Artist Trading Card: Mountain Valley

I got home last night and played around with the gouache.  It seems like a good medium for working small, so I created a couple of ATCs:

Landscape: Mountain Valley

Underlit Study in Blue

I got my distant mountains a little darker than I should have, but I was fairly pleased with it otherwise.  It has been a long time since I have created an ATC and I posted this and another more ribald one on ATCsForALL - I am known as Topdecker over there.

The study in blue was supposed to end up as a gypsy fortune teller, but I scaled the head up way too large.  It was large enough to play around with underlighting and to render shadows that you rarely get to play with.  I finished it over the course of a Human Planet episode (great show, by the way).

One thing that I have discovered about gouache - I greatly prefer my paint to be soft - like straight out of the tube and juicy.  I realize that it is not realistic, but I believe that I will have to squeeze in softer paint a bit more often that I had intended.  It is just so much nicer to work with.

Oh, in case you don't know, ATCs are very small works of art, being 2.5" x 3.5" in size.  I rarely sell mine and prefer to trade them off or join a swap on ATCsForAll.  In fact, due to my recent activity, I have several trades pending and at least 3 more cards that I have to make.