Doing some painting again.

Since today was a painful type of morning for me I decided to paint for a bit.  When I was out with my hubby he got me new paintbrushes so I could do something a bit more detailed.  I think these would have come out better if my wrists weren't aching up a storm but they arent too bad.  The first one here

Now I am not sure if it is good or not here.  I mean with the glare issues of taking the photo that is.

The next thing I worked on was, of course, a new flower.  I mixed up some shades to see if I could make it seem more 3D

Didn't come out too bad I think.  I will be deciding later if i want to add more to this or not.

The final painting was a bit of a test for me.  I had picked up a feather on a walk recently and thought, Hey why don't I try to paint a feather on canvas?  Now it was a bit tricky but here you go.

Did it work?  Good question but i had fun doing it.

Painting on the small or hey this is fun

Now any of you who follow me on facebook know I decided to try my hand at painting this summer.  I have had my successes and my failures of course.  Working with small canvases and acrylic paints I have painted flowers and the moon so far.  Now in no way do I claim to be a talented artist, no more than I think i am the most talented writer but i enjoy doing this.  The canvases I like to work with are both small at 5x7 and cheap.  I can get a three pack of them at the dollar store for a dollar.  This means I can teach myself to paint and not feel like I am wasting money.

Over the past two months I have been experimenting with different techniques using a variety of brushes.  Again the nice part about this is that everything I need comes from the dollar store.  In fact the very first canvas I bought even came with a small table top sized easel.

Okay actually to be honest my hubby started me off.  He bought me my first bottles of paint and brushes.  He was very sweet at this and very patient with my lack of confidence.

This image is the first one I painted and you can see it is bad. 

As you can see I had not learned yet to layer colors.  One of the earliest tricks in painting with acrylics to learn is that you put down one color, then let it dry before putting down the next.  I did better on the next set of paintings.

While they don't look great here they are actually rather nice displayed in my living room.  You can see I have some idea now about how to use the brushes to make petals and to use layers of colors to give depth to the painting.

Not that I haven't had my mistakes.  Yes the first one above was bad but so was this one

This image of death was so bad that I went out to a real craft/painting store and spent money on something called Gesso.  This product allows you to reuse your canvas by covering up your horrible mistakes.  This painting and two others that I don't have pictures of took two coats of Gesso to completely cover up.  Thankfully it is an easy process.

Gesso is a product that looks like think white paint that both covers up your mistakes and adds texture to your canvas.  A lot of painters who stretch their own canvases use it in the prep stage.  I have been lucky in that those cheap little canvases I buy are all ready prepared to paint directly on.

Here are a few more that I have done, just for the fun of painting

The one on the top had my attempt at a signature on it.  I don't know how the real artists sign there work. I really don't.  I think that will be my next thing to learn for sure.

Now these two paintings (final two for now) I actually used for more than just being pretty images on canvas.  The first I have used as a cover for my next Death Walks Through short story.

I have been told it has a nice eerie feel to it.  I hope so.

The next is my attempt at water flowers.  Now these came out so nice that my daughter decided she needed it for the background image in a photo of her latest gundam.  I like it.

Now I have a few others in the works.  I have started a sun to match the woman in the moon above and I have a canvas painted black as a background to what I hope will be a really nice feather painting.  Wish me luck!

Making book covers on your own

As a independent writer I have to do a lot of what publishers used to do.  Years ago a writer got to just do the writing.  Editing, marketing and things like book covers and even book trailers was done by your publisher.  People who have read my posts in other places know that the two small press publishers I have did none of that for me.

The editing and marketing parts bothered me quite a bit as I can only do so much editing on my own and well marketing is a skill, a well paid one.  I have little to no idea how to market my work and I am very glad to those who have taken the plug to read my work.

Even more I have a huge thanks for those who have beta read some of my work and have pointed out where I need to fix something.  When you are a starting writer with no money you have to hope to have wonderful friends who can help you.

But one thing I have enjoyed is making covers for my work.  Many of the covers have come out of my photography hobby.  When you have a few thousand nature shots it is easy to find something that will work.  I keep searching the web for fun fonts and play around in photoshop to make them better.  While most of my covers don't have half naked images I think they are okay.

Now that I have started trying to do painting I thought I would try doing one of my short story covers as a painting.  I wrote a short called The Pest House, which is a Death Walks Through short story.  It is based out of a story I read on the Nashua, NH facebook group.  Pest houses were the places that people with contagious diseases were taken to back in the 1830s.  Most of them were places for them to go and die.  So it fit perfectly in my series.

Going through my little paintings (yes I do small paintings) I decided this painting just might work well for the cover for this tale of a ghost

So should I use this or not?  Any suggestions?