So this is my first little throw back Thursday. As this is the first one I really should dig deep into the archives and scan in some really old stuff… However I cannot… Here is why: all of my super old stuff is at my parents house in the Midwest still. I am also  super lazy and am not about to call them to scan something I did when I was 4….

Instead I am going to grace everyone with a piece I did 8 years ago for my aunt. I actually won a calendar spot on the artwanted.com calendar with this piece. I still like this one, however I am always tempted to redo it and see what becomes of it. I have gotten far better at backgrounds as you will all notice with each throw back Thursday. I also feel that my shading has improved within 8 years time… Or at least I hope…

It is always hard for someone who is progressing as an artist to look back on their work even from a week or two and be like yes I am still happy about the job I did on that. Not because when that piece was done it wasn’t fantastic, but because the artist has improved in their technique. At least that’s how I feel about each of my pieces… I will be so enthralled about it and then when I look back a month later, maybe a year or more later I’m like why did I think that was good… I always have to remind myself it is because this was good when my technique was at that level.

Let’s look back at what I did when I did this piece. This was the very first one I started doing shadows on colors “like you’re supposed to”… Before this I was using just a shade or two darker and then black… This actually doesn’t create the nice deep realistic shading. I can’t just take a darker shade to add shadows, WHAAT… haha… ugh…. When I shade now and what I started to experiment with on this piece was taking the complementary color… So example purple gets yellow or vise versa. For this piece I just used the complementary colors to shade… On my pieces now I use darker shades, the complementary color and if I feel the need for it some black.

Always learning and improving is a good thing! It is when we become stagnate that we need to re-evaluate what is going on in our lives. I feel like this is not just good advice for artists with their pieces, but for all endeavors.

Until next time, safe travels and good luck on all your endeavors,

-The Sonne Faun