Knight in acrylic on canvas

I am not a professionally trained artist, despite my love for drawing, cartooning and painting. You professional artists who stumble upon Comics on the Brain are sure to pick up on my lack of technical skills, but the rest of you? Well, I might have a chance at fooling you!

Over the years I have experimented with a few different media types.

I have tried watercolor, pen & ink, colored pencils and probably some strange tools and devices that I no longer remember.

Recently, I decided it was time to experiment with acrylics. I have used them before — for mural painting and craft projects, but this time I wanted to try something really artsy-fartsy. I bought a little pre-stretched canvas and just started painting.

Here’s what I came up with:

The result is a knight in armor, wearing a velvety-red overshirt. The intent here was to try creating a few effects, while painting something I find interesting.

• A lush background (Partially successful. I like the background, but I wish it had more definition. Further, the sky is just too blue. I need to add some subtle variations in its hue.)
• A tree in the foreground (Fairly successful. The problem I have with the tree is that it is very Van Gogh-ish while the rest of the painting isn’t. I should have used more natural colors for the highlights.)
• A human figure (Fairly successful. I didn’t want to try adding the details of a real human — with skin and facial features — so this figure does that well.)
• Something metallic (Quite successful. It took me several layers to get the metal to have a semi-shiny look, but I really love the helmet and the foreground arm.)
• Add suitable shading (Partially successful. I like the shading on the figure. I wish I had done more on the tree and background.)

All in all, I’m pleased with the attempt. I want to try more, and I hope to learn from my errors.

Further, on the advise of the wife, I will probably paint something less genre-specific next time. Just in case it turns out good!

THE KNIGHT

So who is this cardinal-colored knight? As I painted, I had a little story devised for him:

The knight is the last of his order. He’s a veteran of many campaigns and now, back home, he is the only survivor of a group that vowed to keep a particular forest in virgin condition on the assumption that it would be the place where Jesus reappeared on Earth. Unfortunately for him and his fellows, the land is needed for other purposes. One by one, the order was exterminated and the land cleared chunk by chunk. Now with one last grove surviving, forces are moving against him as he vows to protect the place. He recruits a few people to defend the tract, but will they be enough? In a last bid effort, he fills the forest with traps and then ventures out to slay the company bent on taking over this holy land to be.
But questions linger. Is he foolish for staking his life for the vision of another? How can this place be protected in the future? And what right does he have to take the life of another for his own crusade?

Yeah, it needs a little work. But that’s just the narrative I came up with as I worked on this little piece of art.