Satan's misunderstood daughter

Heavily inspired by Belgian comics these days.
Sketched out a couple of characters, watercolour on soft-press.

hitting up the workshops!

Some more acryla gouache paintings, hope you like em'

Figure drawing

It's funny, I am almost done in school and I keep revisiting the same exercises. I am learning so much from dealing with the apparently simple shapes of the figure, to try and further understand the basic principles of motion, anatomy and stylistic approaches seem to be the tool that is truly the driving force of artistic progress for me these days.

Half the semester is over, and these are some of the drawings I have done so far, Ill post another batch at the end of the term. Should be interesting to see how they compare.

acryla gouache

I have been playing around with a new medium lately, Holbein's Acryla Gouache. I really like the way it handles, it behaves like traditional gouache without all the tedious traditional parts. It doesn't shift in color and tone when it sets, I can layer more than i remember being able to with gouache, and it dries waterproof. The individual colours can be used transparent with the colour remaining fairly brilliant, or opaue in an easy way.

Colour mixing can be a bit challenging trying to get just the right amount of water and pigments floating around on your palette, and I think it would be nice to have a wider range of tubes available. The paints are a bit expensive for the tiny tubes, but I find a little pigment goes a long way. Obviously this medium travels a lot better than oils, and I think I might have just found my new plein-air medium.

Here is a couple of little tests I did, a landscape from a photo I had laying around from Muir Beach and a quick portrait done at a workshop at school.

Sargent copy

Did a quick study of one of Sargent's paintings, about 2 hours in PS.

I have been working on a children's book with my sister for a couple of months. We are in the process of wrapping up the production, and hopefully we will be able to print some books soon. Anyway, this version of this illustration didn't make it into the book, had to make it a sunrise scene instead. But I thought it turned out pretty good!

Also I got a new website up for my work, check it out! www.martinmausethhvattum.com

Big Island, Hawaii

Just spent 10 wonderful days in the sun on Hawaii with Liz. So great to get out of the city and back into nature, the place really reaffirmed in my mind that a life lived outside in nature is so rewarding. You can just get stuck in the everyday big city grind, it is even obvious to me to "go out and play", I just don't. Not like I am becoming a mountain man anytime soon, but definitely stepping up my plein-air painting the next couple of months.

To be honest we spend most of our time lounging on the beach and falling off surf boards but we managed to do a few paintings. This one is the only one I ended up pleased with, and it was painted on a small beach-park near Hilo, Big Island. The owner of a hostel we stayed at was gracious enough to take us snorkeling in the area, he took us to this spot to paint and it was an amazing place. Hardly anyone around except for some locals, and we even saw a couple of huge sea-turtles basking in the sun.

The Flying Dutchman / Narrative Painting final

Fashion history

Some homework for my fashion history class :)

"A Very Sensetive Ogre"

Narrative painting hw

Doing some oils again, so much fun!

I went to the halloween costume carnival here at school last week, and it was really great as always. Did a bunch of figure drawings as usual. My gf showed me some awesome pictures Dax Santi from the illustration dept took so I did a couple of small paintings from two of them. The last one is Liz, although with those teeth in, she looks completely different.

Gouache landscape sketch

Narrative painting HW

Don Quixote & Captain Canada!

Lately I have been doing some pen and ink, comic book kinda stuff. Tried out 24 hour comics the other day with Liz, and although we only lasted for about 12 hours. We did come up with some fun characters for our story along with a few pages of story. In addition, I did this ink and watercolour illustration of Don Quixote and his trusted squire heading out on an adventure!