My latest paintings

Haven’t posted anything here in a while, so here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

1. Made a Millennium Falcon painting for a friend:

I drew it in pencil on a black canvas first and then painted it whith white oil paint. It took quite a long time because of all the details, but it was lots of fun. Here are some in-progress photos:

 

1. Also I’ve been painting some watercolor sketches:

 

1. And apart from that I also joined an illustration marathon by Ellina Ellis (it’s on Instagram #денькрокодила). So far I’ve done two of the topics, the first one was kings and queens and the second was little bird.

Three-legged Crow (Chinese Sun spirit)

I finished this painting about a month ago, but didn’t have time to photograph it properly until now.

A three-legged crow (三足乌) or Golden crow (金乌) is the Sun spirit in Chinese mythology. It lives in the Fusang tree (扶桑), which is a giant mulberry tree in the Eastern Seas, and travels the sky in a carriage every day. Originally there were ten crows and ten suns in the world, but they bothered people by coming out all at once and making the world burn, so some archer shot nine of them down, making the species nearly extinct. Now there’s only one left.

Waves and seagulls

A spread from my sketchbook after watching the first part of Lisa Congdon’s Sketchbook Explorations class on Creativebug:

Here’s a link to the class:

https://www.creativebug.com/classseries/more-sketchbook-explorations

two spring-inspired watercolors

flying by

I wasn’t even planning on painting something mythological when I started this one. Actually, I wasn’t planning anything at all – I just had some vague ideas about what colors and shapes I want. But then this white figure started taking form, and there were feathers, and I realised it’s going to be some kind of bird spirit. I love it how unpredictable paintings can be sometimes.

red birds

My latest watercolor:

It’s really simple, but I like how it turned out. Even with the paper being all wavy.

And here’s my in-progress photo from Instagram:

Chinese Wind god

Here’s my latest oil painting:

I’m rereading Pu Songling’s Strange Tales of Liaozhai, so there was a lot of Chinese mythology on my mind lately. The Wind god idea is not from the book though. I was impressed by the Wind god temple in Tainan that we accidentally stumbled upon during my latest trip to Taiwan (by getting off the bus randomly in an unfamiliar part of town), so I looked up some information about Chinese wind deities on the web.

There are different variations of the Wind God’s appearance in Chinese mythology. Some texts describe a bird with a deer’s head, and some tell it the other way around – a deer with a bird’s head. There are also mentions of leopard patterns and a snake’s tail. I chose the bird-body-deer-head version.

Here are some in-progress photos of the painting:

P.S. Art Prints of the painting (along with canvas prints and other products)  are available in my Society6 shop:

http://society6.com/product/wind-god-f7v_stretched-canvas#6=28

More sketches