CrashOctopus Blog

Mimic Octopus by Meg Lyman

4×4″ gouache on board

$35 – e-mail me*

Here’s another of the 100 Cephalopods! The famous Mimic Octopus. It disguises itself, using its stripes and its arms’ ability to make cool shapes, as various poisonous sea critters, like snakes, lionfish, and stingrays. AMAZING

This was my first try with gouache on Aquabord and let me tell you, it’s like they’re made for each other. Great surface to work on with gouache/watercolors. Absorbent enough to *not* rub off (see my earlier posts re: gouache on Gessobord) and sturdy enough to scrub back to white if you make a mistake. I recommend!

*My e-mail was broken for a few days. I am in the process of updating my website, which is why it says “under construction” or something when you go to meglyman.com. I was puttering around in FTP and deleted something by accident. I had to call my hosting provider and they charged me $75 for a backup restore. They only keep the tapes for 3 days. Lesson: BACK UP your website. ALL of it. I backed up the directory where my viewable files are stored. However, the thing I accidentally deleted was in the root directory. Important things live there. Back it up too.

These guys really know how to have fun.

Gouache on Strathmore Illo Board ACEOs which are thick and awesome.

For Sale! $40 – e-mail to buy

Racquetball Squid, a.k.a. Davy Jones’ Gym Locker

12×16″ gouache on Pastelbord

For Sale: $425

Last month I finished one of my more involved paintings. You know, the kind that actually has a background and tells a story… one that I planned out very carefully. I get one of these done every once in a while, between commissions and fun, quick little paintings. I try to focus on improving one specific aspect of my painting skills during each one, while hopefully maintaining (and improving) the skill I learned on the last one.

(Click the thumbnails for bigger versions.)

This is the beginning of the Racquetball Squid. The first thing I did was try to block in the background with a wash, to help establish darks and lights. And the first thing I learned is that watery paint bleeds on Pastelbord. BAD. Almost as bad as a paper towel. But that’s OK – it’s just a block-in, and I could still see my pencil lines. I used wax paper and foil to help create the textures.

After the wash dried, I completed the locker background. Texture is fun! But the best part about it was adding compositional lines. I used lines hidden in the background elements to draw the eye toward the focal points. The main focal point is the eye of the squid on the left, and the secondary focal point is the eye of the squid to the right. Can you see all the lines I pointed at that first squid’s eye?

Next I filled in the racquet. One good suggestion I got was to push the darks darker for more contrast. There’s enough to know it’s a shadow, but it isn’t as convincing as it could be. At least I was able to push the top of the racquet into the background. By the way, it’s really hard to paint sports equipment without real-life reference.

Here’s a supreme example of the wash bleeding on the Pastelbord. Yeesh.

Anyway, the next and final step was to color the squids. I believe I succeeded at my goal; the left squid’s eye is definitely the biggest focal point. Do y’all have any other suggestions?

Metasepia pfefferi, or the Flamboyant Cuttlefish, is one cool little cephalopod. It usually dresses in drab browns, but when threatened, it lights up like a carnival. Not only does it sport a cool color scheme, it also has poisonous flesh (probably related to color, right?), AND it sort of walks along the muddy bottoms of the Indo-Pacific using its fourth arms. And they’re tiny, rarely exceeding 3 inches. CUTENESS

6×8″ Gouache on Cradled Gessoboard

$100 – e-mail to buy

Nautilus macromphalus by Meg Lyman

11×14″ gouache on Pastelbord

$350 – e-mail to buy

I am beginning to think I set unrealistic goals at the beginning of the year. I underestimated the amount of time required for things like, say, putting my house on the market. It has been hugely time-consuming. However, having that list of goals has helped keep me motivated during the long, full days, even if I’m not perfectly on track to finish everything.

N. macromphalis WIP 1: Background. See this post for my laments about Pastelbord, the Magical Brush Eater. The cheap synthetic brush I used to complete the painting held up surprisingly well.

Here are the goals and my 1st Quarter commentary.

• Register my business by March – Done. I want to frame the certificate.
• Redo this blog to greatly expand its content and interactivity – Not done. I had hoped to finish this by now, but… yeah. Still in the works, and I’ve actually done some coding.
• Trim my website into a portfolio – See above, re: coding.
  
• Time all my projects with the new stopwatch Santa got for me – Doing. Doesn’t work nearly as well when I have 5 projects going at once…
• Complete the 100 Cephalopods project – No way is this going to happen. I have a grand total of 2 done. Commissions got in the way. Working for dollars is way better than working on spec, though, so I’m not bummed about missing this one.
• Promote my art on MySpace, etc. – Slowly working on that. Check out my MySpace page if you’re into that sort of thing.
• Do 10 shows and/or conventions – Going to happen! I have done four already and the rest are planned out.

N. macromphalus WIP 2: Whites. I didn’t do much planning for this piece. For example, I hadn’t planned to push the boundaries of color. These are all supposed to be shades of white, but at this stage I kept thinking, “Looks like metal. Maybe I should change the name to Robo-nautlius.”

I have done something list-worthy that was never an explicit goal of mine: I’m getting faster. I knew this would come eventually with practice, but I was pleasantly surprised when I realized it’s already happening. It took a friend saying, “you’re getting faster” for me to notice. Duh.

N. macromphalus WIP 3: Almost done. The oranges really balanced the blues and made the whole thing look properly organic. Nautilus, check. But the background was distracting. I took a sponge to it, which did the trick. Pastelbord is also the Magical Sponge Eater, and I spent 15 minutes picking bits of sponge off the painting.

Another list-worthy mention: I’m making a conscious effort to work on my style. Maggie and Rita encouraged me, and I worked out a list of things that make my paintings “mine.” One of those things, which had never occurred to be before (and never would have without this exercise) is that I love to use warm browns and oranges and cool blues and greys in combination. This may or may not be related to my love of da Bears.

So, that’s where I am after the first quarter of 2008. How are y’all doing in terms of goals this year?

Dinner by Meg Lyman

8×10 colored pencil and ink

$35 – e-mail to buy

Furry Weekend Atlanta was very much fun. I had a blast sitting all weekend in the stuffy little room they set aside for “Artist’s Alley.” For those unfamiliar with this type of convention, they’re set up with a Dealer’s Room where merchandise and art are sold. Tables need to be reserved and paid for in advance. Often there will also be an Artist’s Alley, where table space is free, but first-come, first-serve, and only art can be sold.

I met a bunch of awesome people and sold prints, hats, commissions, and originals. I sold two pieces in the art show, volunteered to help with checkout, and ended up getting an offer to perhaps run the FWA Art Show next year because I’m “organized and focused.” These are apparently rare traits in the fandom.

One of the best things about a local convention is the local people you meet, giving you many opportunities to socialize with kickass people (artists and otherwise) throughout the year. Every time I meet artists in the Atlanta area, I feel more at home.

Cat Eye ACEO by Meg Lyman

Ink on ACEO

$10 – click to buy

Although you’ve all given me fabulous ideas about how to clean my scanner (thank you!), I haven’t tried any of them yet. Instead, I blissfully scanned more art, expecting it to turn out horribly. As a result, when it turned out OK, I was pleasantly surprised.

I got a pack of ACEOs when I bought some gouache from someone over on WetCanvas. About half of them make me wonder what in the world people DO with ACEOs. I have shiny, slick, metallic cards, cards with stripes, and hot pink. These black ones look neat, but they’re slick, so I needed light-colored ink to use with them. I’d been wanted to buy metallic brush pens for a while… so I did, and here’s the result. Metallic ink is waaay too much fun. And the scanner handled it OK!

Cat Skull with Feathers by Meg Lyman

9×12 pencil on Canson

$60 – e-mail to purchase

It took me two tries to get this cat skull looking reasonably like a cat skull. You think you can draw from life, because you’ve done it before… but when you try it, you remember that it’s been a while and this shit is hard.

Casey’s blog has a neat little widget that says you need to be a genius to understand his blog. Makes readers of said blog feel smart, right? Well, how does this make you feel?

I suppose it’s nice to know that any second-grader could understand my blog, although the sarcasm may go over their heads. My inclusion of a swear word in the first paragraph is an experiment. Does it automatically bump the blog readability level to PG-13? Or do I just need to use more big words?

Unequivocally inconceivable!

Soused Mouse by Meg Lyman

9×12 gouache on Bristol

$100 – e-mail to buy

During my humbling “art-reaming” at Dragon*Con, I was given the same advice by several great artists: Tell a Story. Doesn’t matter if it’s an illustration or fine art or just a character pinup – it’ll be much more interesting and successful if it tells a story.

Tommy Castillo gave me a great set of guidelines to help with storytelling. Once you get an idea, ask yourself these questions:

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

Sitting down and writing out even quick, one-sentence answers to these helps immensely. The first four are pretty easy; usually you’ll have those answers in mind when you originally have the idea. The last two, however, can be tough. Those are the important ones. They can turn a viewer’s attitude from “So what?” to “Oh, that’s GREAT!”

I have about a zillion doodles in my sketchbook that I intend to turn into paintings. The first project I undertook after Dragon*Con started with this doodle:

Originally, I was going to ink and color him as-is. But after D*C, I answered those questions. I gave him a story. Instead of just an inebriated rodent, he became a drunk sot having trouble making his way back to his apartment after a late night out. The resulting painting was quick and messy, but I love it, because it tells a story. That makes it much more successful.

I highly recommend giving it a try next time you’re arting something from your imagination.

Emoticons by Meg Lyman

4×4″ each, oil on canvas

$100 set – e-mail to buy

Continuing with the theme of “oils,” I present the Three Emoticons. I picked up these tiny 4×4″ gallery-wrapped canvases last time I was at my favorite art store:

I have a thing for the three primary colors together, so I did one of each, using several tube colors for each. I tried to make the brushstrokes fit the emotion associated with the color. Then I let them dry. For a month. It took forever. Then I went to Larry’s class and learned how to make the paint flow better and dry faster (with thinner, medium, and dryer). So I went back and painted the faces last week, and they dried in a day or two. Woo!