Lyraina's sketchbook

[-echo-]

Amazing stuff, I really like the color studies and the gesture drawings!

[Lyraina]

Cricketts and echo: Thank you! :)

31/07/2015
1 pm, sun and clouds
...Are you bored of these yet? Today shadows were changing a lot again, so I had to do some major adjustments at the end. Posting 2 versions, before and after adjustments. The dark foreground was what I initially planned to do. I am very frustrated with how terribad I am at painting these midground trees and bushes… it can’t be that hard...!





30/07/2015
8.30 pm
Light is fading quickly, sky is changing a lot. It's hard to get the vibrancy of color in the lighter parts.




Week 4 of Nathan Fowkes’ Color and Light. Convey emotions with color and light, but no character. I try to think about brightness (high key, low key), value contrast, saturation, hue. Asking myself with each point how the emotion I want to convey feels (i.e. sadness: does it feel contrasty? colorful? saturated? etc). A very cool exercise! Can you guess some of them?

[smrr]

Aaaaaaaaaaahmaaaaahgad Lyra!
These. Plein. Air. Studies.


so much juicy work! I bet you're learning tonnes from Mr. Fowkes, because it's showing already!

Also hey, them gestures. No, no you haven't posted them in a while @_@

I noticed your q in my sketchbook as to which class I'm taking - well, I was originally enrolled in the same class as you, but wussed out when I realised he's an enviro artist (_very_ silly of me, ugh), so I changed to Dice and Robert Kondos class to get better at painting.

Gosh you're gonna be nuts by the end of the 12(?) weeks. Keep pushing girl!

[Fedodika]

very nice on those plein air studies lyrona... The top two feel more solid than previous but my goodness the evening one is really losing that digital feel; like the edges are exquisite and soft in the right places.

For the midhground trees i think you are doing pretty okay imo, i think executing that well comes down to how busy the texture is and what appears most in focus. i notice a lot of the texture brush marks you use for the detail leave sharp little marks, and maybe you could try blurring them or softening the edges kind of like in the evening one..

But then I don't paint lanscapes much but ultimately i think just doing more will sort it out fine :)

[Archreux]

Those plein air studies look really nice! The dusk version is probably my favorite. Nice separation of elements and simplification of them as well.

As a small suggestions, I think you could push some of the nuance the next time you do a plein air. There's a few of those color exploration keys that have some really good color variation. So, look to apply that for the next set of paintings. :]

[ramalooke]

heeeeeeyyy. great plan air paintings. i really like them. next time you do these try to simplify shapes even more. push them and exaggerate, to catch their essence. but yeah. can't wait to see more =D

[Lyraina]

smrr, I sure hope I’ll learn a lot :D You can always go back to Nathan Fowkes’ class after doing the one you’re doing now. I’m excited for that one too.

Fedodika, Thank you.. yep, I was going rather hard edged because I don’t like it when it all looks fuzzy and soft, when in reality they are looking rather crisp. But maybe I need to find a good balance. I’m planning on doing more of these, so I sure hope I’ll figure it out eventually :)

Archreux: Thank you. Good point… should push them a bit more… I’m trying to stick to painting what I see, so no sneaking in red when I see no red. But maybe I just need to look a bit harder… :D

ramalooke: Thank you! Niice idea.. I tried stylizing the clouds in one of them, but exaggerating the entire image sounds fun too. So many things to try :D Thanks!

--
01/08/2015
2 pm, overcast and thick clouds
Boring. I still hate these midground trees.






04/08/2015
Tried using a different brush with more texture, to get rid of some of the clean, digital look. Didn't work.



Light was fading too quickly, so just slapped down some color. Interesting thing was that the heavy clouds were blue/grey/purple with cheesy pink color and rims, but beneath that, near the horizon, there were no clouds but sky. Which had a very different color - more cyan-yellow.



...just to prove that I still do other things than looking out of my window :P

[VoodooMama]

Really beautiful gestures in the last page. The environments are looking great as always! It's very interesting seeing the lighting and color shifts.

[Bookend]

Really beautiful work! :) I like the way you're tackling foliage. It's a surprisingly tricky area, particularly in drawing.

[crackedskull]

Nice plein air stuff, quite similar to where I live actually. The Nathan Fowkes exercise looks great :)

[Lyraina]

VoodooMama: Thank you!

Bookend: Thanks, yep, foliage is hard...

crackedskull: Thanks! :)


05/08/2015
11.30 am, warm day
trying to stylize




06/08/2015
6 pm, hot day, paintin‘ at 33°C
trying to stylize #2




07/08/2015
8 pm, light fading quickly.
The pink clouds were glowing a lot more
Pink horizon slowly fading to blue



random color stuff without ref

[Gliger]

You are improving your colors a lot, specially the more "natural" feeling ones.

[iggytek]

sweet studies dude
cant wait to see more.

[meat]

..... is that... a glass jar of eye balls sitting on a sunny Mediterranean window with two potted cacti and sprigs of lavenders? :D Gotta love your quirky sense of humor ;)

[Lyraina]

Gliger, thank you!

iggytek: Thanks. There always will be more studies :D

meat: YES, someone actually saw the eyeballs! XD

I apologize for half-disappearing and being kind of inactive. Time is going by so fast, and I always feel like I am working/producing too slowly, and in combination with some RL things that need to be taken care of there is not much time left at the end of each day...

On a side note, you can now download my Japan and Iceland travel photos for free on gumroad if you want: https://gumroad.com/lyraina

11/08/2015



18/08/2015
9 am - morning mist is lifting, landscape getting more visible every minute (at first, nothing behind the middle ground trees wasvisible - later on, the far background forest started to appear).



19/08/2015
7.45 am - cloudy morning.
Red underpainting + chalky brush



21/08/2015
9 am - very foggy



b/w thumbs, too busy/detailed:



Color and Light practice, inspired by a paintover I saw by Nathan Fowkes.
Original boring photo (taken by me) on the left, then painted over to create a certain mood.

[meat]

Hahaha, suddenly those blah objects becomes so suspenseful and magical, seen in a different light (literally)! Looking forward to your return ;) Not that I'm any one to speak, having vanished off to inactivity and unproductive-ness myself.... Oh if only the skull could talk! She'll say, "What are thy doing with thy Time?!?!"

[crackedskull]

I gotta try the photo paintover exercise, it looks so fun :)
I have a feeling you're gonna go far in environment art, you have great work ethic and also put thought behind exercises that you do.

[Bookend]

Wow, awesome. Really clever way to study mood, colour, and lighting. Keep up the great work!

[Warburton]

Wow Your environments are looking great. You've started to handle those colours like a boss!

Here's a few links as I promised ;)
(Also, I'm not sure how these translate for different countries so if some don't work I apologise, though i'll leave names so you can still find them.
Podcasts - London real (wealth and success)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...wY-FQI_7GZ

seth godin start up school
https://soundcloud.com/startup-school
Also this guy has an awesome blog which he updates daily
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
aaaaand an awesome book he wrote -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NEPoWj5bCE

other great books -
Rich dad poor dad -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppU1IhuwDcs

think and grow rich -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grazszumy6c

Great channel for finding more books like the above with gold knowledge 'fightmediocrity'
https://www.youtube.com/user/phuckmediocrity

Another great blog of tim ferriss plus a good podcast
http://fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

I think that should be enough for now :p Hope that helps and all the best!

[PurpleScissors]

I love your environment studies. Your studying technique seems so much fun and much more helpful than the classical methods. I will definetly try them on my own studies as well. Thank you for that, I will try to learn from you.
The last three paintings in which you changed the lightning are fascinating. It's like magic, lightning does tremendously change the effect of the whole piece.
I will follow your sketchbook please keep update. They are amazing.