Mt. Vanilla

New canvas painting of the week.

Experimenting with cold colors and dry brush effects of the skies, the clouds and the cold smoke.

Leaning Tower of Pizza

A, what I like to call, "pun painting". 

"The Leaning Tower of Pizza"

An intentionally inaccurate depiction of the famous building in Italy. The original tower has about 6 or 7 stories, but I wanted to put in as many different toppings of pizza on here.

It was great to experiment with a 8x20 canvas, and more fun with rendering the pizza too.

My current emotion the past week

Special request painting: "Daiana's Isle"

Yet another special request from a fellow family member:

A nice attempt to paint without any direct reference for someone. Just a nice challenge of experimenting with color theory, perspective, depth, mixed media (acrylic and watercolor) rendering, and, most importantly contributing to all those things, escapism. 

The warm colors, yellow-orange sky, the perspective of the rainbow, different shades of blue of the ocean and the shadow on the ocean as well. 

Admittedly, this is pretty Gilligan's Island-inspired here and, believe it or not, I was singing the theme song to myself the whole time. It's gonna be hard to unlearn it.

♪ Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale ♪ - Oh no, I'm doing it again!

Pencil sketch of the painting

Painting I did for my mother's birthday

A fun 16x20 canvas painting I did for my dear mother's birthday that represents her, her love of organic, nature foods, her personality, among other things.

Took 3 days to complete.

(Pencil sketch)

Colors choices for my painting

New logo for my studio

Well, after a week of penciling and another week of painting, I finally finished this, just four hours before 2024 came along. I anticipated I would have finished this before Christmas day, but other things came up.

I'm just glad I finished it.

Experimenting with perspective, depth and minimalism.

Here's the pencil version.

Black and white diner food imagery

An experimental black-and-white painting consisting of traditional diner treats. My first attempt to painfully render a painting and my first time messing around with black-and-white colors traditionally. Resulted in finishing a whole week on this lovely art.

Yet, another beautiful acrylic painting I did yesterdays

Back to doing more acrylic paints. 

This is what I call "Color My Day": from the crack of dawn to nighttime.

Gave me an opportunity to experiment even more with color theory and dry brush effects, too.

Original pencil sketch

Watercolor painting practice of a slice of pizza

Started experimenting more with watercoloring last Saturday, as well as minimalism and realism, of a slice of cheese pizza.

I think this one turned out all right. The intention I had was to draw/paint a cheese pizza with great detail, as I don't think that's ever been done before, and have ONLY a slice of pizza on a 9x12 paper.

Happy National Dog Day!

Been a while since I've posted anything. Just figured I'd follow along with National Dog Day and did quick drawings of dogs from my Questo's World comic, the main character being the Golden Retriever, Mickey Houndfair Jr., and the others being Incidental characters.

"Questo's World" ™ 

Comic No. 60

By Mike Lewis

06-11-23

© June 2023

Mike Lewis

Watercolor painting of the family cat

Had more fun painting something a little easier this time around. 

The family cat.

Pencil drawing

Finished version

Real life photo

More watercolor practice, of my dear ol' dog

Doing watercoloring is a wonderful way for me to calm down for occasions, but can be quite difficult to master. I adore the slow craft of traditional art, compared to the faster, but still relatively slow craft of digital art.

After doing my first watercolor of my backyard, I decided to make it easier on myself and something that wouldn't require much details. And, more importantly, something I love near and dear to me, personally. 

                        

A watercolor of our family dog my sister named Charlie (from her favorite movie, "All Dogs Go to Heaven"). 

Had her for about nearly 11 years now, so I want to a chance to do something for me and my sis as well.

Pencil sketch 

Illustration of the day

Some quick, simple little drawings I did of Mickey Houndfair's dad, Mickey Houndfair Sr. serving an ice cold ice cream soda back in his day, in black-and-white, directly inspired by this photo on the bottom.

                             

Courtesy of Wikiapedia

I'll probably do more of these next time.

Part 2 of my animation cel experiment

After 12 hours of painstaking painting cels front and back, and mixing different colors and lack of color ink (only brown ink), I finally managed to finish my experiment of a cel of my characters from the Questo's World webcomic. I had to paint the outline of Ms. Amor's hair and Candy's stripes on her sweater, as well as Candy's tail outline being black instead of pink, as there was no purple, pink and yellow ink.

Front:

Back:

Now, as I said in my previous post, I wanted to compare the look of the characters from cel to digital.

Now there's obviously always a differences between the look from cel and digital ink-and-paint. The colors are less vibrant and the outlines are thicker. I've been undecided of the size of the outlines of Questo's World, wanting to make thick and thin to give it an old cartoon look.

As I've said, if it's possible, I would want Questo's World to be cel-animated.

Experimental daily comic

My own take of the "6 & 9 perspective" with my already established characters. And a bit of an experimental illustration if I ever make the series a daily comic strip.