Portrait

Heyo Fine Folk! This is a portrait I have been working on this past week. This is my dear friend's daughter. I am used to working from perfect reference or completely from imagination. This project required that I create a pose and environment from my imagination, but that the subject look like the person I was painting. This made me truly realize how amazingly individual we all are. I don't mean this on an existential level. I mean that even though we all have the same muscle groups, and we all use basically the same ones for certain emotional expressions, certain muscles are more or less dominant in each of us. A smile, therefore, is not just a smile. Some people smile slightly more on one side of their face or scrunch their forehead, while others do not.

 Merry Christmas fine folk of the interwebs!

No Title Comes To Mind

Heyo fine folk of the interwebs!!

I am always waiting so that I can put "Good" stuff up on my blog. But one "Good" piece never seems to be enough. This invariably leaves me waiting for my next "Good" piece to come around so that I can post two of them. Of course, by the time I have the second "Good" piece, the first one no longer looks good. Eventually I get fed up with the fact that I haven't posted, and I put up whatever I feel I can show. I feel as though one of these days I will realize that this is just a blog, and I will start taking myself a little less seriously... until then, here is some of the work I have done of late.

This is the cover of a flyer I worked on recently, and below is my process from start to finish.

 Well, time for breakfast, I hope you all have a beautiful day!

 

 

 

A Well in a Week

Heyo fine folk of the inter-webs! So I just got to do a one week Vis Dev project. The prompt was: a child meets a creature at the bottom of a well. Design all three things.

 

This is Stolto. He is obsessed with his smart phone. One day, while walking and playing internet games, he trips and his phone falls into an abandoned marble quarry.

 Upon entering the quarry, he realizes that he cannot get out, and his phone no longer works.

 

His luck turns when he finds a giant living statue of Neptune. Neptune has been stuck in the rock he was carved in since the time of Constantine. He is grumpy, terse, and disgusted by the boy's all-consuming love of technology.

 

This is the moment when the boy has realized that his phone is dead, he is all alone (except for a giant talking piece of marble), and in all likelihood he will die at the bottom of this well. Neptune takes pity on the boy, and their adventure to escape the well begins.

Unrelated to the well, I realized that I had never designed the ship that appeared in my Fifth Element project from last semester. So here is a quick sketch of how it could look. I had to follow the overall form of the ships in the movie, but they are on the screen for such a short time, I was able to take some liberties with the details.

I believe that is all for tonight! I hope you have a lovely day! 

Practice makes... more practiced

Hello fine folks of the interwebs! It has been rather a long time since I posted. I keep looking at the paintings I have done, and I want to find some sort of theme to connect them. I feel like there should be some kind of rant that pulls all of my work together, but there isn't. So here are some paintings I have done as practice over the past few months. Most of these are based on photographs.

 Have a lovely day fine folk!!

How to be an Exceptional Narcissist

Hello fine folk of the interwebs! The other day it struck me: Blogs are an inherently narcissistic endeavor. Those of us who blog are under the ridiculous notion that someone wants to hear our thoughts on whatever random topic we choose to verbally vomit about.

In honor of how truly ridiculous this whole experience is, I have dedicated this post to narcissism.

 

  I have a room now, and it has a mirror. I've never had a mirror in my room before. In the name of art, understanding facial anatomy, and other inane excuses I have started doing random self portraits.

Also, for the last few days I have lived in almost complete silence. No coffee shops, no TV, no music, no people--just the cobwebs in my own mind.

 

This has led to a great deal of self reflection.

 

 Ironically, none of these were done in front of my mirror.

Well fine folk, it seems I have rather little to say on the subject of ME today. So I hope you all have a delightful afternoon!

A Wizard of Earthsea

Yikes, its been awhile since I've posted anything! So I guess I'll jump right in. I have been working on a new project. I am doing the visual development for A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is based on a truly amazing book, and I think I have read it seven times now. ("read" is a bit of a misnomer, I have it on mp3) So here is some of the sketch work I have been doing.

Since I had time to kill while I was listening to the book, I got an interesting opportunity. I have noticed that I get an idea for a project, and have trouble pulling myself away from it. This time I decided to design the characters and environments as I saw them (Not designed for appeal, just honestly how I see them.)

 I figured once I had put down the ideas that I was connected to, I would have a little more freedom afterwards. (This experiment is still in progress, I'll let you know how it turns out.)

Often times, random strangers become the unwitting victims of my design process. This person walked by a coffee shop I was in--he didn't even stop to get a drink. I had just enough time to put down a blind drawing of him before he walked on.

 This fellow was sitting right next to me. Something about his mood reminded me of a character in the book. I was mortally afraid he would notice my occasional glances in his direction and realize he had become my model.

This was simply a blind drawing from my imagination. I find that I can get my drawings to have a bit more character if I momentarily remove my eyes from the process.

One of the characters I have had particular fund designing is the character of a beautiful female enchantress.

She has gone through a number of iterations, but these were the ones I based my paintings on.

 

This is my first gouache painting in over a year, and my second gouache painting ever. I figured since I spend so much time with the undo key at my disposal, I should try a medium that is known for being temperamental and permanent.

Here she is in photoshop form.

The main character is a goat herder who becomes a wizard. I have yet to figure out his exact design, but I decided to do a quick sketch of him as a goat herder to get a feeling for him.

Here he is again. This time I wanted to pay particular attention to his facial tattoos.

Every once in a while I get a bit obsessive about reference. Usually it comes in the form of researching some little thing for hours and hours, but this time it came in getting the correct facial expression. 

I now have 170 photos of myself treating a bottle of ibuprofen as if it were a small cuddly pet.

In stark contrast, every once in a while I find the need to test my creative thinking process on the fly. I don't allow myself any reference or thumbnails, and I just see how my brain deals with it. This image above was where the painting started. The only parameter that I gave myself was that it had to exist in the world of the book I'm reading. 

This was the product an hour later.

This one appeared using much the same process, but this time I was trying for a specific location and point in the book. 

Well, my stomach is telling me that photoshop and the internet are not good forms of nutrition.

(This is how my stomach feels)

I hope you all have a lovely day!

Now for breakfast =)