Aya Takano

New Aya Takano paintings at Arrested Motion... here

At home in Beverly for the week. Yay!

Editorial Illustration

digital illustration about food poisoning and Guillan-Barré disease caused by raw milk consumption

Plus de Sufjanerie

Final portrait, taken into Photoshop.

Friday Blog

The 'real' class project. Portrait of Sufjan Stevens.

Poetry collab. tester piece. Inside your chests are bent down branches burdened.

Sufjan Stevens

Digital extrapolation of a tester piece I did for a new in-class technique.

Thoughts on a Collaboration

Some thoughts on poetry that I'll be making some complementary pieces for, interspersed with Art History notes.

Related older pieces I don't think I've ever posted:



Anatomic Manual



Remember, Gentle Reader, that most of these and a variety of others are available on Flickr.

Baby Steps

The top panel took 2 hours. I'll be working on this on my deathbed.

More Paintings

I will scan this once its further along so you can really see the details. On the left side you can see some of my initial layers, and then a later version. I work spontaneously right onto the painting, and then occasionally take the image into Photoshop and superimpose my initial sketch over it to see what I need to change. I end up with sort of a plastic surgeon's notebook page of changes. :) hehe

Sometime I will be more diligent in documenting the various layers that go into a painting like this - I do some fun stuff with pouring, dripping etc. Basically I came up with a line drawing, copied it by lightbox onto the paper, then painted loosely over it using a lot of liquid, flowing paint to get various exciting textures and a lot of movement. At this point the underdrawing is only vaguely visible, so i repaint it from what I can see of it, and then started applying really, really thin glazes of translucent acrylic. Then take it into Photoshop to compare to the original, fix stuff, paint more, on and on until I am happy. Depending on the subject and how things turn out on their own, I may be more or less meticulous about sticking to the original drawing.


There will eventually be a huge field of purple peonies in the background. I think.

This is coming along. I think it's mostly done - just needs some darker values and some more color in the twisted branches.