Slow and steady is a great way to lose ...

I'm not even going to apologize for an eleven day absence, thats just terrible. Especially considering the meager amount of work I have to offer as penance. I'm making headway on this painting, but my jobs and freelancing gigs are cutting a good sized hole in my time. However,
having money is nice, so I suppose I'll just have to toughen up and sleep a little less.

This piece is so large that I've had to improvise an impromptu studio in my kitchen (formerly the home of the big effing mural). The space is actually working out pretty well, I may have to rethink the studio space a bit. Most likely not.

Belated updates ...

I know I promised pictures sooner, but lethargy is a powerful adversary. I haven't gotten much done yet, having only recently begun the background, but hopefully my progress will speed up as I go. Working on something this large is difficult for me because it takes so long to see results. For the most part I'm unhappy with anything I'm working on for the first 70% of the project, usually because I'm still uncertain if the whole thing is even going to work. On smaller pieces its easy to overcome the 70% barrier, but on larger pieces like this one it can be difficult to make the beginning steps not feel like work. These however, are all just excuses. Once I get a little more paint on the board the going will get easier, until then I'll just have to suck it up.

In less bitchy news, "Stranger in a Strange Land" sold . Fairly quickly too, from what I could tell. So, if your reading this, thank you very much for your support, it nice to know people dig what I do.

Cake Town ...

Just a quick piece I did for The Prince of Cake as a part of his new 'Cake Town' links page. Basically, he asked anyone he deemed link-worthy to do their own personal rendition of one of his characters. This is probably one of the coolest ideas I've heard in a while, and I'm a little bummed I didn't think of it first.

I'll be starting my next big piece this weekend, so expect some progress photos in the near future.

A Stranger in a Strange Land ...

After finishing up the mural, I immediately got started on a smaller piece for next months Hive group show. I basically cranked this out in one weekend, starting on Friday and wrapping it up around 7am this morning.

I decided for this one that I'd actually do a more comprehensive process walk through. Mostly, I like posting this kind of stuff because its the kind of thing I like to hear about when I look at other peoples work. So here goes:

I start out the character by painting in its silhouette in the local color. The local color I choose is usually for the most prominent aspect of the character, in this case his armor. That local color is then used as the basis of all the other colors of the character. So for this guy all the colors you see, even the green of his skin and the white of his eyes came from that original red color.

After blocking in the silhouette, I render the portions of the character that are that color, and then block in the next piece. I tend to work from back to front when I paint to save me the hassle of having to paint around things and keep them looking dimensional.

After the black sleeves are rendered the silver armor bits are added and then rendered, followed by the right hand, which is done later because its over everything else.


Heres a better example of my actual rendering process. Staring from the local value I render in the shadows, I do the shadows first because they give me a better idea of the form of the object. After the shadows are in I start adding the lighter values. I then repeat the process from blocking to rendering with the eyes and lips.

"Stranger in a Strange Land"

The last steps are to add texture and then finally outlines. The outlines are probably the most important part as they bring everything else together, and tighten up the rendering.

Not bad for a weekends work. Busting back to back all nighters kinda takes me back to my good old Otis days. By the way thanks as always to my good friends Rockstar and Cheez-Its, my one-two combo in the fight against deadlines. Check this piece out at the Hive next Saturday for a cool $100. Toodles.