Not Done with Good Omens art yet...

I had so much fun painting the mural on my dining room wall (see previous post) that I did a couple more pieces from the miniseries Good Omens that would be more portable, in case I ever moved. You can't move walls very easily, I believe.

First, I tried a watercolor and colored pencil portrait of the angel and the demon characters, who are supposed to be enemies but who wind up becoming friends during their lengthy tenure on Earth.  One of the episodes showed various snippets from their long history together in different eras, and my favorite was from 1601.  In that scene, they met up at the Globe Theatre during a production of Hamlet.  Their costumes were wonderful:

I used photos like this for reference, for a close-up view:

Sadly, the first time I tried it, one character turned out well but the other one didn't, and the second time I tried it, the reverse happened.  And it was nearly impossible to correct or erase mistakes, so I gave up and decided to cut and paste the two good portraits together.

Didn't really work out as well as I wanted it to.  But I still wanted to do a piece with historical outfits, so next I decided to try painting a scene that was never filmed.  It was set in 1800 in London.  The angel character (Aziraphale), who loves books, opens a bookshop then, and the demon character (Crowley) brings him a box of chocolates for the grand opening.  

This scene got cut from the script due to time constraints, so I had no photos to go by.  I looked up menswear from that time, and found illustration like these, which are from the Regency era:

The Regency didn't actually start until 1811, but what the hey.  I liked the outfits, it was close enough, and it was solely for my own entertainment, so why not use them?

Next, I cut and pasted various pics of Aziraphale and Crowley onto outfits until I got something I liked:

Then I tried posing them inside the bookshop:

But that looked way too complex to paint.  I wanted to keep things simpler, so I put them outside the front door instead:

Even then, it turned out there was no room for those pillars, and I wound up simplifying it even further by just including the front door only.  Then I added a box of chocolates and figured out where the arms and hands should go.  

Next I copied the finished draft onto an 11" x 14" canvas board.  This time I used acrylics again, because I wanted to be able to correct mistakes, and that was a wise choice, as I had to redo the faces several times, and had to redo a couple of the hands, and fix all sorts of things along the way.  

I'm much happier with this piece than the 1601 picture.  I wanted it to have an old-fashioned look, as if it had been painted in 1800.  

It's now framed and on the living room wall.  Yay.

Perhaps it's time to move on to more original art work, if I can think of anything new to paint.  I've been using ink and watercolor for so long that it was a revelation to use acrylics -- I can change stuff when it goes wrong!  When you make a mistake with ink or watercolor, the piece is usually unfixable.  Working with acrylics on both the mural and this smaller painting made me remember why I used to love them.

So that's my next project -- figure out what to paint next with acrylics, and to have a good time painting over all the stuff that doesn't work!