Twenty-One.

Some days I find it easier to draw than others, and other days I find it rather quite impossible to create anything at all.  Recently though I've felt the urge to paint.  Something I haven't done in a long while.  I have found myself  rather happy just playing with my markers, but I recently find myself staring off at all the few pieces of Gesso and canvas boards I have lying around.  They seamed to be screaming at me, please play with us.  Well that and I finally got new Fixatif, which makes painting so much easier and I really just wanted to play with that.  That and I got this new transfer spray that I wanted to try out too, but I ended up not using that and just sticking to good ole transfer paper.  Anyway, so as I was saying... So I picked up a Gesso board, rid it of its plastic covering, placed it on my desk and then continued to just stare at it for a good long while.

What the hell was I going to paint?  Well I didn't know.  So I just sat there and stared for a good while.  Then I started just dicking around on the interwebz and then I found inspiration in this picture.

Okay so I know what yer thinking, a gas mask?  Really?  Well yes, really.  I've been busy playing, Alice: Madness Returns (I'll have to write another blog about that at another time) and I just love all the Steampunk elements in the game and I'm also just a huge fan of Steampunk in general.  So then I was like hey, How about we do something Alice related?  And so I did.

I started off with a really rough sketch:

I didn't color her all the way or worry too much about the shading or anything like that because I was just going to transfer her form to the gesso board so I didn't want to obscure my line work.  I just colored a few spots because I wanted to get a feel for what kind of colors I wanted to use.  I also knew I wanted to do some sort of striping in the background so I drew some rough lines to indicate that.

So then I transferred her to the board and started the background and all that jazz.

I also decided that I was going to cut up some playing cards to add some texture to the piece.

I then glued them on using my hot glue gun.  I like hot glue.

And then I finished.

(Psst. Click on the image below to visit the painting on my deviantART)