New Project: B90x - 90 day Art Challenge

Designed by B. Lewis

Upon contemplating this year and the things I’d like to accomplish artistically, I came up with a challenge for myself. I call it B90x ^_^ (goofy, I know but this is going to be fun). It’s a 90 day art challenge that requires me to complete one piece of artwork a day for 90 days. It can be anything from an acrylic painting to a digital painting, pastel work, watercolor, graphic design, you name it, the only rule is that whatever I do, it must be a complete piece; sketches don’t count. The goal is to get into the habit of exercising my creative muscles daily. In doing so, I would like to improve my creativity and speed of getting work done. 

 

This is definitely different from the way I normally work; for the last few years, I’ve been a bit relaxed in completing artwork, I might do a painting once every blue moon and I haven’t kept a sketchbook since 2008 although I do sketch before I draw to paint. I had been focusing most of my attention on graphic design. Because of this, I find it hard to begin working when it’s time to paint, not that I don’t want to but when it comes time to put paint on canvas, I don’t know where to begin, I sort of stumble around until I get into a rhythm and sometimes, not always, it’s hard to come up with new ideas. With the task at hand, the goal is to get into the habit of always practicing my craft. So, beginning February 1^st, I’ll be doing B90x. Some of my paintings will be recorded and featured on my YouTube channel, some may not but they will all be on my blog, so stay tuned and wish me luck and feel free to join in if you’d like.

“Neter Khonsu – Digital Painting”

New Project #1 - Complete!!

Revised Final ©2014 B. Lewis

A few weeks ago, I showed you guys a sneak peek into a new project I was working on; it was a portrait of my son in Photoshop. At that time, I had only completed the sketch and up until recently, that’s all I had done. Yesterday I had some extra time on my hands and decided to proceed. It took me about 3 hours or so to complete. About an hour and a half was spent on the face and the rest of the time was spent on the details.  It turned out great. I’ll have a video posted of the making of this piece on my YouTube channel.

©2014 B. Lewis

 

I began this painting with a sketch done lightly with my pencil brush in Photoshop and created a mid-tone value layer which I ended up changing later. I started painting with the eyes as I do in my acrylic paintings. For this I used a textured brush I got from XiaTaptara at Idrawgirls.com. I decided to use this same brush in the face but quickly found that the default soft round brush worked much better to achieve the smoothness I was after. All in all, I’m proud of this piece. It’ll probably be something I continue to work on, making a few adjustments here and there but until then, I hope you like it and enjoy the video:

First Painting - 2014

So…I love painting portraits, if you can’t already tell. ^_^ Usually it takes about 5 hours over several days but for this project, I set aside 2 hours to complete this really cool portrait as a gift. This portrait is painted on 5x7 canvas panel and I framed it in a very nice silver frame with white mat board. I decided to use acrylics and ink for this project for a couple of reasons; one was that I needed to have it done in the same day and two because Acrylics have fewer fumes. Because this was framed, I didn’t worry too much about varnishing the final product. The challenge I had with this portrait was the size of the overall painting and painting glasses. I’ve only painted glasses once and both times, they weren’t as difficult as I anticipated.  

I started this project with a really simplified sketch and went right into painting. After I had the main painting done, I went back in with a black brush tip pen to add final details. 

This is my first painting of the year and I'll be doing many, many more so stay tuned, I've got some big surprises coming this year!