I wanted to share some recent sketches that I've been working on recently. 

I left alot of filter visible here, too much? 🧐 Not sure, but it is certainly on my mind when I look at it. 

This is in progress- It needs more stuff, some boats selling fruit and flowers, more dogs, and I wanted a tree hanging over the scene so I could paint the leaves in different lighting conditions. The tree is not quite in the story yet, so that's on the to do list. 

I found this piece of architecture in another painting, but the story was not as beautiful as I thought the forms were. So I remade it and added the correct vibes. I should probably change the character so that it is just very clearly me lying there on that sunny porch. 

Rough sketch coming along today :) Will I get it painted and submitted to my art show invite and posted by Wednesday evening? The power of winter break compels me!

I'll post the update when it's ready

Progress report

A bit messy yet, I'm going to keep refining all the connections, but it's getting there. 

🌙✨

And I think I'm ready to move on from this one now:

I had such a nice time painting at sketch club, I thought I'd share. Now, don't get me wrong, there are many unresolved shadows and edges, probably some issues with tonal hierarchy and just general polish of the textures- but- it was an under two hour sprint while chatting so I'm alright with that. I did a few minutes of polish from memory because the guitar silhouette was extra jagged and the antler shadow was 0% softness. But this sort of practice is the exact way to skill build with process, finding brushes that work or trying out new approaches, and especially prioritizing what needs to get done versus what can wait. I probably spent more time painting and smudging color on the guitar than the drapery, flowers, and grapes combined. I enjoyed painting the surface of the wall as well, so at least some parts of it looked cared for even if the drapery looks, eh, provisionary. 

Painting this brought to mind this other little study I did about a month ago of a lion's skull. The lighting in the reference was the exact opposite and I spun the thing around so it could sit like this on the surface. I used some adjustment layers to envision the lighting and painted this little thing. Definitely would feel better about it if I could have observed this exact thing for about two hours even if it were over Zoom, but you do what you can right? :)

I worked this week on a nocturne scene and a copy of Joon's skull shrine scene. For my concept I took inspiration from a wytch character I wrote about awhile ago. A character associated with the deep north and the seas. I found this killer picture of the night sky and that comet (? diagonal line?) streaking across the sky and that diagonal got me to thinking of these other diagonal shapes. Pretty soon I realized that this was feeling right for my character. 

Now, I normally wouldn't just include an image in my painting in this way like a backdrop. I suppose I did alter and stretch this image to fit my design's needs, but I still feel a little sacrilege just letting a picture and it's jpeg artifacts sit out there in full view 🤷‍♀️ I'm sitting with it, and trusting the process, haha. I'm mostly happy with this, but I will probably revisit the little glowing white triangles and the large boulder shape before I decide to include in on my portfolio page. Idk, there is something I need to either change or accept, but I'm not sure yet. 

 

This fall I've joined in as a student in Joon Ahn's Fantasy Landscape painting course. And I got to paint Snake Mountain 🐍💀  There was an assigned lighting/mood/layer set-up that was baked in for the assignment, it was new for me so I tried to keep it simple for this first go around. Its a very simple and logical set-up for making a painting, but sometimes I feel like I have complicated ideas and I really wanted to just use direct reference and keep it simple and clean. 

I used the skull from the Dracorex / Stygimoloch to reference for the silly demon face that was originally on the playset. My first instinct is to always go with the Euoplocephalus, definitely my favorite dinosaur, but even I had to admit the Dracorex was the right look for the demon-ish, horned shapes and the overall threatening expression. 

Cool side note: Joon's final process is to blend a piece of an abstract/non objective painting on to the top of the layers to try to discover some interesting texture that you most likely couldn't just pull out of your head and paint. It's a smart idea, and I just so happen to have a folder of non objective paintings and explorations from this year so I get to recycle them into new works and it makes me happy :)

I created another non objective painting this past Sunday. Balance and exploration of color were top of mind as always, with the addition of trying to figure out what I mean when I say that I want my work to feel a bit more like paint. Yes, it's edges, but it's also process and the duration of time that I like to see in the material narrative.  It's a bit like when you remember the feeling of a dream, but not necessarily the content of what happened. 

I like all these colorful dashes and how they hover over top of the more neutral, but related, colors. I like that they are contained in a grid structure even as they still feel immediate and intuitive in their energy and hue changes. Even as I write this I am remembering a series of drawings from my MFA that these are totally reminding me of now. That connection won't be obvious to most ;) More of a note to self there. 

I just like looking at these marks and exploring what is there. I want to wield them like a style, something with more depth not just left to right shallow-ish space. Let's see what happens in the next ones. 

🤷‍♀️ I like it ✨

Very early look of my character for my PB manuscript :) Awww, so cute.  

This is what absent minded painting comes out looking like for me. To be clear, I've written the text, story boarded and edited each page, developed character designs, done a bunch of research and planning for the look of the thing, but the touch or the handwriting of the mark making is what is left to work out. I’d like to balance the look of the raw digital and some of the rough edges with something that looks more like paint 🤔

I want it to be both paint and rendered legible form simultaneously. I can chase a realistic texture or lighting scenario, but for this I'd like to ride that moment where it looks exciting like paint balanced together into form. I like this very raw digital, almost reckless sort of approach to just bringing something into view. It helps to get me past overthinking, or trying to figure it all out in my head instead of on the page, and being too precious with the brush marks. But even as someone who likes the digital look, I need to use this as a rough draft to create a more polished image that I'd be happy to explore printed at a larger size.   

I'm liking this direction though. I want an image that is full of things to look at and even discover. I'm want this to be a book that can be opened and enjoyed and explored more than once. They're illustrations, but they're also paintings. 

I don't usually post sketches or WIPs, but I've been working on a larger project lately and I'd like to share a small glimpse. All summer I've been pushing around suuuper rough black and white thumbnails that make up my story about magical creatures in a forest on a bit of a journey. Really I had no clear idea of what the story was until I just started with these thumbnails and their revisions. I've been in the seriously rough, reworking, maybe only I can tell what is meant by that shape, awkward phase for awhile now, so it was exciting to carve in some crisp edges and color :)

Originally I thought I'd be creating a wordless picture book with a single character, but eventually the words arrived and also several more characters. For the character designs I'm just about happy with them.  I design with abstract shapes and marks so eventually I start to feel compelled by a design, but then need to translate it into actual features, or a way to keep the marks abstract and still feel legible and at home within the artwork. 

More than a bit of what is in this thumbnail I consider place-holder marks. A way to design shapes that stand for stuff and the beginning of finding precision, or more considered marks, but still a short hand language and not quite containing all that I'd imagined in my head. More than a start, a foundation I guess. 

Friday was my last day of teaching Digital Observational Painting for the summer session at PCA&D! This is probably my favorite course to teach: the digital tools have so much potential and I always learn something new myself through the process. I started with a challenging little monochromatic grouping, including this reflective metallic cup. Trial by fire I guess. I remember learning to render in paint with a set up of white eggs and white styrofoam cups and that seemed challenging to me at the time. I have such a short amount of time to teach, so I go right in with a bit of color and temperature from the beginning. 

I don't always make use of these solid flat color shapes, but I started to enjoy how they sort of punctuated all of my other marks.  This was a fun still life to photograph for class because my lit candle really was that close to the spray painted black box top 😆 Wouldn't have been able to work from observation of this one even if we were back in person.

My colleague always included a grapes still life in his Intro Painting course and it's great to see the works that comes from it. It's a bit of an advanced concept to separate out local color and value from the effects of lighting on an object, but probably best to just jump in and begin. This was a great image to experiment with brush work and texture on the background as well to generate some visual interest in the trompe l'oeil format.  I might try to back light them next time, that seems like a good next move.

Like most painters I like to study reference by painting it, or making a study. I'm not really trying to invent my own ideas at this point, just identify the major relationships of tone, color, perspective, and potentially story or something about what the focal area is. I opened Mapcrunch today to find a quick reference to study, something simple that I could study in an hour or less and focus on simplifying. 

And of course Mapcrunch beamed me to an extremely visually complicated place. But there was an archway and I love archways. Also I've never known too much about this place, the old city of Jerusalem, but when I looked it up to see if this gate had a name I learned that this city has many more gates, each with interesting stories and names associated. So, with the real fear of an intense research-based side quest looming, I minimized the research tab and, for now, have just focused on the painting ;)  

My one hour study was allowed to balloon to just over two because this was challenging in a good way with a good sweep of perspective, tight tonal relationships, and new brushes to put to good, and hopefully visually interesting, effect. While painting this I tried not to zoom in too much or often. To me, that is one of the definitions of a study- not getting too into details. Edge quality is in bounds and important, but anything that needs to zoom to be really appreciated or painted is out. So, probably about 6 x 8" on the screen while painting.