Religious Hands, New Painting in Progress & Some Vacation Snapshots

Hi all! I'm back from holiday.

Here are some drawings I've been working on this week: Religious hand poses and more tiki masks. But first, lets start with a cup of iced coffee :)

Homemade iced coffee gets me in the working mode!

These are for the set of 10 religious hands

Made more tiki masks to complete the set of 10

This one's my favorite one... can't wait to ink it!

I have some great news: I started a new painting! I know, its been so long since the last time I picked up a brush. But I am glad I did. They say starting is usually the hardest part. Isn't that what the 80/20 rule is, 80% of the work is just showing up, 20 % is the rest...I might be wrong. Anyways I started this one today. The photo reference is courtesy of Tommy, see his amazing work and some zoo photos here.

Early stage. I start with a drawing in H pencil (to avoid those dreaded graphite smudges)

Then I go over with a light underbase tint, it takes away the overwhelming white canvas intimidation, next I block in the dark shadows

I squint at the original reference photo to distinguish the values. This is about an hour into  the painting. I'll post some more progress tomorrow so stay tuned!

In case you are wondering what I did last week, here are some snapshots of my vacation road trip last week. We went to check out Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Santa Barbara for my little sister who will be transferring next year.

A view of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

On campus housing @ Cal Poly SLO - not bad! 

On the 100 mile drive from SLO to SB we HAD to stop in this rest stop... too many horror movies made it a must stop, luckily we survived

UC Santa Barbara -  beautiful campus & excellent location. Just footsteps away from the Pacific Ocean!

Apparently theres a lot of dogs for them to put these signs up at UCSB

The beach is right across the street from the Engineering buildings! I won't mind visiting Lori if she picks this school :)

We were originally planning on going to the beach in Santa Barbara, but Tommy convinced us to go to the zoo instead. It was so much fun and we all loved it! Here are some pics. The brochures were right with their advertisement of "Giraffes with ocean views!"

Elephants!

We even got to feed some sheep and goats

My favorite zoo animal: Meerkats! They are so adorable

Another zoo favorite, giraffes

Thanks for reading. I'll see you later this week with more progress on the bird house painting and those hands and tikis.

Ciao!