samkuchingdraws

May have unlocked a new favourite way to art with brown paper. Wasn't sure about the white highlights at first, but it turned out better than expected! :happybounce:

It's the spooky season and it's time for some spooky art-ing! I wanted to paint something to kickstart the month and I have had some ideas swimming in my head for a while, down to the mood and composition that I want. However, I was missing something: my subject. I didn't know who or what I wanted to make the main feature of this picture. I have played around with a few glowy-eyed ghouls, but none of them really stuck around for long. Even considered the usual moody landscape with a normal little guy in the field, but that also didn't stick. It was during all of this experimentation that a name came to mind somehow: Ichabod Crane. And immediately, I knew who my main subject would be: the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. A classic spooky and a spooky classic! Also with this piece, I got round to experimenting with a few brushes I have never really used before -- mostly because I never understood how to work them in Autodesk SketchBook. They are a bit more watercolour-ish and

Lately I have been feeling somewhat lousy about a couple of things where painting is concerned. At least with my last piece of work (my first for 2023), I realised that I have heavily regressed to purely working instinctively again, and in struggling to bring the piece to life, it has made me realise what I might still need a great deal of work on: composition, tone and perspective. So I went in search of an instructional video on composition -- which I really should have done in the past, or if I did, probably should have paid more attention -- and I found this one, which helped a great deal. I do highly recommend this video. Do check it out, if you haven't. The explanations are delivered quite well, and there are pretty solid examples given in here too. I haven't seen the rest of the series, but I plan to continue (hopefully). Anyways, having seen the video, I took out my stylus and phone and started making a sketch, very reminiscent of some of the examples you will see in the