nothing more than thinly veiled attempts for spamming you guys with marketing content. And since all of us are smarter than that, I got annoyed, frustrated at sorting through them, and just stopped taking guest post requests altogether. But here’s the not-so-fun-part of that: any blogger could easily tell you that my policy has solved nothing, because spammers love to follow up on emails no one wanted to even read the first time. My inbox still stays full, unless I pen a response somewhere along the lines of “to be 100% honest, I would rather eat rusty nails than publish this for you.”

But then, on a very rare day when just the right sunlight comes through the window and I’ve had enough coffee to not hate email, I will find a real post worth sharing. And this is one of those things. A reader-slash-interior-designer named Ruth Stolerman reached out about a recent project she did for a children’s bedroom. She does really fun, custom murals for her clients, and offered to share some of her secrets for a DIY tutorial, for no other reason than you guys might enjoy seeing how they’re made.

And, it got me thinking that I’d love to see more posts like this from readers who are proud of their work. So, I said yes. And she was super nice and sent me everything in a neat little package, and I managed to still get bogged down for months before getting it onto the blog. So I’m finally sharing it (with apologies to Ruth, of course). I hope you guys enjoy! *Affiliate links may be used in this post.*

———————-

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

I love painting murals for my clients – they’re great above a bed because lots of people worry about heavy artwork falling on them in their sleep. The key to a successful mural is planning. Before you get started, make sure you have a clear vision in your mind. Even if you would like to freestyle it, look at images that will help formulate an idea. I will walk you through a mural I just finished (see above) where we had a clear vision from the start. This mural is in a children’s bedroom and we decided I would paint a scene from the amazing Roald Dahl book, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Materials Needed:

pencil

paint brushes of various sizes

a water glass to clean your brushes

a palette or makeshift palette (plate, etc.)

a kitchen towel

cling wrap

acrylic paint

I like to use acrylic paints because they dry quickly and are water resistant. If you make a mistake before the paint has dried, you can dab it with a damp towel and completely remove the error.

If you’re nervous then I would recommend sketching your ideas on pieces of paper in the size you want, which you can then use as a 1:1 guide. I just dove straight in but I have done quite a lot of these!

When you have finished planning, start off by painting your wall in the color you would like it to be, using the paint brand of your choice. Alternatively, just work with the wall color you’ve got!

Let any paint dry and wipe down the wall thoroughly so that you have a clean surface. If you have to use a little water for this, make sure the walls are dry before you begin. Don’t forget to move any furniture out of your way, or cover anything you might drip paint on.

Now, using a light pencil, mark out the rough area you would like to paint within to make sure your drawing doesn’t get too large or small. If you have done sketches, stick them on the wall using masking tape in the position that you would like them to be in, to make sure you like the layout. Copy or trace them on to the wall.

If you are copying an image, have it in front of you and start drawing. I started this mural in the bottom left hand corner because I wanted to be sure the image sat just above the duvet. Keep stepping back from your drawing throughout to make sure your dimensions are correct and that you are filling the allocated space in the right proportions.

Once you have finished drawing, it’s time to get your paint ready. I like to put kitchen towel on my palette and wet it slightly with water. This means that the acrylic paint doesn’t dry out too quickly and if you want to keep painting the next day you can Clingfilm the palette and it will stay damp. I then work round the edge of the palette with paints, going from light to dark, leaving as much of the palette untouched as possible. This way you can mix colors below easily to get the perfect shade. Don’t have your paints too close to each other or they will inevitably get muddled together as you go. Try to use a good range of colors; I decided I wanted a bit of blue in my painting so instead of using black to make the grey areas, I mixed blue and a little brown with some white.

It’s time to paint! If your image suits an outline, paint it in your color of choice using a thin brush. I like to paint from left to right as I use the wall to steady my painting hand and this avoids smudging.

Now it’s just painting by numbers. Pick one color to start with, I like picking a light color here because if your brushes aren’t 100% clean when you switch colors, there is less contamination going from light to dark. Paint all the areas in your color of choice first.

For your second color, just move to the next darkest color and do the same as you go on. If there are small details in your painting, wait until the paint is dry and add these last.

Keep adding colors one by one until your image is complete. Good luck, and happy painting!

Before

After

———————-

Image credits: www.ruthstolerman.com

Thank you so, so much to Ruth for sharing her amazing work! And if you’d like to follow her, you can check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

P.S. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and want to show off your work, feel free to email me. I’m a sucker for a good before and after, and I’d be happy to share your story! (but if you spam me… see the rusty nail thing above…)

The post An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural published first on https://noambouzaglou.wordpress.com/

[bespokekitchesldn]

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

Today, I’ve got a bit of an unusual post for this blog: a guest contributor!

Over the last 7 years of blogging, I have let maybe 3 or 4 contributors come and share something about themselves on the blog. And it’s not because there aren’t other amazing DIYers out there, or that I wouldn’t love to have a regular contributor or two sharing their cool DIY projects with you guys (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so more on that later). It’s because working alone on this blog has always been a juggling act — planning and actually doing the projects on my to-do list, writing about them, editing photos, getting the behind-the-blog business to operate smoothly, maintaining the site, managing the finances of it, and of course, dealing with lots of emails — it’s minutes here and minutes there, and then there’s no more time in the day for new stuff (and duh, Charlie needs a walk or two).

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the behind-the-scenes stuff with blogs, “guest post” requests are WAY TOO OFTEN nothing more than thinly veiled attempts for spamming you guys with marketing content. And since all of us are smarter than that, I got annoyed, frustrated at sorting through them, and just stopped taking guest post requests altogether. But here’s the not-so-fun-part of that: any blogger could easily tell you that my policy has solved nothing, because spammers love to follow up on emails no one wanted to even read the first time. My inbox still stays full, unless I pen a response somewhere along the lines of “to be 100% honest, I would rather eat rusty nails than publish this for you.”

But then, on a very rare day when just the right sunlight comes through the window and I’ve had enough coffee to not hate email, I will find a real post worth sharing. And this is one of those things. A reader-slash-interior-designer named Ruth Stolerman reached out about a recent project she did for a children’s bedroom. She does really fun, custom murals for her clients, and offered to share some of her secrets for a DIY tutorial, for no other reason than you guys might enjoy seeing how they’re made.

And, it got me thinking that I’d love to see more posts like this from readers who are proud of their work. So, I said yes. And she was super nice and sent me everything in a neat little package, and I managed to still get bogged down for months before getting it onto the blog. So I’m finally sharing it (with apologies to Ruth, of course). I hope you guys enjoy! *Affiliate links may be used in this post.*

———————-

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

I love painting murals for my clients – they’re great above a bed because lots of people worry about heavy artwork falling on them in their sleep. The key to a successful mural is planning. Before you get started, make sure you have a clear vision in your mind. Even if you would like to freestyle it, look at images that will help formulate an idea. I will walk you through a mural I just finished (see above) where we had a clear vision from the start. This mural is in a children’s bedroom and we decided I would paint a scene from the amazing Roald Dahl book, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Materials Needed:

pencil

paint brushes of various sizes

a water glass to clean your brushes

a palette or makeshift palette (plate, etc.)

a kitchen towel

cling wrap

acrylic paint

I like to use acrylic paints because they dry quickly and are water resistant. If you make a mistake before the paint has dried, you can dab it with a damp towel and completely remove the error.

If you’re nervous then I would recommend sketching your ideas on pieces of paper in the size you want, which you can then use as a 1:1 guide. I just dove straight in but I have done quite a lot of these!

When you have finished planning, start off by painting your wall in the color you would like it to be, using the paint brand of your choice. Alternatively, just work with the wall color you’ve got!

Let any paint dry and wipe down the wall thoroughly so that you have a clean surface. If you have to use a little water for this, make sure the walls are dry before you begin. Don’t forget to move any furniture out of your way, or cover anything you might drip paint on.

Now, using a light pencil, mark out the rough area you would like to paint within to make sure your drawing doesn’t get too large or small. If you have done sketches, stick them on the wall using masking tape in the position that you would like them to be in, to make sure you like the layout. Copy or trace them on to the wall.

If you are copying an image, have it in front of you and start drawing. I started this mural in the bottom left hand corner because I wanted to be sure the image sat just above the duvet. Keep stepping back from your drawing throughout to make sure your dimensions are correct and that you are filling the allocated space in the right proportions.

Once you have finished drawing, it’s time to get your paint ready. I like to put kitchen towel on my palette and wet it slightly with water. This means that the acrylic paint doesn’t dry out too quickly and if you want to keep painting the next day you can Clingfilm the palette and it will stay damp. I then work round the edge of the palette with paints, going from light to dark, leaving as much of the palette untouched as possible. This way you can mix colors below easily to get the perfect shade. Don’t have your paints too close to each other or they will inevitably get muddled together as you go. Try to use a good range of colors; I decided I wanted a bit of blue in my painting so instead of using black to make the grey areas, I mixed blue and a little brown with some white.

It’s time to paint! If your image suits an outline, paint it in your color of choice using a thin brush. I like to paint from left to right as I use the wall to steady my painting hand and this avoids smudging.

Now it’s just painting by numbers. Pick one color to start with, I like picking a light color here because if your brushes aren’t 100% clean when you switch colors, there is less contamination going from light to dark. Paint all the areas in your color of choice first.

For your second color, just move to the next darkest color and do the same as you go on. If there are small details in your painting, wait until the paint is dry and add these last.

Keep adding colors one by one until your image is complete. Good luck, and happy painting!

Before

After

———————-

Image credits: www.ruthstolerman.com

Thank you so, so much to Ruth for sharing her amazing work! And if you’d like to follow her, you can check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

P.S. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and want to show off your work, feel free to email me. I’m a sucker for a good before and after, and I’d be happy to share your story! (but if you spam me… see the rusty nail thing above…)

The post An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

Website // Subscribe // Advertise // Twitter // Facebook // Google+

from The Ugly Duckling House http://www.uglyducklinghouse.com/an-interior-designers-guide-to-painting-a-wall-mural/

[garagedoorsbrighton]

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

Today, I’ve got a bit of an unusual post for this blog: a guest contributor!

Over the last 7 years of blogging, I have let maybe 3 or 4 contributors come and share something about themselves on the blog. And it’s not because there aren’t other amazing DIYers out there, or that I wouldn’t love to have a regular contributor or two sharing their cool DIY projects with you guys (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, so more on that later). It’s because working alone on this blog has always been a juggling act — planning and actually doing the projects on my to-do list, writing about them, editing photos, getting the behind-the-blog business to operate smoothly, maintaining the site, managing the finances of it, and of course, dealing with lots of emails — it’s minutes here and minutes there, and then there’s no more time in the day for new stuff (and duh, Charlie needs a walk or two).

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with the behind-the-scenes stuff with blogs, “guest post” requests are WAY TOO OFTEN nothing more than thinly veiled attempts for spamming you guys with marketing content. And since all of us are smarter than that, I got annoyed, frustrated at sorting through them, and just stopped taking guest post requests altogether. But here’s the not-so-fun-part of that: any blogger could easily tell you that my policy has solved nothing, because spammers love to follow up on emails no one wanted to even read the first time. My inbox still stays full, unless I pen a response somewhere along the lines of “to be 100% honest, I would rather eat rusty nails than publish this for you.”

But then, on a very rare day when just the right sunlight comes through the window and I’ve had enough coffee to not hate email, I will find a real post worth sharing. And this is one of those things. A reader-slash-interior-designer named Ruth Stolerman reached out about a recent project she did for a children’s bedroom. She does really fun, custom murals for her clients, and offered to share some of her secrets for a DIY tutorial, for no other reason than you guys might enjoy seeing how they’re made.

And, it got me thinking that I’d love to see more posts like this from readers who are proud of their work. So, I said yes. And she was super nice and sent me everything in a neat little package, and I managed to still get bogged down for months before getting it onto the blog. So I’m finally sharing it (with apologies to Ruth, of course). I hope you guys enjoy! *Affiliate links may be used in this post.*

———————-

An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural

I love painting murals for my clients – they’re great above a bed because lots of people worry about heavy artwork falling on them in their sleep. The key to a successful mural is planning. Before you get started, make sure you have a clear vision in your mind. Even if you would like to freestyle it, look at images that will help formulate an idea. I will walk you through a mural I just finished (see above) where we had a clear vision from the start. This mural is in a children’s bedroom and we decided I would paint a scene from the amazing Roald Dahl book, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Materials Needed:

pencil

paint brushes of various sizes

a water glass to clean your brushes

a palette or makeshift palette (plate, etc.)

a kitchen towel

cling wrap

acrylic paint

I like to use acrylic paints because they dry quickly and are water resistant. If you make a mistake before the paint has dried, you can dab it with a damp towel and completely remove the error.

If you’re nervous then I would recommend sketching your ideas on pieces of paper in the size you want, which you can then use as a 1:1 guide. I just dove straight in but I have done quite a lot of these!

When you have finished planning, start off by painting your wall in the color you would like it to be, using the paint brand of your choice. Alternatively, just work with the wall color you’ve got!

Let any paint dry and wipe down the wall thoroughly so that you have a clean surface. If you have to use a little water for this, make sure the walls are dry before you begin. Don’t forget to move any furniture out of your way, or cover anything you might drip paint on.

Now, using a light pencil, mark out the rough area you would like to paint within to make sure your drawing doesn’t get too large or small. If you have done sketches, stick them on the wall using masking tape in the position that you would like them to be in, to make sure you like the layout. Copy or trace them on to the wall.

If you are copying an image, have it in front of you and start drawing. I started this mural in the bottom left hand corner because I wanted to be sure the image sat just above the duvet. Keep stepping back from your drawing throughout to make sure your dimensions are correct and that you are filling the allocated space in the right proportions.

Once you have finished drawing, it’s time to get your paint ready. I like to put kitchen towel on my palette and wet it slightly with water. This means that the acrylic paint doesn’t dry out too quickly and if you want to keep painting the next day you can Clingfilm the palette and it will stay damp. I then work round the edge of the palette with paints, going from light to dark, leaving as much of the palette untouched as possible. This way you can mix colors below easily to get the perfect shade. Don’t have your paints too close to each other or they will inevitably get muddled together as you go. Try to use a good range of colors; I decided I wanted a bit of blue in my painting so instead of using black to make the grey areas, I mixed blue and a little brown with some white.

It’s time to paint! If your image suits an outline, paint it in your color of choice using a thin brush. I like to paint from left to right as I use the wall to steady my painting hand and this avoids smudging.

Now it’s just painting by numbers. Pick one color to start with, I like picking a light color here because if your brushes aren’t 100% clean when you switch colors, there is less contamination going from light to dark. Paint all the areas in your color of choice first.

For your second color, just move to the next darkest color and do the same as you go on. If there are small details in your painting, wait until the paint is dry and add these last.

Keep adding colors one by one until your image is complete. Good luck, and happy painting!

Before

After

———————-

Image credits: www.ruthstolerman.com

Thank you so, so much to Ruth for sharing her amazing work! And if you’d like to follow her, you can check out her work on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.

P.S. If you’re a regular reader of this blog and want to show off your work, feel free to email me. I’m a sucker for a good before and after, and I’d be happy to share your story! (but if you spam me… see the rusty nail thing above…)

The post An Interior Designer’s Guide to Painting a Mural appeared first on The Ugly Duckling House.

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from The Ugly Duckling House http://www.uglyducklinghouse.com/an-interior-designers-guide-to-painting-a-wall-mural/