nokochaoli

I took my art down from the drying board and scanned it to my computer. There, I uploaded it to Canva and added the New Year's message and date.

I didn't add some of the other messages, since I usually like to add that to the back and personalize it to the recipient~

Now I've sent it off to FedEx to print, and I'll pick it up tomorrow! No picture today though. But I'll have it later when I pick up the postcards~

This is my first year to make physical art for my New Year's cards. It's not individual art for each person (I am not prolific enough for that), but it's still nice, I think.

The urauchi!!

I made some wheat paste glue and waited for it to cool down. Then I set up my backing station. I did get super fancy materials for Christmas from my wonderful friends. But I'll use those in another project.

I sprayed water on the main work and smoothed it out with my water brush~

Then I used my glue brush and spread it over the backing paper. In both cases, it's important to go from the center out to the edges.

And then I transferred the backing paper to the main work and brushed it together with my smoothing brush! I weakened the glue, spread it around the edges, and transferred the work to my drying board.

I added some strips to blow air to the back and make it easy to remove once it's dry.

I had thought about writing calligraphy, but I think I'm still not there yet in my learning. So I'll probably scan it and add the text.

I used hosho paper and ground sumi ink. It took me about 3.5 songs to grind up the ink to a decent consistency. Then I put the sketch into a plastic cover sheet and started painting.

I went through about 5 attempts to figure out where to start and how to get a good contrast for the tone. I tried to start with the face, but I had trouble balancing the body brush strokes afterwards. So for this one, I actually started with the darker areas of the stomach and back legs. Then I went to the chest and front legs, then finished out the bum. Finally I went to the face and filled in the shading before the eyes. Lastly, I finished out the hair before adding a few line accents.

It's so difficult to tell how it's going to turn out in the middle of painting. I had to get a bit of encouragement from my friends to see it through. It looks a bit weird in the process, but inkwash style really comes together towards the end~

So now I just have to finish out some of the other New Year Card things~ (calligraphy, signature, backing, scanning, and printing)

As a bonus, here is the other attempts~

Day 2 of New Year's Card art journey~

I watched this video for how to paint a horse. I really liked the idea of having a tracing guide, so I decided to make one.

So I used regular printer paper, Kura Toga mechanical pencil, Mr. Pen kneading eraser, and sharpie. I'm not so good with horizontal views, so I used a stock reference photo with a front-ish view. I sketched general reference shapes and then kept sketching over lines until the general shape solidified.

Here's how the pencil looks under my nice painting paper:

But I want to be sure to be able to see it ok, so I lined the expression lines with Sharpie~

And now here's how it looks under the nice paper:

So I think that will be easier to paint with~

Day 1 of trying to figure out New Year's Card art. Sketches with instant sumi ink and scrap washi paper.

I forget that instant sumi ink makes it harder to control tone, and the Daiso paper is really easy to bleed. So I started to get a little frustrated last night. Whenever that happens, I know it's time to put things up and do something different. Came back to it this morning and realized it's a pretty good start~