Working away...

The time always slips away during the holidays... here is a bit more progress on the forest illustration.

Mini Oil Illustration

I found a little mini oil panel I made a few years back and liked the shape of it so I decided to sketch a little landscape illustration on there. The initial name I came up for it was Bridge to Nowhere, but that could change. There's a figure with pet standing on the edge of a cobblestone path or wooden foot bridge overlooking a vast lake to the city on the other side dwarfed by some crazy mountain peaks. In the lake will be ships with colorful sails traveling to and from the distant city. I also sketched up a little mini value study with markers.

Illustration Progress

I did a bit more on the forest illustration and sharpened things up a bit. I'm at the phase where I really need to start writing up a more defined story behind the scene, and start doing some research on what the figures will look like.

The Start of a New Illustration

I haven't done an illustration in ages because I've been focusing so much on oil painting, studies, and compositions this past year. Well... I think it's about time I take something to a finish. Here's the start with the thumbnail comp it is based off of.

 

Camel Painting

Saturday's class was focusing on contrasting colors and how they interact. So here's an orange camel with a teal background. There are a few flowers tossed in there for good measure. This was a lot of fun to paint, and it was very interesting to see all of the teals in the shadows of the camel. Color and light work in fascinating ways.

Even more comps!

I do too many of these... but they are a good way to throw something down fast and hopefully create a good composition that I can use for an illustration or concept. I think I got maybe one good one out of this batch. Success!  I tried using a hard square brush on these to change things up.

Painting Light

No... I'm not trying to be the painter of light, but I did paint light though. A small lamp to be precise. It was tricky painting this because you get the glow of the lamp shade plus the glow/haze sphere from the light bulb itself that completely blows my eyes out every time I look at it. I really enjoyed painting this scene. It was a new fun little challenge to figure out. I found out that I really like painting books! I kind of want to go buy some ratty torn up book from the 1800s so I can paint em!

Color Keys based on Thomas Moran

Here's the first batch of color keys I painted based off of the Thomas Moran swatch page I created. I used a different swatch palette for each painting and used his paintings as a guide to understand what colors are used where.

Thomas Moran Swatches

So I thought it might be a good idea to give this a try. I took a bunch of Thomas Moran paintings and color picked out a bunch of colors from each painting to figure out some of the color schemes he is using. My thought is to see the differences between Sky, Foreground, Background, and Water colors. It was cool to see how the colors are all broken up.

I got this idea from watching "Color Theory: The Mechanics of Color" with Richard Keyes ; one of the Gnomon Workshop training videos. He didn't talk about the swatch thing in the videos, but was talking about color harmonies in paintings and how early 1900's landscape painters used Green Red compliments for foreground, and Yellow Purple compliments for background. It's a pretty interesting video, and now that I'm oil painting I'm trying to figure out how the hell I'm supposed to use color.

Anyways... here's what I ended up with:

Pumpkin Still Life

Last weekend we painted a pumpkin still life in class. Nice way to start off the Halloween weekend!

Plein Air Paintings

I decided to try my hand at Plein Air Painting. There's no better way to learn how to paint environments from imagination than to paint them in real life... out in the elements. It's also a lot of fun! These are all from the past few months, and painted in various places around San Diego County.

First Post

Welp, for my first post I'm going to toss up some of the thumbnail compositions and speed paintings I did earlier in the year. Might as well play a lil catch up!