I've moved to London!

Well, as some of you may know, I got a job as a matte painter at Framestore CFC in London. I've been here about a month and a half now and I can finally say I'm reasonably settled in, so I thought I'd take a moment to finally update my blog after half a year of neglect. I've had to immediately focus on work and setting up my infrastructure, so I haven't had time to do any art on the side yet, but expect some soon. I'm going to Salzburg and Amsterdam for the Christmas break and I hope to do some sketching while I'm there. Cheers!

New Character and Vehicle Designs

Here's a couple of new character and vehicle designs I've been working on. The top one is a heroine and her sidekick based on the main personalities of the Chinese creation myth. The god Pangu created the world, then Nuwa created people. At some point after creation the world fell into chaos and Nuwa struggled to restore order to the world. Sounds like an excellent inspiration for a super heroine to me. I think I might develop their backstory further in the future. I had a bit of a struggle with getting all the reflections to work well in her suit. I think it was an excellent learning experience. I think I've got the mojo of the physics of it all down pretty well now.

I was inspired to do the second piece when I saw a kick-ass fully restored, cherry 1968 Camaro at a shop where Hally's car was being fixed. It was up on the hydraulic lift and I was able to really thoroughly examine it. It looked so aggresive and I imagined that it could make a pretty intimidating Mad-Max-style war machine in a post-apocalyptic world. voila.

The Realm of the Little People

I'm finally starting on a series of PhotoShop paintings. I'll be doing some environments, character designs and vehicle designs. Hope everyone enjoys them.

Sketchcrawl 14 sketches

I had the pleasure of being a part of sketchcrawl 14, which was a benefit for Emergency, an organization to help the civilian victims of war. I also attended the auction they held the next day. I was outbid on most of the art pieces I wanted to buy, but was very happy to win my bids for some very nice artwork by John Hoffman and Evelyn Hahn. I had a great time all around and you can't find a nicer and more creative group of people!

The first of these two sketches was done just before the sketchcrawl to warm up. I was very happy to find out that someone had bought it at the auction. The second was done during the crawl at Koit Tower in SF. I was blown away by the quality of the sketches from other artists on the crawl and I came to the conclusion that I need to practice sketching to improve my speed and to learn to create more aesthetically pleasing quick sketches. My sketches have always tended to be just studies for more extensive projects and I haven't focused on making them artful in themselves. Hopefully next time I'll come up with more I want to post.

Painting with Friends in Morgan Hill

I went painting in Morgan Hill with some old SJSU friends: Noah, Jackson, Dela, Nikki, Kendelle, Scott, and Jules. I managed to paint this old building in downtown. I'm finding architecture a bit of a struggle to create in plein air, but I plan to keep working on it. I think the secret is to treat it as shapes and colors just like anything else rather than try to do an architectural rendering in such a short time.

More paintings...

I did some outdoor painting in the Berkeley hills with Noah, Jackson, and Daniel last weekend. The top two pieces are what resulted. On the first piece I had the challenge of simplifying enormous amounts of visual information. It was pretty difficult and I learned a lot from it. For the second, my painting of the hillside was pretty dead and wasn't going anywhere, so I took inspiration from Noah's recent pushing of his artwork and decided to do the same with this one, taking it in a whimsical direction. I don't think I'd ever done anything quite like that before. The third painting was done the next day in my own backyard.

The last two paintings are the same ones from my previous post, but with more work added to them. I thought they had a lot of potential as pieces to put in the gallery, but felt they needed a bit more pizzaz. For the dirt road I brought out more of the colors in the shrubbery and developed the shadows more. I originally created the Monterey coastal cliff image just to practice rendering the rocks and didn't pay much attention to the composition at the time. As such, I felt the composition was too blandly horizontal and lacked a focal point. I added some opposing mass to it in the form of the kelp forest and added some interest with a cute little sea otter. I think people visiting Salinas/Monterey will like that. How can you resist one of those cute little fellas?

More plein air landscapes

After some busy weeks, I finally have time to update my blog. Here are some new plein air pieces I've done lately. I'm getting ready to do a lot more outdoor painting now that the weather's nice. I'm getting back into practice. I got a guerilla painter outdoor setup, which makes things much easier. It was a bit of a cluster*$&$ to do it the way I was doing it before. I've done about 10 or so lately and the first few were really bad. I'm only showing the good ones here. I think I'm all warmed up by now.

The first three were done on location then finished from photos that I took at the scene. I tried to just bring them to completion at home and not add too much extra information to them. I'm definitely learning that photos completely flatten the scene and kill the color. Not only that, they make the color choices for you, whereas when your on location, the colors sort of vibrate and change depending on adjustments your eyes are making to the environment.

The last painting was done very quickly with the intention of making it look good on-location, rather than depending on any studio work to bring it to completion. I've been making a lot of attempts at that and this one's halfway decent, but not quite there yet. That's really tough. I'm going to keep studying painters that are really good at quickly suggesting detail and make successful and aesthetically pleasing "quick reads" of scenes. I think it's a good skill to have. I plan to be posting some Photoshop paintings soon as well.

Painting with the flu

Well, right now I've got the worst flu I've had in years, so I can't really leave bed - but I can still do some digital painting. I thought this turned out pretty good. It's the view I'm stuck with of my bedroom. Maybe I'll try to paint some stuff on TV next.

Sunset in Big Sur

This is a new painting I did for the Salinas gallery. I used several photos I'd taken at Big Sur and Cozumel (just for the sky) as reference. I used the lighting from some photos and the rocks and water from other photos and used my imagination to figure out how those objects would look in the different light. It was pretty challenging, but it turned out pretty good I think.

At 24" by 36", this is the biggest painting I've ever done. It took 15 scans to get it all scanned into the computer - luckily I recently got a newer, faster scanner and it only took about 45 minutes to do that. I then carefully pieced it together in Photoshop. Unfortunately, the bright areas of the painting were bleached out a bit. I'll have to learn how to override the scanner's "smart" exposure adjustment in the future. (I don't think it's very smart in this case!)

This time I used acrylic instead of oil. The oil paintings just take so long to dry that I thought I should build up an inventory with some acrylic and multi-media paintings before I do more oils.