As part of my continued exploration and in painting and fantasy design, I have been working on the Bird Whisperer project. These are two of the birds I painted over the past four months. Unfortunately I’ve had to take a short break from painting feathers to focus on the looming Spectrum Fantastic Art Live show which I will be a part of next month. But hopefully I’ll be back to painting birdies soon enough.

Sirens and the Art Order Journal

Back in February I decided to finally bring my Sirens illustration to a conclusion. I used the ‘Month of Love’ challenge on Tumblr as an excuse to push through and get this painting done before the end of the month. I succeeded! the painting was done in time. Unfortunately the curator of the month of love challenge chose, for whatever reason, not to share it.  I’ll admit I was a bit dejected and sort of forgot about the painting for a few months.

Fortunately, I didn’t forget about the painting altogether and decided to give it another shot. I submitted it to Art Order Publishing for consideration to be included in the Salon section of the Art Order Journal, a successfully funded kickstarter.com art book which will include works from industry legends such as: Brom, Donato Giancola, Rebecca Guay, Allen Williams, Jon Foster, James Gurney, Jean-Baptiste Monge, Mark A. Nelson, Marc Scheff, Tony DiTerlizzi, and Paul Bonner to name just a few of the amazing talents featured in this book.

To have my work included in a book with artists of this quality and renowned is extremely humbling and a bit intimidating.  It has been a long time coming and a lot of blood sweat and tears, but in the end, finishing this painting, the idea for which was born and begun back in 2010, has been on of the most rewarding experiences of my artistic career.

Be sure to pre-order your copy of the Art Order journal today!

Try try again

Five years ago I had an idea. I thought it was a pretty good idea so I tried really hard and worked out all the bugs to set myself up for success. I tried as hard as I have on any project to make it the best it could be. I got near to the end of the project when it became apparent that somewhere along the line, I had made a mistake. That mistake was compounded by additional mistakes that culminated in a stinking mess which is now physically painful to behold. Sure it had it’s redeeming qualities, but the overwhelming cumulative effect of the bad decisions overshadowed those qualities and obscured what was still a very good idea.

Bellow is the final result of the best of my efforts at the time:

I could list every place that I went wrong in this piece, but instead, I’ll just say that it all starts with the drawing. The composition is weak at best and the anatomy, despite my best efforts, left much to be desired.

Fast forward to about a year ago. I plucked this idea back out from the dust bin and decided to give it another go. This time I decided to really focus on challenging myself with the composition. I really pushed the idea of overlapping the figures and trying to create more interaction between them.

However, once again I was thwarted by my own bad decisions. The anatomy was still pretty weak and I just flat out jacked up a few of the faces. I got this one into the color study phase before I shelved in once again.

About a month ago I decided to give this idea yet another treatment. This time I was determined to work out every last detail before I went to the final. I started by revamping the concept a bit. Instead of having a sailer being drowned by Sirens (yes I know they aren’t the classical Sirens of Greek Mythology, but I think it would lose a lot of the charm if they had bird bodies) I decided to change the sailor to a fighter pilot. Perhaps he was flying over the sea when he heard the Sirens’ song and it compelled him to irrationally bail out of his aircraft.

To safe guard against bad drawing, I have committed to drawing and redrawing every part of this illustration until it is absolutely perfect. Or at least as close as I can get it before I am driven mad by the Sirens’ song myself.

Here are a few of my current layouts and a toned drawing. Hopefully this will only require a few more passes before I have all the bugs worked out.

The above sketch was still fairly early on in the process. I hadn’t even decided to change the sailor to an airman yet.

Here I inked the jump suit right over a printout of the drawing.

Finally I managed to get all of the faces to a relative place of acceptability and the bodies look ok as well… I guess. So next it was on to the tone drawing.

Bellow are a few crappy iphone pics I took to give you a rough idea of where I am at right at this moment.

This might actually be the first toned paper drawing I’ve ever done, so take that into consideration when judging it.

In conclusion, even though I have spent a ridiculous amount of time on this project, I have to say it really has been worth it. I’ve learned a lot about how I work and I think I’ve really grown as an artist. Hopefully I can grow as an artist and actually produce a piece that is eye worthy this time around.

 

Monsters of Rock!

(Click on image for more pixels)

Here is my sketch up process for the Monsters of Rock t-shirt design I’m currently working on for the bad ‘Cherry Pie’. As you can see, I’ve been having lots of fun. I’m currently working on the painting and will have an update on that soon!

Recent work

 

Here are a few of my most recent creations!