Where have I been?

I have been painting, the blogging hiatus was all due to baby stuff. Its hard to blog while you are chock full o' baby and the morning sickness that comes along with it. I'm still chock full of baby, he's not due until May... but thankfully I am well into my second trimester and I don't have to worry about nausea as much anymore. Whee!
So I have been painting, but because its me, I have been revisiting a lot of pieces. (I know.) I did manage to finish a couple as gifts, but I didn't scan or photograph those yet.
Mostly I've been spending my time working on techniques for painting backgrounds. I'm only using very cheap hobby and student grade acrylics right now, for budget and toxicity purposes, but man I would love to get some more gel medium. All I want to do is glaze layer upon layer for my backgrounds, but I'm making do.
I'm also starting an art journal so that I can have a place where I can get messy and not be afraid of screwing up the process of something. Hopefully I can just use those pages to experiment and play and then I won't feel the need to constantly revisit something. I can only hope... So for this month I have decided to create one page a day. I'll try to get around to posting them, along with any paintings in progress, to keep myself motivated.

Just to prove that I have been painting:

Angel
Painting progress

1:

Very mixed media background. I started with canvas and glued down a bunch of random pieces of paper then used a lot of texture medium and gesso like icing and spread it across the top. There are bits of tissue paper and other bits of paper in there. I glazed over the top with light pastel colors and painted in the figure. At this point I had no idea what I was going to do with the piece.



2:
At this point I had referenced a sketch I colored/played with in photoshop and tried to recreate the piece with acrylic.
I used the rest of my beloved soft gel medium to get the blue-purple swirls in there. At some point I decided to give the girl wings... and I changed her face quite a bit trying to add a bit more realism and detail. Now it looks like she is crying... oh well.
I painted little feathers everywhere too, if it was going to be cliche with the angel, I might as well go all the way.

3:
Lastly I really tried to detail out her wing to make it look feathery, and less flat. The floating feathers got a great deal of detail added to them as well, because I wanted them to look fluffy... and uhm... feathery.
I glazed a bit more into the background and decided to call it done.

Sometimes you just have to know when to quit.