Pensando en la muerte

This is my Frida Kahlo pumpkin. I couldn't get a good picture with just the candlelight. ¡Feliz dia de los muertos!

Somewhere in the jungle...

I haven't done any painting in a long time. I saw a blog showing the progress of a picture done in acrylic and watercolor. My acrylics haven't been touched in forever, so I thought I'd give it a try. He first built up some values with washes of purpley-gray acrylic. Then, he did flat washes of watercolor, without varying the intensity of the paint, letting the underpainting determine the shadows. The end result was very soft with subtle colors.

I wasn't too successful in this first attempt, since I think I worked too small and lost a lot of the details of the original sketch (her bone bracelet, her eyebrow and most of the curls of hair and fur). I have no idea what this picture means; I needed something to paint and this girl in a linsang skin with a strange skull was the first thing I drew. I'd like to play around with this technique some more soon. The drawing is done in a brown colored pencil, which might not have been the best thing to use but I wanted an uninked image.

Two Canines with No Skin

I decided to draw skulls in my new brown sketchbook. I thought it would be fun to do white highlights and darker shadows and keep it mostly the browny paper color. These are the skulls of a coyote and a red fox. I used my trusty purple pencil and a few colors of watercolor pencil. The paper got a little wrinkly from the washes but I do like the results overall.

Yo quiero pan de muerto

Happy Day of the Dead! La Catrina, the owl monkey skeleton, would like a sugar skull. Had to upload a tiny version for now, stupid picture loader thing.