Progress!

Well, the last studies are done, and the comp has been projected on the canvas...there's no hiding now, time to man up and get this thing done.

The sketch of Emily, above, really brought my confidence back.  I was having a hell of a time trying to get her expression right on the canvas, but this quick color study really locked it in for me.  Had a blast with all the red in this one as well.  The study of Heather is below...

Heather's sketch was by far the fastest, probably only about 20 minutes of easel time on this one.  Sometimes it's hard to tell how long I actually spend on these as I have 30 high-schoolers back behind me.  So a lot of the painting is really broken up; it's a good thing I don't work in acrylic.  I have to admit that doing these color studies before the final really helped me loosen up and enjoy the paint.  It's something that I may be adding much more of to my routine.

So, the painting has started in earnest on the final.  I started in on the carolers from left to right, one at a time.  They're mostly finished before I move on to the next, but there are a few little details on each that need to be filled in before the finish.  And I'm sure I'll find little things here and there to mess with, I always do.  Progress follows:

Projected on the canvas.

Most of Matt.  I also toned the canvas, but forgot to start shooting pics until this stage.

Lining on Heather.

Basic value structure.

Most of Heather.

Starting Emily.

Basic value, and a scarf.  This is where I cleaned my brushes today, had to head out early to pick up one of my boys.  Too bad all of the underpainting will be dry on Monday when I get back to the canvas... But hey, on the bright side, this should be almost finished for Tuesday's post.  Fingers crossed.

And the friday kicker.  After getting my butt handed to me at last week's figure session, I got back on track last night.  We had a new model, and she was absolutely awesome.  I kid you not, she was built just like a girl out of a Frazetta painting.  The gesture poses she gave us were great, and I was pleased with this final 20 minute endeavor as well.  Until next time.

Sketchin' with the paint...

Took some time to work up paint sketches of the two male carolers, Jeff and Matt (left and right respectively), today.  It was definitely nice to get back into the pigments, and I'm feeling much more confident about tackling the final painting for the card.  The colors will probably change a bit, more towards some rich and warm hues, but these cards usually end up pretty full palette.

I definitely had a lot of fun painting Jeff (gent on the left), his expressions were so great, and I'm feeling good about how I worked up some of the detail-ish stuff.  With Matt, I just kind of fizzled out after I had the big shapes slapped down.  And, I can definitely tell I was getting a bit lazy - what with that off-kilter hat and its glaring tangent where the red and white meet...

Anywho, Jeff was around 45-minutes of broken-up painting during my Art IV and Art I classes, and Matt was 30-ish split between Art II and my Independent studies.

I was using a pretty full palette on gessoed illustration board, a number two round hog bristle, a similarly sized round sable, and gamsol as a medium.  And these are in the 6-inchish range.

A Chance Encounter

A Chance Encounter, oil on canvas, 32x24.

Glad to finally get this one off the easel.  It was a good slog through the final work on the three adventurers, with lots of rethinking and repainting as I changed a few things up for the finish on this, and maybe figuring out some semblance of painting that feels right.  So I broke down and added a nit-picky round sable to my stable of hog bristle brushes, and also made copious use of a burnt sienna, ultramarine, raw umber, and pretty much any other dark on my palette glaze for the final shadows.  All in all, pretty happy with how everything turned out.  Enjoy.

Also, props to my student Matt Gray for the "Golden Axe" suggestion, though he's a bit too young to get the reference...

Happy Holidays

And the gift of new work.  Not much commentary for this first post in a long time, as I have a pint sized art director sorting through the desk next to me.  Two newest pieces off the easel in order:

Early Gifts, 21x30, oil on canvas.
This is the Holiday card for the high school where I teach, and continuing the trend that I started last year, I've made another family portrait out of it.  And also, continuing the trend I started with my first card four years ago...there's still a wreath in it.

RTM, 30x18, oil on canvas.
A wedding gift for the excellent Dr. and Mrs. Bongiorno, featuring an excellent Mecca for food - Reading Terminal Market.

Of Giants and progression...

A short little post with some WIP shots of my latest painting.  I've been taking the opportunity to work back through some of my thumbnail sketches from right after I got back from the IMC last year.  And this frost giant has been lurking around in my sketchbook just waiting to find a piece of unsuspecting canvas.  There's obviously a long ways to go in the painting above, but I'm really digging the blues in the underpainting so far, I'll have to see how much of that stays, and in turn, see how much it forces me to change in the figures in the foreground. 

The sketches for our three adventurers were pretty straightforward, although I'm sure our neighbors think I'm now truly crazy - I shot everything behind our garage (hey, the light was right...).  And just for kicks - the dwarf up top started out as me snarling with a snow shovel, I'll let your imagination do the work on that one, as I don't think I'll let that reference see the light of day.

 And, here's the origin of our starring giant/titan.  I had been wanting to make a maquette for a while now, and this seemed the perfect opportunity.  They are absolutely fantastic tools for finding value reference, and damn fun to build as well.  I found that my sketches never quite got to what I was looking for in the giant's face, so I figured I would kind of "feel" everything out in the clay.  It worked quite well, but I found that the maquette ended up with a bit of a "slow" feeling in the face, the tight drawing turned out to be a bit of a blend of thumbnail sketch and model.  A good learning experience in all, and I'm really looking forward to getting this one finished up.

Firebrand

 

Firebrand, 28.5 x 22, oil on canvas.

Finished this one up about two weeks back, and have just been waiting to get a good photo of it.  I am now sold on the fact that the family point and shoot is no longer up to the task of shooting my paintings -I could not get the color right on this piece for the life of me.  Here's to Mother-in-laws with photography degrees and excellent equipment (Thanks Char!).  

I don't think I really intended to have the glows go quite so "fiery" but once I got the cads on my brush, I couldn't help myself.

The Guardian

 

 The Guardian, 30 x 24, oil on canvas.

About time this one was finished.  Believe it or not this guy has been lurking in the studio since about last April.  The water, Good Lord, the water.  How it taunted.  Quite a challenge getting all those waves in there, I think it turned out alright, but I'll definitely have to tackle another "maritime" piece for some much needed practice.  I'm sure that there's some dumb-easy trick to painting water that I just glossed over in the alla prima painter's handbook, but man - this was a challenge.  I also suppose this could be considered my first "dragon" painting.  Though I prefer to think of the beasty as an overgrown snapping turtle.  The finished drawing below for some comparison.

During the painting of all that water, I decided that the little silhouetted shaman/priest fellow on the cliff had to go.  I think it works a little better for the composition and storytelling (I like cliches as much as the next guy, but this was definitely a decision that I was more in love with 8 months ago than now), plus it was a complete pain to keep painting around him...

Oh, and I also managed to spell the file name incorrectly - yay, English.

A Delaware Christmas

A Delaware Christmas, 21x30, oil on canvas....And sketches.

This year's Christmas/Holiday Card for the high school.  I will forgo my usual hesitancies with my own artwork and come out and say that I'm really pleased with this painting.  It was some of the most fun and fulfilling work I've spent at the canvas in a while.

More Joan Progress

Had some time between classes this week, so I started slapping down some of the background.  It's a lot of real estate, but hopefully it won't take too long once I get cooking.  The hair and the beginnings of the armor are from the last spurt of free time I had about a month ago.

Works in Progress

One drawing and one painting.

The good, the bad, the mystic...

Every gunslinger worth his salt needs a magic magenta winchester...

This also ended up looking a little more like me than I wanted...well me minus about 75 pounds...

More hhhwip

As it stands on the easel, right now.

A quick B-dub photo to see how values are coming along.  Think things are going well...may knock the mountains around the left shoulder back a bit more, and add a few more darks into the face, but I'm pretty happy with the value overall.  This however does fail to mention the HUGE amount of refining that still has to go into the figure...Hopefully have this off the easel by the end of the weekend.

Mystic Gunfighter gets rollin'

So, got some paint rolling on this over the past couple of days. Pretty happy so far, I'm digging the way the background is coming along, and it was definitely fun to paint. I haven't tried tackling a spacey kind of background in a good 5 years, and some of the pointers that Donato Giancola tossed out in his DVD on the topic definitely proved invaluable. And this turned out to be a ton of fun. The color may have gotten away from me a little bit, perhaps a tad more full spectrum than I was initially gunning for, but I've always been blown away by the photos from "way out where the lights don't shine" where you can see the whole Milky Way just blazing across the sky. So hopefully I got a little of that here. Plan to knock out the rest of the background over the next couple of days (fingers crossed).

IMC 2010

In a word: Wow.

In many words:

Begin stream of consciousness...

I spent the week of June 12-18 up in Amherst, MA at the Illustration Masterclass, and it was without a doubt the best experience of my artistic life.

The class was created by the fantastic Rebecca Guay, and the other instructors included folks such as Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Donato Giancola, Dan Dos Santos, Scott Fischer, Greg Manchess, and Irene Gallo, with special guest appearances by James Gurney and Jeremy Jarvis.  The class is open to anyone who wants to enroll and a choice of assignments is given beforehand, each student is to choose one to work on during the course of the class.

I don't know if I can truly encapsulate the whole experience into any kind of coherent statement, it was a crazy week full of new people, new ideas, fresh takes on old ideas, reinforcement of skills, and everything in between.  I met a ton of great people, most of whom I will hopefully keep in contact with for a long while to come.  So here goes...

The class started with a good old fashioned critique of everyone's sketches, it was just like school we hung everything up on the wall and the faculty went through each one and gave feedback.  It was straight up with what worked, what didn't and how to fix it, and it looked kind of like this:

Needless to say, this took a while.  The class was about 85 students total, and we broke into two separate groups and I was in the upstairs group whose critique was run by Donato, Dan, Boris and Julie, and Irene.  We clocked our critique in at just over 5 hours, the downstairs group which was headed up by Greg, Scott, Jeremy, Rebecca and Jim finished in around 9 or 10 hours.  Word has it there was a lot more "fun with tracing" in the downstairs group with Scott, Rebecca, and Greg drawing all over everyone's sketches.  While the critique portion did take a while, it was incredibly informative to hear the feedback about others' work, and for me, some of the most critical ideas and concepts came from the notes I got during this session.  The critique also served to show that there was some serious skill on display at the class.  About a quarter of the students in the class are pros already.

So I didn't take a shot of my initial sketch (the assignment I chose was Joan of Arc), but after the crit and some time at the drawing board, it looked like this:

The drawing had started with two additional figures, kind of like a personal guard, with big old two handed swords.  The very first comment I got from the instructors was to lose the extra figures, which is funny since my first thumbnail for the piece was Joan floating like this with her banner, and I then proceeded to spend a dozen or so pages trying to figure out how to "fill up" the rest of the composition.  Big mistake, the figures were just filler and it showed, one of many things learned - if it's not essential to the piece, it shouldn't be in the piece.  So Joan is the focal point, make the painting about Joan.  So with this in mind I moved on into the painting and over the next four days (and nights) or so ended up with this:

I got some good feedback on this along the way, but overall I wasn't really that happy with it.  I realized that in general, I had come into the class very under prepared, and that was perhaps the best thing that could have happened.  Well, maybe not the best, but it forced me to really look at how I was approaching my art, about how I should never take anything for granted and always make sure what I'm doing is as good as I can possibly make it.  

As the week went on, a lot of us started talking about what our big "take away" was from the class.  For some, it was this or that bit of technical information or way of handling paint, and at the time I said that my big "take away" was that I was going to go home and do the painting over but twice as big.  One of Greg Manchess's first comments to me was that the painting was a bit small (16x24).  So that led to me getting back home and rethinking my reference and redrawing my sketch (at 16x24) and ending up with this:

and this:

The original is that puny little thing at the bottom...

Greg mentioned that he often keys the size of his paintings the main figure's face, just to make sure he has enough room to really work out all of the essential details.  I had really started to work bigger before I left for the class, but I wasn't sure how much room I would have at Amherst, so I opted to bring the 16x24 board and just hack it out, mistake number two.  So this is where I'm at right now, I don't think this is the biggest painting I've ever done, but it's the biggest in a while.

Back to that "take away" from the class.  Mine really wasn't doing a big painting, the real take away that I got from the IMC was community.  I love fantasy and sci-fi art, it's what got me interested in art in the first place from the very first comic books that I cracked open, to the first time I saw a Boris Vallejo painting in the bookstore and made sure that my parents didn't see me looking at it, or the first time I discovered that Frazetta was FRAZETTA, to the first copy of Spectrum that I picked up and saw Greg and Dan and Scott and Donato's work and thought, "man, where have I been to have not been looking at this stuff all along."

Maybe it was college, and to some extent growing up, and feeling like fantasy and scifi and all the fun stuff was just supposed to be for kids (or nerds, dorks, or whatever, your pejoratives will not phase me). And especially having that reinforced by art instructors who didn't even feel that I should be working with representation.  But that's neither here nor there.  IMC opened my eyes to a whole community of like-minded people, hell, it opened the door to that community, and the great thing was that everyone was basically standing there saying, "come on in."  That was another thing that blew me away, here are all these people who didn't exist beyond the printed page for me a month ago, and now I've met them, I've talked with them, they've critiqued my work, we've joked around, we've partied together...They're real folks, and they're really good folks.  As I mentioned earlier, I hope to stay in contact with as many of the people that I met at the IMC for as I can for as long as I can.  

Starting to ramble and gush here, better wrap it up before it gets ugly... 

The IMC let me walk into the world that I love and always wanted to be a part of as far as my art is concerned, and it showed me that everyone working in that world is a real person who is doing just that - working, and the only requirement for being a part of the world comes back to something I tell my students all the time (which may be corny but hey I am a high school teacher after all):

"It's like Nike Art - just do it."

GBWIP#3

Hazy sky, now on to the water, which is proving... challenging.

GBWIP#2

The skin is mostly done, now on to the craggy shell.  I think I'll probably come back and try to play with some reflected color in the final stages of this.  Light bouncing up from the water and such.  As well as fix up the oddball highlight on the right arm.  I got a bit carried away with my whites, and realized that that arm would more than likely be in the shadow of the nearby cliff, and therefore not have a striking edge light. Ah well, easier to fix when it's dry.

The GB WIP

Plan on wrapping up all of the skin tomorrow.  Also, I am enjoying painting on canvas, as opposed to board, greatly.

And I go to bed this evening sad, having just learned that Frank Frazetta passed away.  People have all kinds of heroes, one of mine happened to be an illustrator who usually said he'd rather be playing ball. 

'bout Time.

About time I get this off the easel.