We Got a Winner!

 

Every year my favorite art store hosts painting contests based on different brands of paints, color pencils, pastels and more and every year I plan to enter one and somehow, I end up missing out. Well this year I made sure to enter the fall painting contest for Soho brand paints, and ended up receiving honorable mention, which is awesome. 

The painting that placed was “Michonne” done in Acrylics on Canvas. It took me about 5 hours or so to complete. As with most of my work, I started with a rough sketch, (in this case I sketched it in Photoshop). This was followed by a detailed under drawing on canvas. After which, I sprayed the canvas with workable fixative and began to paint. This painting is probably one of the most complete paintings I’ve done, it has not only the face of my subject but accessories her to identify her.  You can watch the process of painting “Michonne” below, or by visiting my youtube channel. 

Rough Photoshop Sketch

Final Sketch Close-up

Painting With Oil Pastels

Happy Holidays everyone! Recently I completed a pastel portrait as a holiday gift and it turned out pretty darn good. I hadn’t worked in pastels in over 10 years but for this particular project, I decided to break out a stash of soft oil pastels and see how it would turn out.  

The tools I used in this project were:

·      Mungyo Soft Oil Pastels

·      Blending Stump

·      Acrylic Paint

·      Krylon Spray Varnish

The portrait part of this painting was done entirely from the pastels and I chose to use acrylics for the background. I found that painting with pastels is really quite similar to painting with oils or acrylic paint. I did however find that it’s a little bit difficult to get fine detail with the pastel crayons but I was able to gesture in or suggest certain details as opposed to making them finely detailed. I also found that instead of using mounted canvas as my subsurface, I could have used pastel or Bristol paper or un-stretched canvas. All in all, I’ll definitely do more pastel work in the future, so stay tuned.

New project #1

As of today I have 3 pretty big projects I’d like to get done before the end of the year. One of which is a long overdue portrait of an awesomely cool little boy who just so happens to be my son *smiles*. This portrait is going to be a digital painting. Why you may ask, simply, right now it’s easier. I may go afterward and do this same painting in traditional medium but I hadn’t decided, I’ve really been having fun drawing and painting with my tablet lately. I do plan to post this one to my YouTube Channel so stay tuned. The intention with this composition is to paint my son after the likeness of his ancestor who shares his same name.

Practice Makes Perfect

11 minute drawing

  In my spare time, I enjoy reading about and looking up different artists and their work and one thing they all have in common is that they practice their craft. Just as Michael Jordan worked on his jump shots or the Williams sisters work on their tennis, in order to become great, you must practice. In school it was easy, I was practically forced to practice with live model drawing and painting sessions along with various assignments but outside of school, it takes a bit of work to get into the habit of practicing. Recently I found a cool site called pixelovely that allows you to set up sessions where they’ll show you figures or animals in different poses, very much like those figure drawing classes in college. You may have a few 30 second poses on up to 11 minute poses or longer.

  As I started with the 30 second poses, I was awful… man o man, I was rusty but in one 30 minute session, I went from awful to not half bad and that was just in one session. Imagine what could be done with continuous practice over a length of time… As someone once said, each time you draw [or paint], you get better and better. So here are some of my sketches from last night’s practice session, the good, bad and down right ugly :-)

5 minute drawing

2 minute drawing

kyuubi-susanoo fusion

One of my favorite Anime Shows/Manga is Naruto. For those who have no idea what Naruto is, it’s basically an epic coming of age story about a boy in the world of Shinobi (ninjas) who’s body is a vessel for a powerful creature known as the nine tailed fox. This boy (Naruto) wants badly to be recognized by his village and also wants to save his best friend who as become a rogue ninja. So the digital painting that I created his based on one of the most recent chapters of this saga where Naruto and his rogue buddy Sasuke are actually teamed up for a common cause and in doing so have morphed their powers to create this hybrid entity seen above.

I completed this painting over a series of 4 or 5 days and in total it took me about 5 hours or so to complete. I did something in this piece that I don’t normally do, I didn’t sketch this out before hand, and I allowed the audience to see my drawing process in the video, nevertheless, I think it looks pretty darn good. I hadn’t done a complete digital painting in some years and I had a blast getting back into the groove. As always, I edited the video in Blender and you can check out the making of Kurama-Susanoo Fusion below.

Starting Anew

My First Painting circa 2003

Art has always been a great love of mine. From doodling in elementary school to completing full on reproductions in high school, making images has always been my thing. Nevertheless in recent years, I’ve been a bit lazy when it comes to creating and have found myself having a bit of a creator’s block. It’s a little like falling down that metaphorical rabbit hole and not really knowing what to do. So to remedy that, I’ve decided to start fresh. Over this past year, I’ve done a little bit better for myself, creating a whopping 5 or 6 works, and get this…recording myself doing it. ^_^. It’s been a great and fun journey, one I’d like to share with you. So, join me here and check out my creations.