Quetzal's 2016 paintings

Hi! I realized with an amazed kind of horror the months since I finished a digital painting...ouch! I also have been absent from forums, because life tends to keep happening and always something else comes up. On hindsight, I believe the reason behind the lack of finished paintings is related to the forum absence: posting on a regular basis became a habit, and as such I allowed the time for it on my day... with the happy result that I ended up with finished images.Not all has ground to a halt; thanks to the habit of social drawing with my Drink and Draw buddies, I do have a backlog of sketches to color... and thanks to the upcoming Comic Expo in my city, I have a deadline to get new stuff finished as fast as I can.
So, please forgive me if I use you as a branch to wip myself into action. As always I welcome any comments, and will be posting the works in progress and commenting on the parts that are giving me grief

so, first wip of my Amsterdam Siren. I am finding extra hard to figure out the cobblestones, so I am going to look at some reference photos.

This is nicely done. The colour and texture of the wood is lovely and the detail of the grain really sells the perspective well.
The cobblestones look good so far, the bit that sticks out to my eye is the space between the stones. The darker blue colour looks a bit too saturated at the moment but I'm sure the reference will help you figure that out.

Hey Quetzal, I like the idea you came up with, looking very cool I go to Amsterdam every Sept, and they usually keep the ' less popular ' gals off the main strip so would hate to run into her walking around a corner !

The perspective and anatomy are looking excellent, and like the color choices a lot, look forward to seeing it all finished, great first painting to come back to after a break

A bit of background on the image... some time ago I made my way to Amsterdam for the first time, in the company of my wife and my mother in law. As typical tourists, we wanted to see the infamous red light district, but I was warned beforehand by my companions not to oogle the working ladies... so in the interest of peace I got pretty interesting views of the pavement between my feet.
(by the way, "oogle" is a very descriptive word, isn't it ? )

Nice work. I would also put some glare or reflections on the glass to make it really feel like glass. Also depending on thick the glass is you can distort the details behind it. Hope this helps.

okay, working away at the cobblestones...and got hit again with the "be careful of what you wish for" curse. I guess I wanted to have more time to work on my paintings...maybe I should have phrased my new year wish differently.

Anyway, I am looking to start a new website for my work and musings, do any of you have any tips? I was leaning toward Wix, but I don't really know better and my searches for reviews of website builders only confused the issue (it seems that every review has a" top ten" different sites list!) I hope you do not mind me asking, but I would appreciate any tips that not come from robots...

Quetzal wrote: Anyway, I am looking to start a new website for my work and musings, do any of you have any tips? I was leaning toward Wix, but I don't really know better and my searches for reviews of website builders only confused the issue (it seems that every review has a" top ten" different sites list!) I hope you do not mind me asking, but I would appreciate any tips that not come from robots...

The majority of webhosting services these days offer some kind of drag and drop site building option if that is what you are after. I can't advise you on which is better in that respect because I've never used any of them.

You could also consider a popular CMS like Wordpress or Joomla, again most decent hosting platforms offer quick install options for those. They would require a bit more effort in development but would probably provide more options.

I use a website builder called create.net for my wifes business. As I am not really technically minded this seemed the best option for me and I can change/upload and update the site any time I want without the cost of using a web designer. It's very much a drag and drop interface but you can do some nice(but rather limited) graphics and rollovers, banners etc.
Theres a months free trial on offer before you start to pay, so no contract to sign before you try it out and you get a dedicated manager (think technical help) who responds very quickly to any queries you might have.
Pricing varies on the amount of image storage you need, everything is supported by easy to use payment gateways (we use Pay Pal) and it's relatively cheap. We pay around £10/month for so much storage I have over 300 images uploaded and am using around 3% of the available space.
If you want to check it out its right here Parsons & Jack . Its undergoing a face lift at the moment ready for the new season which for us begins around March (so don't be too judgemental please )
The only downside to create.net is the limited options, graphically, that they provide compared to a web designer but then I've seen far worse designed by 'professionals'.
Something to think about at least.

Edit: One other point and though it may not concern you overly much I do think its worth mentioning. Create do no search engine optimisation for you. You have to do it all yourself. That being said if sales is something you're looking at doing, a few well placed meta words and linking your facebook page, twitter account etc does seem to generate a decent amount of traffic.

So, painting like crazy because I have to finish a bunch of new images in time for the comic convention... and I have to finish a entry for the art book! so everything else has a slightly less mad deadline, but this has to be done by end of the month...and hopefully will be selected for the book (fingers firmly crossed, even if it makes it hard to hold the stylus)
Now, they have asked us not to show the whole image beforehand, so I will share parts of it as they progress. In due time I will be able to post the full final image, but please bear with me...
What is challenging about this image is the textures: the fur, the cloth, and the leaves.

this is the base sketch, I like it a lot for the gestures, but it is on landscape format and the artbook is on portrait... so I scanned it and did some cut and slash to change the composition.