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.

More Holiday Card

And not figure work, boy did last night's session kick my butt.  We took a couple of weeks off from our figure drawing session at the Dover Art League and I was feeling it last night when we picked back up.  Not to mention I situated myself in about the worst place I could - every pose was foreshortened hell.  Enough with the excuses though...but I'm still not posting any of what came out of last night.  Instead, some more work on the CRHS holiday card.

Studies for the other two carolers, I didn't have as many poses to choose from for these guys, but these two will work fine.  Will probably still do a few more sketches before paint, just to make sure I nail down the likenesses a bit better.

And here is the working comp that I okayed with the principal this afternoon.  Carolers front and center, the wreath will frame behind them with a pic of the high school inside it, and the Leyendecker-borrowed scroll with an old english-esque CRHS will close off the bottom.

I'll project everything to canvas on Monday and then start laying paint on Tuesday.  I'll take a bunch of pictures along the way.  And, deadline - Thanksgiving.

Also, this Friday's kicker - I made a video! Definitely not saving the world with this, but I had to do some video work for my grad class, and it was an interesting learning experience.  I'm definitely going to try and hone my skills with this and get some more up in the future.  Enjoy, and don't be to harsh.

Carolers

Well, it's time to start in on the high school's Holiday card, and the sketches came together earlier on this year during an in-service.  I typically take the opportunity to incorporate my boys into the card, but I was feeling something a little different this year.  There are a few elements that seem to make recurring appearances - scrolls, wreathes, maybe a street light.  But the main thrust of this year's card will be a group of carolers.

Some of the vocal jazz students were kind enough to costume up and pose for me.  They actually sang during the reference shoot, so that was super cool - definitely got better facial expressions than just asking them to fake it.  This is the first batch of sketches for two of the carolers, more will be up next Tuesday, along with quite a bit of progress on the finish.

Pieces

 

Something a bit different.  A few pieces of larger images that I can't quite show all of.  Soon though. Soon.  More MTG sample work in the next post.

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.

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.

Thumbthing

MGF

Hanging in the studio encased in a cocoon, this specimen will emerge as an oil painting in approximately 4-6 weeks.

Negligence Avoidance

So it's been a while...

Went to the Illustration Master Class back in June, and it was definitely the best experience of my professional life.  Will gush about this in a forthcoming post (sooner, not later).

In the meantime, some sketches from our little excursion to Cape May for the week.  And even though it's beautiful, I was still firing on fantasy overload from the IMC...so none of them have anything to do with Cape May.  Alas.

Bard. Me. Me Bard...

A little progress post.

Another piece from The Hobbit, as well as the "How do I work?" category.  I feel like I'm getting closer to figuring things out.  The beasty from the last post definitely got me thinking in more step-by-step terms, a set process to work through, if you will.  But I'm still not totally sold on a few issues.  I may just be hard-headed at this point...

This is Bard, and as I'm not sure if my Mom has finished reading the book yet, I'll leave it at that.

A little sharpie thumbnail, was digging this.  Lots of energy.

Learning from mistakes.  This is a terrible drawing, I debated not posting it.  I may yet remove it.  But it serves a purpose for the moment - this is out of my head, going off of the sketch above, and it is useless.  It solves no compositional problems, it's stiff, inaccurate, and just plain bad.  Now I think I may leave it up, just to shame myself into never drawing like this again...

My faithful assistant, getting ready to give some critique...

"Something looks a little off..."

"There.  I fixed it."

I had a lot of reference for this one, so I'm not gonna post all of them, but in summary:  I did pose using a stick and a curtain rod for the bow and arrow, and I definitely took a picture of one of our stew pots to get ideas on reflected metal... So here is the drawing thus far:

Well, that's not quite how the drawing stands, I finished most of it up (I think) before I sat down to post this.  Originally, I wasn't going to make this a self-portrait, but then I figured I might as well go for it, as I haven't done one in a while, Bard is a pretty cool character, and I didn't feel like looking up another face to plop on my figure.  I also haven't worked this realistically in a while, we'll see where this goes.  I'm not sure if I want to continue working with this much realism, but I have a feeling it may be good for me to really crank out some polished pieces.  Plan from here is to get a copy made of this drawing (it's 20x30, I just wanted to do something big) then mount the copy to masonite, seal it in, and then paint.  I'll make another brief post when I've got the painting surface ready.

One last note, I should have done a quick reread before I started drawing.  It's a thrush that comes to Bard, not a raven.  Ah well, at least I'll have a self-portrait out of it.  And another thing that this particular piece is teaching me, is that there is ALWAYS so much more to learn.  And after chewing on that a bit, I find it incredibly refreshing.

Art Procedural

So I got distracted this week with a challenge from the great blog ArtOrder.  Going off of the prompt and Mr. Schindehette's description, it seems like pure cheese...my favorite kind.

Plus I got off of my butt and did some process shots as well, so here goes part II of that challenge - Anthropomorphized critter (probably will be read as a vulture by most, but he's a turkey buzzard at heart):

The initial scribble.

The next scribble.  I liked the first one more.

Some thumbs to get my comp in order, I was feeling more of a portrait look for our carrion friend.

Working sketch.  Lots of Mad Max in this, as well as a bit of glare off the graphite.

Painting in progress with a few little tweaks from the sketch.

Things gleaned thus far:

         1.  It pays to hunt for reference material.

         2.  It pays to develop that working sketch as much as possible.

Funny how I tell these things to my students all the time and then think I can skip them...

Oh and here's that spider, I didn't forget completely:

The Hobbit.

When I was eight years old (I think) my Dad read me The Hobbit before I went to sleep.  I don't remember how many nights it took, probably many more than he needed to spend, but I have always remembered him taking the time to do this.

It was the most fantastic stuff I had ever heard of, little people called hobbits, dwarves, trolls, goblins, great eagles, Gandalf the wizard, a big guy who turns into a great bear, elves, spiders, a dragon, stolen gold under a mountain, and a grand adventure.  I was hooked, what's not to love?

Lots of artists have tackled Tolkien's extraordinary world, that being the case I think back to a quote I heard from an artist not long ago, "If you keep trying to be original, you'll wake up one day a shriveled old man that's done nothing.  Just make sure you're being authentic."  If I can get these pictures to look anywhere close to what I saw in my head when I heard The Hobbit for the first time 18 years ago and what I see when I read it now, I think I'll be doing OK.  And even though this is a personal undertaking, these images are just as much for my Dad as they are for me.

"Queer Lodgings"  one of many scenes of feasting and deep talking, this time in the house of Beorn.

Looking now, there are some real ugly passages yet...pay those no mind.  Graphite on thrice gessoed illustration board.  Plan is to spray the drawing with fixative then lay oils on top.  I've seen a really good illustrator do this to great effect...I have no idea how it will work for me.  The other purpose of these Hobbit pieces is also to try and find a good way of getting the drawing into the painting, this being the first method of a couple that I'm trying.