Crimson Daggers - new studies

Here are some more of my studies from the past four days. I'm really digging these still life paintings...expect to see more!

Crimson Daggers - daily studies

About a week ago Dave Rapoza posted about getting people together (virtually) to do daily drawing studies. I decided to answer this call to awesome and try to do some routine art push ups in addition to my work routine. Below are the studies I've done so far independently and with the group. We've been studying anatomy from Andrew Loomis and doing still life paintings. I'm stoked because I've been getting up between 6 and 7am most mornings since it started. I've been a night owl for a long time with morning envy, so it's been a nice change of pace.

These are sorted chronologically, oldest at the top, newest at the bottom (ending with the pear still life I did this morning).















I'm gonna stay brave and hopefully sustain the hour or two of morning study each day. Rock on!

Dune book club: Duke Leto Atreides

Week Two in the Dune book club brings us to about page 80 in the book. We ended on the chapter where Duke Leto wrestles with his rage after learning his son was nearly killed by a hidden assassin. Meanwhile he is trying to keep up his calm and stoic appearance in front of his men and attend to his duties.

I'm reading a lot of things in the book that I don't remember from the first time I read it, but Leto was and is still one of my favorite characters. He knowingly enters a situation filled with traps and perils out of duty or recklessness. He's willing to take a chance on such a treacherous situation, placing his family and allies lives in danger because if he can catch the plot before it fully unravels and foil it, it will be a great victory against his enemies. At the same time though he seems tortured by the dangers that do come to fruition. They show that some things do escape his control and expose threads to the plot he has missed. He's torn between boldness/dynamism and protector/guardian as a father and leader figure.

Environment: River tree speed painting

I'm trying to get back onto the environment train today. I think it took me about 20 minutes, but I'll pay closer attention to the next few.

ArtOrder: Catastrophic Dragon (Earthquake)

Whoah! Dragon time. I've been trying to work on some environments in my downtime lately and yesterday I started getting really antsy. Environments are challenging to me since I usually draw things with legs and faces, so I decided to take a quick creature break. How convenient then that Jon Schindehette made this week's ArtOrder topic a dragon challenge! The topic this week was to create a catastrophic dragon...it's a new dragon subtype they're trying out that is sort of a container or carapace holding back elemental fury. The natural force for the topic is "earthquake". I thought about it and a really earth ripping earthquake would probably spill out magma like crazy. It's insides is a burning hot tumble of rocks, gems, and magma, while it's outside is like a rough and cragged hillside. It's body is almost composed like earth strata.

O.K. Dragon break is over, time to get back to drawing places.

Environment thumbnails 2

More thumbnails. I decided to shelve the creeper castle one for now in favor of something different. Most of my horizon lines were safe and in the middle before, so I wanted to try some more extreme angles (birds eye, worms eye...high and low vantage points). The upper left one in this new batch has me really excited so that's where I'm headed next.

Four demon girls

I had drawn these demon girls a few months ago and completely forgot about them. Wow! They're all iterations on one character I was trying to create but they're interesting enough to me on their own.

Environments: Cradle of Life in progress

Here's as far as I got today. I'm calling this one Cradle of Life, depicting a tree / oasis in the middle of an arid desert. I'm going to try working in some birds and little critters flying / crawling around the place.

I sort of feel like it's not totally an environment piece but a design for this tree, but it's got me working on stuff that's not character / creature related for now. Gotta start somewhere!

After doing this image which is turning out to be very optimistic like I'm probably going to want to do the skull and spine castle...

Is that Bambi over there behind that root?!

Environment thumbnails

So Daily Demons are on hold again. Work has been keeping me busy (a good thing!) In my spare time I'm gearing up to get back to portfolio development time in the area of environments.

In most of my recent illustrations I've been including settings, but I don't have many pieces that are environment only. Time to fix that!
Look Bill! It's not all creepy stuff! Sure there's a skull cave / castle in the mix but there's also a big tree, cliffs, giant crystals with anchors...I'm going to pick a couple of these to render over the next couple weeks. Then back to thumbnail land and repeat.

ArtOrder: Way Back Machine, Primordial Gnomes

I made another image for ArtOrder. This week's topic was to devolve the Dungeons and Dragons gnome.

ZBrush face

More 3d practice stuff. This was from a few weeks ago. I'm grateful for the y-symmetry drawing toggle in zbrush!

Creature design demo

I covered for Jay Lincoln's Character Design class today and did a bit of a creature design / brainstorming demo. Mainly I talked about digital thumbnail sketching and shape / silhouette construction. I even tied in a little bit of Gestalt principles too. I think I spent about an hour and a half putting this stuff together, and probably 20 - 30 minutes minutes of that time refining the fish a bit. I hope to work on it some more.

Isomorphic correspondence, anyone?

Plus, I think I introduced Jay's students to the Mekong river delta catfish. Hoot hoot!

What a rad planet. Thanks guys!

Google SketchUp!

I went to a SketchUp demo today. It was fun. here's the result of 1.5 hours of tinkering while listening:Whale ship visits big gun city! I was having Tron flashbacks along the way...

tangled sketch!

It's been a hectic / busy week.

Vegetable / Mineral / Structures / Props

I started my Daily Demons back up again the other day but I haven't been dwelling entirely in creature town. I've been working on spending more time sketching on organic / mineral forms and structures (tall image warning!)

2A4TV paintings are done!

The paintings are done! Here are both of them.Painting 1...

Painting 2...And some process! I decided to do both paintings of skulls after finishing the first one. Instead of redrawing the first thumbnail I used a mirror to reflect the image to start with.
Pencil on canvas. Painting number 2 isn't a mirror copy of the first one. I changed the expression on the second painting. I wanted this one to look sad instead of angry. I wanted them to look interesting side by side or back to back, so a little bit of semi symmetry was o.k.

Pencils next to painting.
Monk figured out he could warm up by sitting in my chair next to the space heater. Warmth mooch!
The green and blue base colors. I was having a rough time getting the colors right on painting two. I was being lazy about mixing too much paint, so I tried working from the tube if I could. It worked ok since the paintings are mostly flat colors.I started off painting the outlines this dark grey blue. It was too dark compared to the burnt sienna outlines on the first painting. They ended up being a dark olive green in the end.
Then I painted the outlines a dark blue, but I changed that too! haha. The tentacles got filled with a light blue, but that was mostly covered with the same purple color from painting 2.
Now comes shipping the paintings to NYC and then the actual show. You should go!

Too Art for TV paintings in progress

Too Art For TV is having its 3rd show in NY beginning December 5th. I'm going to have two paintings in the show and one of them is nearly done!

Here's some of the process (with notes) that got me there...

When talking to the 2A4TV folks they said they would like to have some energetic paintings of mine similar to the picnic table I painted for the Art Park benefit (previously posted here). The picnic table was big, so I was able to do a huge image across it. For the pair of paintings I'm working on 18" x 24" canvas. Big, but no picnic table. I liked the scale of the table painting so I decided to do close up monster faces for the canvases. After some sketching I settled on these two thumbnails to move ahead with:

Then came sketching the image out on the canvas. I already gessoed the heck out of them a few weeks ago so they were ready to go:

I started by painting the background color and moving forward in depth (trying to let areas overlap as I went):

And then it's a big jump up to the painting I posted at the top! I'll try taking more photos of painting #2. Originally I was planning on using complimentary color schemes for the paintings (you can see my original notes on the thumbnails say R/G/W and B/O/W for red/orange/white and blue/orange/white) but I decided to go for analogous sets for both. The next one will be primarily blue, green, and violet. Also, I ended up liking the skull image so much I think I'm going to scrap the ape thumbnail and do a different skull for painting #2. Choices!

Just a few more details to change on painting 1 and then it's done-done. Then onward to #2!

Find more info about Too Art For TV via Liz Artinian's page or "the facebook": http://www.bunnycutlet.com/2008call
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1538561657&ref=ts

Art dump.

ack. the images are out of order, but you get the idea :]

003, 004, 005