Another journal

An interesting thing happened during this focus month. Stylistically, I always feel like I’m all over the place, what veins of consistency I have are shallow and general. But when I tried to follow the more traditional airbrush styles in lettering and theme, I couldn’t do it. When, in annoyance I went to those themes of mine I thought were shallow and general (metal, sf, rawr), it totally worked. So I can’t do gorgeous traditional airbrush script like you see at county fairs. But I guess I can do gothy, metal ones?

And the t-shirts with stars and names and cute skylines not so much. But I can do t-shirts.

So. Maybe the aesthetics I started picking up years ago have stuck with me this long for a reason.

The bottom two shirts are up for grabs, BTW. They’re a general size large tee.

Tomorrow: what March’s focus month is.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

I do not have steady hands, this I have learned as I’ve continued following the lessons over at How to Airbrush. I am not bad at shading spheres though. Here, have some tablet snaps of my learnin’.  The second one has pictures Chase drew for me that I then shaded in:

I am also not good at palm trees. Much to my everlasting dismay.  The dagger stroke! I am terrible at it.

But! I can do pine trees okay.  And I think I may be not bad at depicting eldritch horror.

Cannot wait to start playing with these themes using the Miami-traditional palette I have.  On t-shirts. Because having a dark planet or creeping tentacle monsters is way cooler in neon.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.

For some gift holiday last year, Chase got me an airbrush.  It’s not just any airbrush, it’s an airbrush gun and air compressor specifically made for nail art and miniature work. It came with little stencils and fake nails, because some wonderful lady in southern middle America had made an investment and then decided against it.

I haven’t been very good with this gift, I use it sometimes, and got most of the awkwards out, but I don’t use it nearly enough—nor have I practised basic technique enough with it.  So this month I’m doing the exercises over at How to Airbrush and getting this tool to where most tools and skills I have are at: skilled-workable. Which just means that I can use it to do what I want, without thinking about it, but not feeling like I’m perfect at it.

Not that I can’t bully it into doing what I want as it is right now.  At the start of the month I went up to Seattle and had a semi-planned (as in, I brought all the things and we picked through what things we’d use) photoshoot with the amazing and wonderful Libby Bulloff.  I pushed my airbrush to the limit of the total area it can cover, which was good to learn—because now I need one that is made to cover large areas of skin, since I love the images Libby got.

(airbrushed through lace and tipped nails with white)

(acrylic housepaint up to wrists, airbrushed gradients from there)

Alas, not all life is glorious photoshoots with wonderful people, so when I got home, I started doing the airbrush lessons. The first was lines and dots. I’m at a disadvantage, because my kit is for miniature work and I’m still pushing it to work bigger.  But that’s why we do learning things.

Aaaaand gradients.  I can do gradients pretty well on dimensional stuff, but not on flat stuff. I think a big problem here is scale. I need to figure out the ideal scale for this particular airbrush.

Beyond doing these lessons I don’t have any particular goals set, but I love using this thing, so who knows what will come of it?

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.