Every Day is Halloween

i've got a very small painting hanging in this upcoming group show. it's fun to pull out the old "traditional" paintings now and again and marvel at the lack of the undo button. the opening is this Saturday 7-10 PM, see 'ya there.

a funny thing happened on the way to Wrightwood

they reopened the 2 highway to Wrightwood recently after a five year closer so i thought i'd drive up and do a little painting Sunday. packed the laptop but forgot the "Black box" that blocks the screen from the sun. a crucial part of digital plein air. so i drove back and painted this from imagination instead.

ice and rock

i drew so much ice and rock on Brother Bear it's like second nature now. a quick study over the weekend.

20 minutes

done while waiting for an approval on a design......

close values , matte painting and realism

one of the main ways that paintings can look "real" is the conservation of value and keeping value areas consistent. here's a great example. it's a matte painting by Peter Ellenshaw and you can see how narrow the value change in the distant background really is. by modeling within this narrow range the reality of the whole image is maintained. it does take great skill to do this and the smallest value change will be enough to indicate a difference.

more invented land

(updated with block in) i think i'm getting the "scrubby bush" look on hills to work better now. it's 85% form and 15% texture. gotta get the form first, major planes then minor, then sub forms....then texture. all invented, no photo textures. spent more time on the initial block in and silhouettes. makes all the difference..

Sunday Sketch

(updated:fixed top left of mountain and added brush) another invented landscape. the focus on this one was trying to get a brush that helps with the dense broccoli like trees. need some more refinement on that idea still i think.

Custom Brushes

this image is entirely hand painted. it was an exercise in mimicking the impression of photo reality but without any actually photo textures. i looked carefully at each area and made a brush that best mimicked the visual noise. the clouds were the simplest. it's just a chalk brush with a little scattering because that's the impression it gave. the foliage generally needed a few brushes. the block in took only about 20 minutes but the rest i did spend hours on. mostly thinking and planning and not so much wrist time.i hope to do more of this because it was so educational.

VUE 7

started playing around with Vue again the other day. here's something built and rendered in Vue and then touched up in photoshop. clouds are real. hope to do more soon.

Saturday evening sketch

just trying to make time for more of these. i always learn something when i do. completely from scratch btw.

matte paintings from Gone With the Wind

for fun i went through and captured all the matte paintings that jack cosgrove and his crew did for GWTW. there's probably more but the these were the most obvious candidates. and yes, that's my idea of fun :)

new cover

Pat Wilshire is putting together a book on several artists. Myself, Mark Zug, Paul Lehr and Justin Sweet to name a few. finished the cover over the weekend. all made up, no reference, all digital

it was a dark and rainy week

so i painted another soft light oil. so many close values.

Snowbound

the most recent morning sketch. i'm really liking the open ended nature of these sketches and seeing where they end up. this one for example, not sure if it's surfacing from a frozen lake or some futuristic snow plow.