Mehgan Trice

Mask in progress stage one

The start of a mask for my next film...if all goes well, the final result will be a coyote mask.

Lior and Robyn, plus shop mailing list

"Lior"
7.5"x8.5"
Mixed Media: Pencil, ink, coffee

"Robyn"
7.5"x8.5"
Mixed Media: Pencil, ink, coffee

Lior and Robyn have both been added to The Hidden House of Ofelia and are available for purchase. These coffee illustrations are fun little pieces to work on when time is limited. Also I just setup a mailing list for the shop through the awesome service MailChimp (I highly recommend it to anyone looking for an easier way to setup and organize newsletters and general email marketing).
Therefor, for anyone who wants to be notified by email of important shop updates and upcoming art shows, go ahead and join the mailing list by entering your email address in the little mailing list form in the left side bar panel.

Last but not least, I will be participating in an art show coming up in March, in New York City, more details on that to come. I hope everyone is enjoying and getting off to a good start for the new year!

Sneak peek...

Finishing up these rabbit pin brooches and thought I would post a sneak peek. They'll be added to the shops (Website and Etsy) soon, just waiting on a few packaging supplies to arrive. I'm really happy with the way these brooches have turned out!

Work in progress and Farewell prints

Slightly older piece from 2007, I think. I'm going to be working on this and posting photos later tonight on Twitter, for #fridaynightartdorks. If you aren't already following me on twitter, I'm @MehganTrice
Some of you who watched my old account on DeviantArt probably remember seeing this one, since I had a photo of it as my "desktop shot" for a long time.

Also, I was going through some of my artist proofs from past prints last night and pulled out these extra prints of "Farewell" that I have. I'm going to go ahead and post these in the shop tomorrow afternoon, there are only 5 of them left. I'll make a more detailed post on this tomorrow as well.

Quick update

Hello, hello! I realized I haven't posted on here in awhile so I figured I should give a quick update. I've been super busy lately, however I've been working on a lot of art related projects as well (new paintings, jewelry, sculpture work)

Everything seems to be in a state of 50 to 80 percent completion right now. So expect lots of new works to be popping up during the month of May. In the meantime, I have a few work in progress photos, concept art, and workspace shots to share with you all, from the past couple months:

 

 

 

(I'm not sure if I've posted photos of this piece before. It's a drawing that I did about two years ago and transferred onto panel. Then I forgot about this kid and he's been hiding in my closet ever since.)

Butterfly Painting Part Two

This video simply shows part of the shading process that I do before starting on the underpainting. Shading with the charcoal is basically a guide for painting the monochrome underpainting.

For this I use Winsor and Newton Vine and Willow charcoal. The Vine charcoal is a dark gray, while the Willow charcoal is black. I don't have the box from my Willow charcoal, so I couldn't take a photo of it, but it comes in a grayish blue box similar to the the one pictured below. Usually I'll start out shading with the Vine charcoal first, which is what you see in the video, and then afterward I go over areas that need to be darker with the Willow charcoal.

 

For blending and smoothing charcoal I just use stumps and sometimes tortillons for smaller, more detailed, work. Also I like to use the q-tips for blending as well, but mostly for smoothing and picking up excess charcoal, sometimes they seem to do a better job than the stumps do.
For large areas, like the sky in this piece, soft Kleenex Tissues are great to use for blending as well.



Next up will be the underpainting...

Butterfly painting stage one

I don't think this piece likes me much, I've drawn about four versions of it, made it to the painting stage and started it over twice, haha. But I think I'm getting somewhere with it now. As I think I've mentioned awhile back I've been filming the whole process of this painting, because I get a lot of comments and messages asking about my process of transferring my sketches over to the masonite panels. Plus I know some of you would like to see the underpainting process as well. I was planing to just post all of these videos once the whole piece was done but since it's taking quite some time, I figured I'd go ahead and start uploading the early stages. Keep in mind I am still very much self taught when it comes to painting, so this is just what works for me. Most fine art professors will teach you to use graphite or charcoal for your line drawings, personally I don't like to use either. So this is just what I like to do.

The video shows the process of transferring the sketch to the Masonite panel (and of course this will work on canvas as well). For this I use Saral Transfer Paper in blue:

 

This is somewhat easy to find, many large art stores carry this paper, like DickBlick for example, and I think Michael's might carry it in the sheets. Saral transfer paper works like carbon, it lays down waxless, greaseless, clean tracings on a variety of surfaces. It comes in five different colors for different purposes:

Blue — non-photographic, for bright line and tole painting.

Yellow — good on metal and glass surfaces.

Graphite — for all-purpose tracing.

White — for dark surfaces.

Red — for ceramics.

I've only used the graphite and the blue paper, I prefer the blue simply because it's less messy and doesn't smear like graphite. This is the reason why I don't use graphite or charcoal in general for the line work on my paintings, even when using a fixative, I find it to smear into the paint too much. Which isn't so much of a problem now that I'm doing gray scale underpaintings, but it was when I was laying down color right on top of the line drawing.
This paper, from what I have seen, is available in two forms, a 12½" × 12 ft roll (which is what's pictured above) and sample packs of 8½" x 11" sheets. I could be wrong about that size of the sheets but I'm pretty sure they are somewhere around that size. The only downside to buying the samples packs of sheets is that they only come with 5 sheets, one sheet of each color (which is why it's called a sample pack). So in one pack you'll get one graphite sheet, one blue sheet, one white sheet, and so on.

The first thing that I do is cover my masonite panel with the transfer paper and tape it down using scotch tape, sometimes I use painters tape, anything that can be removed easily without ripping the artwork.
After that I lay the sketch on top and tape it down as well. A good tip would be to photocopy your artwork first and lay down the copy rather than your original. Because you will be tracing over this and if you do so on your original, it's not going to look so nice anymore when you're done (I should heed this advice more myself, actually).

Once the sketch is taped onto the panel, I trace over the entire sketch, applying a bit of pressure since the transfer paper works like carbon paper and you want to make sure you end up with a nice clean transfer the first time around (if you use canvas be careful not to apply too much pressure, thus making dents in the surface). Which is also why it's important to have the transfer paper and the sketch taped down securely, because you do not want anything to move while you're tracing, it'll mess up your transfer.
Once that is done I just remove the transfer paper and the sketch, the image should be perfectly transferred onto the panel.

From there I use a Pigma Micron pen to once again trace over the entire sketch. Pigma Micron pens are waterpoof and fade proof archival inks. They come in different colors and a wide range of sizes. Fine tips and brush tips. Though I haven't tried their brush tip pens, I have a feeling they might be useful for calligraphy or anything requiring wispy strokes (like drawing hair for example). I like to use the fine tip pens in the 01 size, for most of my work, which has a 0.25mm line width. The reason for doing an outline in ink is so that I can see my lines through the paint better.

Once the tracing is done in ink, I usually let it sit for about 24 hours before doing anything else, just to make sure the ink is nice and dry. Then I erase any blue lines, that might still be showing, from the transfer paper.

Coming up is stage two, shading with charcoal, I'll post that video in a day or so. I hope this was helpful to some of you though!

Sparrow sketch

"Sparrow"
Pencil on paper

You are beautiful, but you are empty

These are the polymer clay bird skulls for my animation project, I ended up having these made, I didn't sculpt them. I'm really happy with these! I'll start to work on the armatures for them next week sometime, most likely. I've made a few armatures over the past few months trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to go about making them, I don't have it figured out completely yet but I'm leaning towards making the body similar to a marionette in a way. Since I like the aesthetic of marionettes and ball jointed dolls and I'm not going for complete realism, I don't mind joints showing.

Work in progress 12-08-09

Just a peek at the start of a new series of paintings.