Tep's Wedding Portrait - First Colour

Now that I have the basic shapes in I've gone over the portrait with a first, pretty rough try at the colours. It's a little strange because they have the identical skin and hair colour (Mennos! They all look the same) but I want to differentiate between them, at least a little. I've lightened his hair a little, which is helped by the balding, so I can work more of the skin tone in. I really need to start a little blending, And definitely darker it up, so I can go in and put the highlights in later. I think I should have started with the base skin colours, more reds and oranges and blues, then put in the lighter tones on top. Oh well, it's early in the portrait, I have lots of room to make corrections. 

Postcard Potfolio

I've been trying to find ways to display paintings in the fantasy artist portfolio I will someday make myself when I came across this tutorial. I really liked how it looked when it's all done and it looks easy to add/remove/move pages while still displaying almost the entire page, plus the back-to-back display means you don't have to see the blank back of the sheet of paper. But I didn't like the folded look, that the corners could still flip up, or that the back stayed very tight together.


So instead of acheiving this with origami I made the elements seperately and sewed/glued it all in place. The corners that hold the postcards are sewn in the centre so everything stays in place very very well. I wasn't 100% on how it would look with the back of the accordian fold not held together in some way, without the postcards in it it bulged out too much and had no shape, but now that it's done it fans out so beautifully to display everything that I'm really really pleased. Experiment succesful! This will be perfect for my portfolio.

Artist Portfolio

These photos are of a custom piece that turned out very very well. It's a sort of monotone (silk, leather and brads are all in a very rich chocolate brown) steampunk book with a few extra features. The back page has leather loops that fit most small to medium size pencils/brushes, and there extra pockets and the front, and one at the back that fits more full size pages.

This has got me to thinking about my own portfolio, lost somewhere in planning stages. I'm not actually a bookbinder by trade or training, my BA is in visual arts, and more specifically oil painting. I've been wanting to make myself some sort of book that's really an easy to carry around portfolio. Oils are a bit of a pain in the ass to travel with so it would be watercolour and pen. It's going have a section for displaying the finished paintings, a large pocket to hold the new pages, a board with elastics or somesuch to act as an easel while I'm painting, and room for brushes and my mini travel paint set. And it's going to happen... sometime... soon.