'Tis the Season!

Christmas is this week!!!! This year I made a couple gingerbread houses and I struggled so badly--so like I do,  I made a painting about it :) This is exactly how I felt (only I'm not as talented at making gingerbread houses as this girl seems to be!)

Enjoy! and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

New post on AndSeven!

The semester is over, and man was it a busy one! I was only enrolled part time, but have had the opportunity to get some contract work with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and some commissioned pieces.

With the permission of my client, I have set up a workshop on AndSeven for this piece. It is a huge family portrait (3 x 2 ft), bigger than anything I've ever painted digitally, but it turned out nice. They ended up printing it on canvas, which I have to say only made it look better (go canvas!)

The dad wrote a memory journal about all his kids before passing away earlier this year. Each person in this piece is represented by the memory their father had about them. It was a tough painting, but fun to work on!

The workshop is really cheap--only $5 if you're interested. Click on the link below

http://andseven.com/classprivate/118

Here is the painting :)

Comic

Here is a short comic page using the Illustration Friday word "Theatre". The assignment was to use strictly solid black or white with no gradients or values. (Though we were allowed to use 'halftone' which is the dot pattern).

I used the pen tool a lot on this assignment to make clean crisp lines and select shapes that I want.

Enjoy!

Design work

Winter Card

We always have huge dinners for Thanksgiving, so we always have to assign seats for dinner. Here is a name place holder for Thanksgiving. The individual pieces can be printed on the colors of paper wanted, and the turkey is built so it can stand on it's own. The name tag can be inserted between the body and feet. 

 This is a Christmas card I made last year. Here is the step by step to how awesome this card is :)

(Everyone loves a little Alice in Wonderland :) )

Just in time for Halloween

The Bride of Frankenstein. Illustration Friday's word for this week was 'puppet'. I wanted to show a more realistic view of someone being used as a puppet by someone who has control over them. In this painting her marionette  strings have been cut freeing her from control

Monster Monster

This assignment was to use extreme perspective and to put a creature in it that fit the perspective. I wanted to do an old black and white (sepia in this case :) ) movie, but reversed. The little monster is scared of what he heard up the stairs, and like in all good scary movies...he goes to check it out--ALONE

This was an assignment for my Digital Painting class with Jim Madsen. The assignment was to create a piece in the style of Mark Summers, using the Illustration Friday word for the week which was "Silence". Mark Summers is an amazing illustrator who does scratch board. Definitely check out his work. 

Though I didn't use actual scratch board, the point was to make our digital paintings look like we had. Here is what I came up with:

Wish

This weeks Illustration Friday word was "Wish". The assignment was to make it look like it was pieced together out of flat pieces of paper. I learned a lot working on this assignment (or more, after I finished and learned an easier way:) ) but I think I have 100+ layers!! I usually paint with a lot of layers but NOT this many!

I decided I wanted to do a wishing fountain from the fishes point of view.

Tribute to Pernille Orum

The theme for this next piece was "Novelty". Our assignment was to try to imitate the style of a favorite artist. An artist who really inspires me is Pernille Orum. She is an amazing illustrator from Denmark--here is a link to her site if you want to check out her work http://drawings.pernilleoe.dk/


Here is my version of "Novelty" in Pernille Orum's style. In her work, she uses a lot of purples and pinks in her shadows which I love! She also has a unique way of stylizing her characters, that as I tried to imitate her found hard to replicate. I love how she designs hair also, and tried to bring that over into this piece.

Enjoy!

Money

This past weeks theme was "Money" for Illustration Friday. I was thinking along the lines of people who come from money, and people who don't...and this is what I came up with!

Radio

This weeks theme for my digital painting class was "Radio". We had to do the assignment as a high key painting, meaning that all the values need to be on the light half of the value scale. You can have some spots that are a little darker, but for the most part everything needs to be really light.

When I started this assignment I had a great idea for color in my head... but I didn't know it was supposed to be high key. Here is the version I thought of at the beginning (not high key :) )

and here is the high key version....

Which do you like better?

The Tin Man

So I am taking a digital painting class from Jim Madsen--who is an AMAZING artist! We are so lucky to have him teaching at our school. If you want to see his work, here is a link to his blog http://jimmadsen.blogspot.com/

Each week in our class we are to illustrate that weeks work on IllustrationFriday.com.

This week, the word was "Tin Man"

Here is mine :)

Bunhead

Trent and I went to my nieces dance recital and a woman sat in front of us with a HUGE bun! After her daughter performed she came back to sit with her parents, but was too small to see so she stood between her parents. By the time my niece came out, we couldn't see at all. And mostly because of a bun head. So this piece is dedicated to all the bun heads out there! :)

Also see this piece at my Etsy shop! https://www.etsy.com/shop/KristyLender?ref=hdr_shop_menu

Catwoman

I really wanted to do my version of Cat Woman, so here you go! :)

The Hamburglar

This is a piece for sketch dailies that I really ended up liking...a lot! If you don't know about it, follow @Sketch_Dailies on Twitter. Every day they post a new subject for that day, and artists all across the world participate drawing their versions of that subject....

This one is a few days late, but the theme was the Hamburglar..so...here is mine!

Little Dutch Girl

I did this quick painting from a sketch I did this spring in a sketchbook for one of my classes. I'm trying to practice on painting faster as well as using textures.

Diving Girl

Here's another quick painting of a sketch I did last semester....I hope you enjoy!

Princess and the Frog

I wanted to paint some of the sketches I did during my last semester at school. This is a quick one I did of the princess and the frog. I used the image hose in Corel Painter for the leaves which is an awesome tool to create a lot of the same thing...

Astro Girl

Trent and I wanted to do the same piece as each other, but develop it in our individual styles. So...we said to do a female astronaut (originally with huge pants) and we left it at that. We each took a few days and developed our own pieces. Here is mine:

I did this piece in Adobe Photoshop. 

Here is Trent's version of the same subject matter. He did his traditionally in watercolor. You can see more of his work at http://trentgersbachillustration.com/

Book Worm

So I really wanted to do a piece that was loaded with textures and patterns and text. This piece was so much fun to work on because there is so much of that stuff in it! I've made a workshop/tutorial for this piece that is available on AndSeven. If you want to learn about using textures and text, or my process you should check it out at the link below. It is also available on my etsy shop. Let me know what you think! :)

Enjoy!

Here is the link to the tutorial: http://andseven.com/classpreview/68

and to my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/kristylender

Let

Etsy Shop

I finally set up my Etsy shop! Last week I was a part of the Wonderland Boutique, and now I've listed some of my work that's for sale on Etsy. Check out my cute little shop : www.etsy.com/shop/kristylender

Spring Wind

This is a piece I did mostly last Summer.It's 7x 23 or 27 inches...something weird like that. I have a ton of Masonite board, because lets face it--this is the beginning of my hoarding career, and this piece was done on a scrap of that board. I really love long compositions whether vertical or horizontal. So, I took this random sized board and painted a piece for my "Boy Meets Girl" Series. This was done in acrylic.

I drew the piece out on Reeves paper, scanned it into the computer, printed it on toned paper and then mounted it to the board with Matte Gel Medium (which dries clear). The hard thing about this piece was the size. Because it's so awkward scanning has been a dilemma. I haven't been able to find a scanner big enough to scan the entire piece, and I am not the best photographer :/

But scanning worries are over because I learned that Photoshop has this awesome photomerge feature. So I scanned my painting in twice...one half and then the other. Then I put them both in Photoshop, use the feature and it automatically matches and aligns the piece together.

Thank you Photoshop, you are pretty amazing!

Also, I got into the Wonderland Boutique! Yay! It is in Alpine at the old Peppermint Place on June 6th and 7th from 10 am to 8 pm. This is going to be one of the pieces I'm selling prints for there so you should come check it out! I will update with more information as it gets closer and I find out all the details :)

Children's Book

This was a really fun project to work on this semester! The assignment had a lot of things required for the piece but basically it had to be flat flat flat flat flat! be in an abnormal environment, and have some reverse perspective. This is the first time I've worked flat and not spent time trying to render and put value in. It was a lot of fun doing this flat style and I actually love how it turned out...

Harvest

This is a book cover for a ya novel that is currently being worked on. It's a story about Sirens in the real world...here's the blurb/synopsis:

How do you control desire? How do you survive obsession? You don’t.

Two young lovers must fight against life and death in this Paranormal Fantasy novel of unconventional and impossible love. Jace never thought what he once knew as myth would turn into reality. Let alone, he’d be the one to uncover the truth about the disappearances of males from Santa Cruz…

That is until he fell for Iris—a hauntingly beautiful girl that looked more stunning in the moonlight, with the glow of the ocean on her skin, than anywhere else on the planet. Sirens, after all, tend to captivate the male species the closer they are to their feeding grounds.  Troubled by her own life, Iris doesn't mean to complicate it by letting Jace pull at her heart strings; but before she knows it, it’s too late—she’s in love with her prey.

It isn't until the only boy who Iris has ever fallen for hears her song (a pure, hypnotic melody of notes that lures men into the ocean, sealing his death with her words) that her world turns completely upside down. Suddenly, Iris must choose who she stands with: her family or the humans?

Either way, many will die. 

-"The Harvest" written by Kimberly Benson--Coming Soon!

The Robber Bridegroom

The semester is over! Well...almost...I only have one more final to complete. This semester I took "Advanced Illustration" which was awesome because we got to choose all of our own assignments. This helped because I was able to start building my portfolio with the type of work I want. This is one of the final pieces for that class:

The Robber Bridegroom

This is a fantastic Grimm Fairy tale, but let me warn you it is not for the squeamish or faint of heart. 

A young woman is betrothed to a man she barely knows. For some reason she feels nervous of the man, not fully trusting him. Through their engagement he continually tries to get her to come to his house but she always refuses. One day he tells her she has to come because he is throwing a party for her for the wedding. She says she doesn't know where he lives.

"In the middle of the dark forest" says the man.

"I will get lost" she says.

"There will be a trail of ashes you can follow to find my house"

That night, alone, the girl goes into the forest and follows the trail of ashes to his house. But there is no party there: in  fact the place is empty. She steps inside to look around. A bird is trapped in a cage hanging from the ceiling and he tells her to get out, she's in a murderers house! The girl ignores the birds numerous warnings and continues searching. She looks in the cellar and finds an old woman there who informs her that her betrothed is a murderer and he's planning on killing her! The old woman hides the girl behind some barrels and the betrothed and his friends come home drunk, with a young girl screaming in their grasp. 

They throw the girl on the table, kill her, and then eat her. One man chops off her little finger (b.c he can't get the ring off that is stuck there). The finger flies behind the barrels and into the girls lap. The men fall into a drunken sleep and the old woman and the girl escape. The next night at their wedding, it is customary for everyone to tell a story. The groom encourages the girl to tell a story. So she retells the story about the groom (all the while he's getting more and more nervous). Finally she pulls the finger out and proves the truth of the story. The guests attack the groom and give him justice.

This story is a dark one, but I really like it. Here is the piece I did as the girl first enters the dark forest

Little Miss Muffet

I love little nursery rhymes....

Little Miss Muffet,

sat on her tuffet

eating her curds and whey;

When along came a spider

and sat right beside her,

and scared Miss Muffet away!

This girl is pretty brave...if that were me I would be on the other side of the country by now, swearing that "Eight Legged Freaks" was starting!

I painted this sketch in Photoshop as one of the few I'll submit to Craft Lake City (if I apply this year).

Anyway, Enjoy!

Influence

For my figure painting class we were given an assignment to paint a conceptual piece focusing on one word. I chose the word "Influence", and specifically the influence of the media onto little girls to be the worlds definition of "pretty"--to be "sexy" "skinny" and "perfect". It's sad to see young girls feeling like they are not perfect as they are...that they need the newest clothes, a cell phone, and make up in order to be worth something. That is simply not true.

After I started working on this piece I saw an article in a magazine titled "8 ways to boost a girls self image". The author of this describes how I feel about the worlds influence on children better then I can put into words, and I think it is something that could help parents with their children. Here is the link to that article if you are interested : http://www.ldsliving.com/story/75061-8-ways-to-boost-a-girls-self-image

The Park

This piece is a part of a series called "Boy Meets Girl". It's the moment right before (or after) a boy and girl meet. The other two pieces were done in acrylic, but I decided I wanted to do this one digitally. For this piece, I decided to do my process a little differently. First, I blocked in all the color in flat, large shapes. Then I went and rendered the flat shapes.
I also learned to use the Image Hose in Corel Painter, and can I just say "I lovvveedd it!" It was so simple to do all my leaves and flowers and fun too!
All in all it was a really fun piece to work on....anyway, Enjoy!!!

Mermaid

So I decided to turn some of my sketches into paintings and try to get into Craft Lake City this summer. Here is the first one...

Chapter Headings

These are two chapter headings for a book I am working on. They are done in graphite and digital. The story is about a girl who goes back in time and becomes a pirate. In this first scene, she gets in a fight with a pirate and he pushes her off of a cliff and into the ocean. There is a second pirate (who later becomes the love interest) who dives in after her. He looks around through the seaweed and finally catches a glimpse of her through the tangle of green.

This second chapter heading is for a scene where the main girl and guy end up on an island and run into it's native tribe. The tribe hates women and the only woman in the tribe is the chief. In the center of the tribes camp they have a totem pole, only instead of being made of wood this pole is made of severed human heads.