customization

I painted a large wolf…

Image | | Holly Zezu

Well, larger than most other things I have custom painted up to this point. He was a Halloween decoration – plaster or something rather fragile-ish (bits of it sort of chip off the bottom sometimes). I painted him with acrylic paint (and holy crap did it take a lot longer than I anticipated…granted the ink shadowing didn’t work on him the way it does on the smaller figures so that set things back…) Hopefully making a plan AHEAD of time will speed things up in future endeavors – though I guess that won’t account for trial-and-error scraps of plans…Anyway I think he turned out rather well at this increment of decided completion, and I really like how his back details turned out with the paint shade layering for his fur. Also worth noting that being plaster or whatever and not a high quality material/expensive perfect statue, there was a lot of pitting and/or flaws to work around and try to mask with my painting work. But he’s quite lovely and I wouldn’t mind painting another something large sometime.

Crafts and Gifts Cache #1-3

| Holly Zezu

Eventually, even I get tired of explaining away (or trying to) my absence periods. And thus, just down to business: Despite the lull here, I am quite busy at my art and creating, so it is time to schedule a series of (long) finished objects for all of you lovely people to see. More to come!

  1. Mom’s Gazebo – Christmas gift custom painted wooden gazebo – from either 2013 or 2014 (we were still at the old house). Acrylic paint.

     

  2. Mom’s Star Box – mom’s birthday is on Christmas, so a lot typically goes on gift wise around that time (including my birthday on Christmas Eve…) I forget whether this was the same year as the gazebo or earlier…but it was around the general time period. Acrylic paint, nail polish, gold wrapping paper on wooden box.

     

  3. Katie’s Box – 2011 – for my friend’s birthday, acrylic paint on thick cardboard box thing. She’s a forestry/plants and such major and does a lot outdoors so I used leaves to make prints around the box. Unfortunately this seems to be before I had good item photography skills so I had to make some digital edits to clarify and tune down the shine of already tricky-to-photo-metallic paint on Hello Kitty on the box lid…and the annoyingly persistent perfectionist in me necessitates my mentioning the rustiness of my painting skills back then (the lettering could use work in my opinion), coupled with a time constraint I actually had to stick to (I believe she was moving away at the time) but I’m still very fond of how the patterning turned out, and as it seems no one else is as picky and particular of these things as I am, she loved it just the way it was, although I protested it wasn’t finished.

     

    So anyway, there’s three. There are many more and I’ll try to get them up regularly, I’ve photographed most, so that just leaves the edits/preps and commenting. Stay tuned!

Gold Dragons

Image | | Holly Zezu

In addition to painting my own work, I also like to customize thing like figures, miniatures, storage containers, etc. The dragon figure above is a custom-painted huge gold dragon Dungeons and Dragons miniature, from the tabletop game. I first posted this on my Behance site (LINK: https://www.behance.net/midnightblack8881709 ) with the following description:

“Repaint of the Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures Tabletop game figure, the Huge Gold Dragon. 2012. Personal project – I used to play D&D minis, and this piece was a frequent staple of my warband. The original/as-is painting of the piece, out-of-the-box did not do the creature justice, and was shabby, bland, and imprecise.”

So…that’s another thing I do. I’ve had a reasonable amount of experience painting various figurines, minis, warhammer 40k army pieces, boxes, photo frames, etc. Requires a small brush, a steady hand, a bright light, and a tolerance to going cross-eyed every now and again.

Back in high school, I painted a Gold Dragon on my D&D binder:

Fantasy and role playing games and books and whatnot have been a good source of inspiration and wonder-generation. I especially love the Monster Manuals with all the different beasts and creatures and their descriptions, stories, history, traits, etc. and illustrations.