Sticky, oozy blood!

Alright! Who's ready to check out some zombie progress?? I know I am!! So I'm going to apologize ahead of time for the photo quality here today. I took them on my phone and even though it's got a great camera on it, it's not *fabulous* so there's glare and weird stuff going on, but you can still see!! Woo!

So here's the overall image I left today. Well, I got her hand done - which you'll see in a photo below. But I was working on mainly fixing a couple problem areas and adding blood and shape to the guts! It's really quite fun and liberating to work on the guts. At the same time, it's pretty intense to keep wondering "Does it look like guts or just some weird red fabric in her mouth" so there's a lot of back and forth. It's good to not stop concentrating though :)

Here's a close-up of her face so you can see more of what's going on there. There's going to be more detail in the thicker, oozing blood running down her chin, but I have to wait for the paint to dry before I can work into that, so everything's pretty much the same value of red at the moment, but it'll change tomorrow or Saturday when I can go back in and punch up some stuff without ruining what I already like about it :)

And here's a photo I took just before I left this studio this evening. You can see the blood I added to her hand! It's the same deal as the face where I need it to dry before going in and adding some highlights and darker areas, but overall - I'm super happy! I'll get the rest of the guts in tomorrow so there's no more weird yellowy gut area!

Because it actually is pretty darn cool.

I thought I should do this painting the justice of including a detail shot of the head. I forgot I had it or I'd have included it in the last post. ...Or maybe I'm trying to make up for not having updated in a couple weeks. Regardless of my motive, here's the detail. Mainly so you can see her crazy eyes! And I apologize for the glare - I have fluorescent lights in my studio and one is pointed directly at this painting. But you can definitely see it better here than in the full-size photo!

Also, I know that still looks like a belt in her mouth - that'll get changed during my painting session on her tomorrow!

I haven't forgotten about you!

Wow. There has been some serious delays since I last posted. At least it feels like it. Yeah - it's been a while. Anyway, I've been busy working on the three paintings that I need to finish. I got my final review date - looks like I'll be presenting my 5 *finished* pieces on August 10th. Not a lot of time, but I'm actually shooting for July 28th ...I've got 7 days. Want to see my progress? Here you go!

So here's the zombie baby! She's coming along well - I need to adjust her skin color a little, but otherwise, she's looking nice and I'm pretty happy with her! Once I get the guts and background laid in, it'll come together much better. Then I get to add the blood! I'm thinking this one is going to give folks mixed feelings. Any thoughts so far? I'm happy to hear them!!

Moving on - this is my final piece in the series. I can still add to the series after I'm finished with the 5 thesis paintings, but this one is the endcap. She got shot in the head, but I want to keep it from being overly gory - so I'm going to be adding the blood to the area of her head that has hair on it - it'll all be matted, but I really want to get an overall feeling of peace when looking at this one. You know, since this "soul" is released and allowed to move on. Or however you think about the death of a zombie. I should really think about that... Since I don't necessarily believe in a soul or anything. Yeah, I'll work on that. In the meantime, here's the underpainting:

And Here's the piece that's getting closer and closer to being finished! My lovely little scavenger! I'm happy with the forms I'm achieving and the skin color, etc. Too bad the face didn't turn out well in this photo - I'll get a better one after I work on it a while longer. Pretty soon it's blood time for her!

Underpainting: Zombie Baby: Done!

I apologize for not cleaning up this photo, but I'm a bit lazy at the moment and eating lunch, so I figured posting a messy photo is better than no post at all :) So, here's is my undpainting for my little zombie baby! She's so precious, if I do say so myself! I'm currently making decisions about the intestines she's playing in and the placement of them and blood on and around her. How often do you get to say that?! (And not be dragged off to jail, of course) So, as it is, this painting is way more textured than it's going to be when finished. Same thing as the scavenger one. My underpaintings tend to be pretty quickly laid out. Just so I get the idea of form and value to work off of.

So here is a taste of things to come! Bazinga!

Underpainting: Scavenger: Done!

This week has been great!! I've learned my lesson from my previous two zombies and have painted the outside edges of my canvases *before* beginning the underpainting! So much less of a headache since I won't have to worry about ruining my painting at the last minute! Now I need to figure out how I want to attach the canvases together before I start the final work on it. Since it's only three pieces, it will be much easier (in theory), so we shall see. At least none of them will be as hard as my first one with the 11 canvases. That was not my smartest move :)

Anyway, here is the painting as I was working on her - I took a photo about halfway through my day. I started with her face, which ended up on the green side, but sort of figured out my palette as I was working through the painting. Painting an unnatural skin tone is harder than you might think. I have the tendency to make the skin tone a natural one and think "ooh, no, I need to make her look dead!" and go far too cool. In this case it's okay since it's just the underpainting. I have time to rectify it and have a nice cool base to work off of!

Early in the day:

End of the day:

I'm very happy with the way this underpainting looks! It's got good form, decent values and now I know for sure what lines I'm looking at! :) Her face is still quite flat and green, but that'll get fixed - all in due time! My next project for her is to figure out her exact anatomy so I can emaciate her and have her bones sticking out a bit more. Since she's a scavenger, it's not enough to have her thin - she's starving and eating found intestines! So needless to say, by the end she's going to be quite skeletal.

More work! (Imagine that!)

I got around to finishing my zombie baby drawing! So I am now proud to say that I have my fourth thesis painting started!! There are only a couple little issues I need to fix on this little one and then I can start in with applying paint! If you don't mind me saying, I think this painting is going to be absolutely adorable and disturbing as hell! Going for conflicting emotions on this one. (As a note: She is 2x2 feet)

Also, I updated my website with more detail shots of finished zombie paintings. If you'd like to check it out, it's over at www.kimberlymacaulay.com

Animate before Re-Animating!

Alright, so first off, I headed out to the Marin Art Fest last Sunday and checked it out. There's some awesome art over there - very interesting sculptures and people doing very cool things with wood! The paintings were so-so, I thought. There were some that I liked and some that weren't anything I hadn't seen other students do. Unfortunately, the Skate This Art tent was over by the kid's finger painting tent and the restrooms, so not too much "interested in buying art" traffic was flowing through there. Anyway, my board was displayed at a great height and had good lighting on it, but there were no takers. So it's safely inside my studio at home with other zombies now :)

In other news, I finally started on my third zombie (YAY!)! It's a bit more of a difficult position than I thought, but that's not surprising since they've all been quite challenging in their own ways so far. I thought I'd share a couple photos of how it's coming along so far. (Note: Don't expect excellence just yet!) The piece is 4'x4'.

Here's just the sketch - trying to get my positioning and proportions correct before I start filling anything in:

And here's the rough block-in. The head needs some work - there's something proportionally wrong with it since I moved it down, but that should be a quick and easy fix.

Next step: Paint!