A Long Day for Sarah

Hey everybody. This is Sarah. Sorry about the whole blog neglectation (that may or may not be a word). It's been pretty busy at home what with tons of plant nursery stuff plus Papa is building a big shed and works on it almost every spare minute he can, having us lift, measure, pluck, straighten, nail and hand him things. But we really do get free time that we could use to finish posts and do lots of things but we're just lazy despite Hannah's little inspiring speech of turning away from laziness and forging on through the many difficulties of a blog. She started a post about another award someone gave us but still hasn't finished it, and that is all I shall say on that.

So, we watched How to Train Your Dragon 2 and it was spectacular! I really like the animation, and the dragons were as awesome as ever. And I noticed something neat about the conformation of Toothless' head and face, his muzzle is very short while his head is very broad and flat, and it's almost like a snake. None of the other dragons have a head shaped quite like his, I know they made him unique like that and made other Nightfuries so rare so that Hiccup could have the most special dragon of any other character because he is the main character. I cheated. I really liked Toothless and I tried to draw Nightfuries in different colors before but none of them really looked like Nightfuries, one's head was too pointed and one was too round and fat and I couldn't figure out why, I still can't. But yesterday I made one that looked like Toothless, except I wanted to make a girl and it worked. So here you are.

                                                    Toora the Nightfury

I made her entirely on Photoshop and I think I'm a bit too proud of her since she actually worked and now I have my own Nightfury!(more or less)

I have tried many techniques to make different animals on Photoshop with softer brushes, darker outlines, no outlines, heavy shading, light shading, special effect paintbrushes to try to mimic fur, and surprisingly this one had almost no special effects or paintbrushes and turned out better than most of the ones that did. I just used a round paint brush of different shades of blue and green, the only special brush I used was like a paint splatter brush to give the eyes little flecks of darker blue. Before this version you see here^ I made this darker one.

Hannah actually likes this one better just because it's darker. Sadly I had lots of trouble getting this versiond seperate from the lighter one while keeping the signature on so her eyes are also more round and less shiny then the other one because I must have turned off  the wrong layers while trying to save it as a JPG and not a Photoshop file and not on top of anything else.

As always I love comments and I'd like to know what you think about both pictures.

-Sarah

You Are My Sunshine (Award) [Updated]

Hello, again, 'tis Hannah! Long time no see. While we've been gone, the art projects have been building up unblogged about, and time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' by since the blog was attended (that was a 70s/80s reference... Fly Like An Eagle by the Steve Miller Band).

Suddenly, out of the blue, while we were fiddling around with our personal life, someone awarded The Sunshine Award to our blog!

Because we are shiny. I guess.

The rules for the Sunshine Award:

• Thank the person who nominated you
• Answer the questions they asked you on your respective blog
• Nominate another batch of bloggers (eleven being the standard)
• Question them (evil chuckle)
• Notify them that they have been nominated
• And post the award image on your blog

Thanks to

Ajax Cochrane of 21st Century Renaissance Man

(cue opera singing at full volume)

Check one. I like to do things big hereabouts.


Here are your questions:
Do you prefer cats or dogs? Cats. They're clean, smell good better than dogs, and seldom drool. I have never had a dog, but we have had around fifteen cats at our house over the years (pretty much only three or four we wanted, the rest just showed up). We have a couple of long-haired house cats that have been with us for nearly ten years, their "official birthday" being this Monday.
What is your favorite outside activity? Walking around. Taking movies. Carving snow sculptures. I don't do sports, and I don't much care for outside work. Walking around outside gives me a chance for some quiet time. Update: Swimming and inner-tubing behind a pontoon boat on the lake are also enjoyable for me. No oceans 'round here, or I'd consider surfing.
If you got to meet one of the presidents, who would it be? Ronald Reagan would be my first choice. I've met his personal secretary (from after he was in office), and I heard that he was God-fearing, Constitution-believing, upstanding man. If not him, then George Washington. Then I might be able to tell people first-hand exactly how the Founding Fathers intended this country to be.
What is your favorite fantasy series? Aw, dang. That's tough. I'd have to say The Chronicles of Narnia.
If you had been Peter Jackson, would you have changed the name of the last Hobbit movie to “The Battle of Five Armies” or stayed with “There and Back Again”? Definitely would have kept it as "There and Back Again". That is such a poetic title, and it couldn't have been better if I had thought it up myself.
What is your favorite time of the day? I'm tempted to say whenever I'm asleep. But apart from that, 6:00 to 8:00 PM. That's when the light is most beautiful outside, and in the spring it's right before sunset, just past that super-hot time and into the cool, shady, loverly atmosphere before dark. I believe that's around the time photographers call the magic or golden hour.
Are you from the North or the South? South, my whole life. *sprinkles Tony Chachere's everywhere*
Who is your favorite character in Pride and Prejudice? No clue, never read/watched it. My dad prefers us to avoid the chick flicks for at least awhile longer.
Are you homeschooled, public schooled, or graduated? Homeschooled, but graduated-ish. I'm not old enough to graduate yet, but pretty much all my schoolwork is done. I guess the last thing I need to do is get my driver's license and do the GED. Not too excited for either of those.
Any plans for college? I'm not doing college. As I told someone recently, my whole life has been Home Economics. And I just finished my early morning "Botany" class for the day.
What is the last thing you were doing before you began answering the questions? Sprinkling Perlite on the Manhattan Euonymus and Arborvitae in our family nursery. See? Botany.


Sarah also wanted to answer the questions, so I'm turning the mic over to her.


Do you prefer cats or dogs? Oh, cats, quite a bit, although they're are several species in the dog family that I'm particularly fond of even though we don't have any dogs.
What is your favorite outside activity? Probably swimming. But I can already think of a couple other activities that might top that.
If you got to meet one of the presidents, who would it be? I'd probably have to say Ronald Reagan because I'm not really... politically-minded and Hannah has some pretty good reasons for why she'd want to meet him.
What is your favorite fantasy series? Wow. There are just so many awesome ones. The best one I can think of at the moment is the Twelve Dancing Princesses series by Jessica Day George.
If you had been Peter Jackson, would you have changed the name of the last Hobbit movie to “The Battle of Five Armies” or stayed with “There and Back Again”? Oh, conundrum. I don't know, "The Battle of Five Armies" sorta spoils it for those who haven't read the book, but "There and Back Again" is a bit vague, and yet it's an actual alternate name for the book, though I still don't know how big a part The Battle of Five Armies is going to be in the movie. So I suppose if The Battle of Five Armies was going to be a huge part of the movie, I'd choose that title, but if it isn't, I think that the original one is appropriate.
What is your favorite time of the day? Afternoon. Between about 3:00 and 8:00 I think.
Are you from the North or the South? South, I assume because I've always lived with my sister.
Who is your favorite character in Pride and Prejudice? I don't know, never read it or seen it.
Are you homeschooled, public schooled, or graduated? Homeshooled.
Any plans for college? I'm not going either. So, no, no plans.
What is the last thing you were doing before you began answering the questions? Eating Chicken Divan.


Let this award make us feel guilty about abandoning our blog and steer us away from tergiversation and general faithlessness.


Now to nominate eleven nine other bloggers:

Siani Delaney at Writing & Wanderlust
Ashley M. at Inky Wings
Ashley T. at Cheery-O
Pretty Much Anyone at Ravens And Writing Desks (excuuuuse me, there are several bloggers and the Bible says don't pick favorites)
Sarah Faulkner at Inklined
Bekah Joan at Found and Cherished
Anastasia Elizabeth at Every Stinkin' Page
Aili at Aili's Adventures
Nessima Tavariel at Arda Nessimava

And the interrogation. *eyebrow wiggle*

• Which number (1, 2, 3, etc.) is the best, based on it's personality and morals? (Example: 7 is best because of his wise and patient personality.)
• Fruit-flavored candy or chocolate?
• Under what circumstances would you jump on a shark's back?
• Would you rather grab a handful of cow poop or drink milk straight from the cow?
• Batman or Iron Man?
• Fantasy or sci-fi?
• Three years of famine, three months to be destroyed by your foes, or three days of the angel of the Lord destroying throughout all the coasts of the land?
• Favorite season?
• Is the Lochness Monster real?
• Death by fire or death by ice?
• Out of any animal, what would be your dream pet?

So there you are! I'm off to notify people. Auf Wiedersehen!


UPDATE: It seems some people are confused about the questions. You can skip number one if you don't understand it (I assumed everyone assigned personalities to numbers... when I gave the above example, Trinity walked by and said, "Seven's not wise and patient, he's a jerk. Cool, but a jerk.") Also, the seventh question is a reference to 1 Chronicles 21, when God gives King David the choice of having the three aforementioned things happen to his land as punishment for numbering the people of Israel when He told them not to.

To God be the glory,

Hannah

Marvel Ladies

It's Hannah, again. I've waited a long time to be done with this one. It's been a month long project, and thanks be to God for the foresight to put the files on my second drive, because the single folder "Marvel Ladies" was a good 9 GB with over one hundred .psd files, while my main drive has only 1.69 GB to spare. This is what comes of saving dozens of extra copies.

Left to right: Maria Hill, Darcy Lewis, Natasha Romanoff, Betty Ross, Lady Sif, Jane Foster, Pepper Potts, and Peggy Carter.

Alrighty, let's begin at the top. Backstory. I'm a Pinterester, and I get on that site entirely too much. On one of my daily visits, I saw that someone I follow had pinned this picture:

This picture, by the way, does not belong to me. It's from vylla-art.tumblr.com. 

I almost didn't give it a second glance. I think I'd seen it before, but this time it caught my attention because in the comments below there was some dispute about Marvel lore and cinematic trivia, and since I am a person who unconsciously absorbs facts about silly things like comics and movies, I stepped in to help sort out the mess. Then I saw that people began to say things like this:

I like to fix things. I'm a fixer. So when people were saying they thought it wasn't done right, I wanted to "make it right". I'm just weird. Maybe slightly OCD. 

In any case, I did some research and some sketching. It wasn't a big thing at first, and I didn't ever think I could do better than the picture above, but I thought, Well, if I'm going to do this, might as well do it right. I know for sure that Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman are very short, but I couldn't remember how Sif and Pepper, etc, compared.  

You might be able to see the notations beneath each lady: 5' 8", 5' 3 ½", 5' 3", 5' 10", 5' 9", 5' 3", 5' 9", 5'7". Yeah, I went so far as to look up each celebrity's height, but you have to keep into account that Natasha wears freakishly tall heels. Each lady's outfit is just the one I liked best or was the best I could get. Didja know there are tons of Natasha and Pepper images all over Pinterest, but Darcy? Jane? Betty? Ha. I had to dig into the Marvel Cinematic Wiki to get a handful of blurry Betty pictures, so I pretty much made her outfit from scratch.

And of course I had a ton of reference images:

   

Now this was supposed to be a quick job. After scanning the drawing in, after about 15 minutes I had finished with Peggy's dress. But then I started on Sif.
And I finished days later. That is some complex armor. And a lot of fun. This entire project was a crash course in lighting and clothing and skin tone. It's been a long, painstaking process.

Speaking of lighting. When I'd finished the outfits, hair and skin, I presented the picture to Mama and all my siblings, to rounds of gushing and compliments. Once all that was out of the way, however: What's wrong with Peggy's forehead? She looks like Megamind. She looks lumpy. Jane's head is way bigger than everyone else's. The two chicks on the end, their legs are too bright. Darcy looks way vampirical. It looks like she's wearing a mask. Sif's eyes are blurry. Peggy's hand looks like a flipper!

All part of the process, I suppose. Mama did say, "If I were in the Sistine Chapel while Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling, I'd say, 'What's wrong with his head? It's all egg-shaped.'"
But I did listen to the criticism, with a sigh, and I was beginning to realize that I was only half-way done. Especially when my greatest fear was pointed out: I had followed all of the reference images too closely, because it looked like each lady had her own personal light source.

"How am I supposed to fix that?"
"You're going to have to do the skin over again."
"NOOOOOOOO!!!!"

Then I told myself that if I wanted to fix this thing, and get it done, I was going to have to accept this horrible fate. And so I went again, making sure that the shadows of the clothing all fell on the right side instead of the left. I adjusted Peggy's dress and fixed her "flipper", moved Darcy's eyes closer together (she did sort of resemble a frog), completely redid Peggy's face, warmed up the pale people and toned down the orange people, generally making everyone look like they belonged in the same "picture".

So now, after 39 days of hard work... and easy work and medium-skill-level work...VOILÁZ!

And despite the slightly-harsh criticism, everyone in my family has been super encouraging. I must have gone to Mama for advice a dozen times, and she knows just how to deal out the compliments. I have to admit I was getting pretty unhealthily proud about Pepper's face. 'Cause I really like it. Also, Sif's armor. But I'm working on that.

If there's one thing I would like to change about my picture, it'd be the stiff, inactive poses. In Vylla's picture she had the girls in all sorts of interesting positions that made them seem alive. So proper respect to her. This was all hers in the first place.

To God be the glory,
Hannah

Lighting: Drawing The Eye

Happy Blogoversary to us... the blog is one year old.

Hannah here. No, this title doesn't refer to sketching an eye. This is about using lighting to attract someone's eye to a point on a picture.
 Likely every artist that has had an official teacher has been told about contrast: contrast between dark and light. My mama, who has actually had art lessons (as opposed to all us home-school kids), said that her art teacher told her to make the dark parts of a sketch black, and the light parts white. It makes for a more dramatic image.

Light draws the eye. If you are in a dark room, and the only source of light is a tiny strip under the door, odds are you'll look at the light instead of at the rest of the room. This power can be manipulated. Bwahaha.
I don't know how many people are familiar with this technique (the technique that may or may not have a name, I'm not sure), but it can be used to great effect.

One notable example, and the one I remember best, is Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.

Who is the most important picture in this image? Jesus, of course. And you may notice that, contrasting with the dark walls that make the backdrop, there's a window right behind Jesus, framing his head, drawing the attention right-smack to his face. About as effective as a halo. Da Vinci's pretty cool.

Another artist I see that uses this technique is Gustave Doré. He's got a fairly distinct hand. His illustrations of the Bible have shown up in both my CKJV bible and my study guide.

Nehemiah secretly viewing the ruins of the walls of Jerusalem.

The Ten Commandments

Daniel

See how in each of these, the white wall, or bright lightning, or the lighter sky, draws the attention to the dark figure or object directly in front of it.

Of course, there are different ways to use this. You could, for instance, make the object of importance light-colored itself.

The famous judgement of Solomon.

John and the angel looking down at New Jerusalem.

Take a look at the New Jerusalem picture. What's the first thing you want to look at? Probably the glowy-white city down there. It's the idea of a spotlight, if you understand that.

I have to say that I don't often use this myself, but I'm going to start... thinking about it. If the pros do it, why not?

To God be the Glory,

Hannah

Drawing Eyes

A step-by-step of how I draw eyes. No reason.

For starters, when I normally draw any pictures of eyes, I do the drawing from memory or from my reflection in a mirror. I chose to take a picture instead as reference, this time. This is Sarah's eye.










I took the picture to my computer and blew it up so I could see it easily.





Then I began sketching out the basic lines of the eyes. I usually begin with the teardrop. I'm weird that way.





Congratulations me! Already it looks like an eye.





The top of the eyelid, or as I've heard it called, eyeflap. Often the eyelid line has a vaguely squarish shape.


By the way, the eyelid does not lay flat against the eyeball. It's, I don't know, a half a centimeter thick, so it has an edge that's visible on the lower side at the angle. (That sounds super intelligent of me). Also, with all the eyes I've closely examined (meaning, no one's eyes outside my family), there's a subtle wrinkle on the lower lid, as you can see.


I put a little line where the eyebrow will be, and began to mark out the shape of the iris.




You may have to erase and redraw. As you can see.





I began shading the eyeball, and added the pupil. I had to redraw that part too. Depending on what the lighting's like, it'll be bigger or smaller... so long as it's round.



Shading the iris. Using light lines, and keeping in mind that the outer rim of the eye is usually darker than most of the iris. Once in a tutorial I read that you should be very careful to keep all the lines pointed toward the center of the pupil, so, respect the master, whoever they are.




Fleshing out the eyebrow more, and adding more shading...




The beginning of eyelashes! Keep in mind that eyelashes are curved, not stick-straight, so they go down slightly before they go up. Also, as I've heard and observed, the eyelashes are rarely seen individually, but stick together in clumps. Pretty clumps.



Adding lower lashes. Smaller than upper lashes, and a lot more scarce.






Darkening the pupil. Pupils are like, really black. I added a bit of shading around the eye (you may not be able to see it). For the most part, I'm done now.

So I hope this was at least vaguely informative. I'm not any sort of expert, I'm a sixteen-year-old girl, not Van Gogh or Michelangelo. I just like doing eyes. I have eyes. You may also have eyes. Eyes are good.

Update: Here's the image superimposed over Sarah's eye. You can see here that the eyebrow I've drawn is not proportioned correctly and instead should be much larger in comparison to the eye (and it's not just Sarah, she's got much thinner eyebrows than I have). That's one last tip, then. Well, maybe fuller eyelashes.

To God be the Glory,

Hannah

Long-Promised Post: Part 1

As said, a long-promised post… one of them, that is, because there have been two long-promised posts. I’m going to wisely start with the one that happened several months ago… starting about last April in fact… gosh, that was a long time ago. In any case, last year was my (Hannah’s) first time to go to an event in our town called the Father-Daughter Ball. 

Now, I am not a person to keep prom-type dresses just hanging around in my room. I’ve never gone to prom. Don’t see it likely that I ever will. So I needed to dress up formally and I didn’t want to wear my sister’s dress from the previous year. (I didn’t want to buy a new one, because, doncha know, formal dresses, new or used, cost anywhere from about $60 - $CrazyAmountOfMoney).

Fortunately, around that time my aunt gave us some of our now-grown cousin’s old prom dresses, so I rifled through them and found one I thought I could alter into something I’d like to wear.

I couldn't find the original "before" picture I'd wanted: this is one with pins stuck in various places.
Originally it was just a plain straight skirt.

The color was not my first pick, but it was the closest to my size. I set about to sketching ideas:

Then I was struck with a conundrum. Where would I put this dress while I was adjusting and altering and snipping and sewing and stuff? My sisters would not stand (literally) for being my models for my hours of pin-pricking and needle-pricking and scissor-pricking and so on (hee hee, sew on...).

So instead I convinced Sarah (with a great deal of difficulty) to let me use her as a model for a duct tape mannequin I decided to make, based on this tutorial.

I believe the question, as I worded it when asking Mama for permission to do this craft, was: "Can I wrap my sister in duct tape and then cut things with sharp objects very near to her?"
She said yes. 
I love our family.

The process of making the mannequin took several hours in and of itself, but once it was finished I could begin work on the dress.

The idea was to make something called "pickups". For example:

Not my image... I seem to remember that this particular one was from latterdaydresses.com. 

It makes the skirt look all ripply, in simple terms. To achieve such a look, Mama gave me very complicated instructions that I don't really remember and a demonstration. In short, I used quilt-binding on the inside of the dress and gathered the skirt to the quilt binding and sewed it there. It's very difficult to sew something on the inside of a dress from the outside, so I turned the dress inside out and hung it up again, but then there was an underskirt thing (Crinoline? I'm not sure what it's called... here you can see the depths of my knowledge in designing) getting in the way, which I hiked up and tied around the top of the mannequin with a measuring tape. Resourceful me.
By the way, the mannequin thing is only a bust, not a full body deal. I didn't have quite that much duct tape. But I had a hanger on the inside of the mannequin and rigged it up hangman-style to our ceiling fan. This rig was there for several weeks and got pretty annoying, so occasionally I took it down to appease the other people in my house. (This is why I would like an art studio. I can do all of this stuff without me or my materials getting in everybody else's way, or vice versa).

Here is the lovely shapeless-looking monstrosity as I'm working on the pickups. Of course, it looked much better on the outside.

Once the pickups were done, I wanted to add a little bit of sparkle (cause I'm a girl... go figure. Besides, when shopping around for dresses I was always drawn to the artfully glitzy ones). Originally I had wanted to Swarovski crystals or Schwarzenegger crystals or whatever you'd like to call them... rhinestones. But there was nothing available at Walmart (we live out in a small town, there's no Tiffany's or whatever to shop at, don't judge... but we are getting a Hobby Lobby soon, which I am uber-excited about), so I picked up some assorted sequins instead.

Then I painstakingly sewed them to the skirts - all the sewing I did was hand done - in an asymmetrical pattern (asymmetrical makes me sound all smart), and added some along the empire-waist-line in a wave pattern. All this, due to my amazing procrastination skills, was finished on the night before the ball. I also did adjustments to Trinity's dress, since she would be joining me at the ball after volunteering all day for the younger age groups, and Mama and I made Papa's fabulous bow tie.
Now, I do have to say that Mama voluntarily took in the sides of the dress, which involved the sewing machine and was beyond my skill level.

The finished product.

Me and Papa right before we left for dinner, posing and being awesome.

To God be the Glory,
Hannah

Tiger

Ha ha! It IS sooner! This is Sarah and what I mean is, the time between posts for me is sufficiently shortened! Woo-hoo! I also get two posts in a row! Though if you would have liked one sooner, I'm sorry, we've had a lot going on in the past month, house cleaning, decorations, friends and family coming over and lots of entertaining. We had 32 or so people at our house for Thanksgiving. So, although I've had enough free time for one I have excuses if you are unsatisfied. I've made three pieces of photoshop art in the past week but I will release them one at a time starting with...( pause for dramatic effect)... this one!

Now this was pretty simple to do. It's pretty similar to the Snow Leopard I did two posts back. I guess I like doing night sky background because it's dramatic, beautiful and easy. But, snow, especially at night, is harder, it's like a periwinkley-ish blue with white-blue outlines. I think I got this picture from Wikipedia, well, at least part of it, the tiger. The background came entirely from my own imagination, though I did listen to a lot of music while I did this, which is where I get much of my inspiration.  The original picture is this.

As I compare the two on this post, I realize with some horror, I forgot the whiskers! But it doesn't really take away from the picture so it's okay. I got a fair bit of reception from my family and a long-lost Bamboo brand drawing tablet to help with future drawings. 

On a side note, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, comes out tommorow and I think I'm equal parts excited and scared. Because...Spoiler Alert! I'm afraid about the part where Bilbo takes the Arkenstone and Thorin is furious with him and in the last movie at the end he finally accepted him and this action will shatter any belief Thorin had in him in the first place. Also, the battle. I don't know if it takes part in this movie, but I'd really like Fili, Kili and Thorin not to die as soon as possible because they happen to be my favorite characters.

So! I don't know if this will be the last post of the year, but I'd still like to say, Merry Christmas!

Not particularly long for a post, but if you would like more information on any of it, we'd love comments

.- Sarah