Painting

So, over the past year, I've been working on this painting. I have this large roll of watercolor paper that I've been lugging around for about ten years now, and I thought hey, why don't I prime it and paint something really big? It'll have a nicer texture than canvas, I won't have to stretch anything, and when was the last time I made anything larger than ~16"x20" anyways?

Oil on Paper, tentatively called Urban Dreamscape 2

Yeah. This is 3.5'x4'. Yes, that's feet. I finished it last week and was so pleased, very happy with how it turned out and that I actually FINISHED the thing (to be honest I could work on it forever, but I had a friend whose judgment I trust look at it, give me a list of stuff to fix, and once that was complete I took it off the wall to force myself to stop). 

However.

Now I have to get it framed. There's a full framing studio at my day job, so they can help me, except that I think the painting is awfully close to full size of the glass sheets we have in stock, and it won't fit in my little car without being folded, it's taking up the entire floor of my office, and I'm not entirely certain why I thought this size was a good idea. 

At least it's much lighter than masonite?

Here are some detail shots: apologies for the quality, as they were taken with my phone while my real camera charges, and the paper doesn't exactly lie flat.

 

 

This is a sort of prequel to the above painting, where I'd started working on the idea of showing layered landscapes with a history of human development/influence. I'm still very much working on how I want to use paint, what kind of texture, how much detail, etc. All the things that painting on the computer just doesn't quite manage.

 

Oil on canvas, tentatively Urban Dreamscape 1

Starstuff

This image was inspired by this post by Emily Finke, who is a friend of mine. She puts it far more eloquently than I can, but the idea that we are all starstuff is one that resonates me and I wanted to try to figure out a way to convey it visually. I have no idea if it works for anyone besides me. I felt that anything literal would end up looking cheesy and worse, not convey the grandeur. Just picture it, a figure filed with stars courtesy of the power of Photoshop! Yeah, no.

The drawing was just in my sketchbook so the original is approximately 14"x11", but I think the appropriate size for this concept would be wall, or possibly billboard, with the flower very small in comparison to the entire composition. Drawn with Prismacolor marker and brush pen.

assorted

The first two were sketched in Corel Painter, the last is an older graphite drawing.

Post-apocalyptic saurapods

Old, but my website has been infested with malware, so I figured I might as well re-post some stuff.

In retrospect, having him strike a pose was a bad idea

Dragon skeleton! So I decided to try to come up with a reasonable shoulder structure for a six limbed dragon. Here's the front half at least--I'm not entirely happy with the results, but I was getting tired of picking away at in my sketchbook.

EDIT: Forgot to say that the wings are purely decorative. This dragon probably has a lovely mating dance.
 

And also, here's a knight jousting on a Gorgosaurus, the most serious of all dinosaurs.

TAM2012 pt2

Forgot one! This goes with the previous post.

TAM2012 sketchbook edition

I attended TAM2012 last weekend, and as I do, I brought along a sketchbook. These are all pages that I drew during the four days I was at the conference. 

Big bird here was something that I sketched out while hanging around the hallway where exhibition booths were. I was thinking of a therizinosaur when drawing, although it's by no means accurate, and unfortuately I totally told a whole group of people the wrong way to pronounce that name, and they took my word for it. I DID qualify that I was probably wrong, but it didn't matter. 

The rest of these were done during the various talks/lectures/panels. This is obviously what you draw during a skeptics convention. 

Sloths were requested, sloths were drawn. Also, I need to get a smart phone so that I don't have to demand that my friend look up sloth noses for me because I can't remember what they look like (answer: weird).

The tiny drawing of a map is the one example of actual notes that I took about what I was listening to while drawing all this. I thought the phrase "a map doesn't equal the land" was a nice way of summing up the same concept that  The Treachery of Images does. I'd like to say there's some sort of relation to the velociraptor and giraffe in disguise, but, no, I think I started out riffing on the speaker that talking about how we form our concept of self. And, er, fairly certain that at no point did the speaker say a thing about velociraptors. 

The person towards the bottom was one of the more vehement speakers. 

The bear comes directly from one of the lectures, where the speaker was using the different forms teddy bears have taken over the years as an example of what qualities we find cute, and how humanoid cartoons/toys/etc tend to become "cuter" over time. This is not an example of that. The sketch in the upper right is a study of part of the curtains above the stage.

There were a few different speakers that brought up optical illusions as examples of ways your brain tries and fails to perceive images correctly. This stuff is interesting to me, except that the topic always seems to be presented by someone who has never taken a drawing class, and has never realized that if you're attempting to draw with any sort of realism, you're creating an optical illusion. I mean, that's why linear and atmospheric perspective works, and if it's done right you don't even notice, whereas the standard optical illusions scream out that there's something wacky going on here.

This image is Bring Your Own Symbolism. Seriously, it started as a doodle that just got out of hand. Points to anyone who can guess what the scribbles at the bottom towards the left are supposed to represent (hint: a physicist was talking)

And lastly, a more serious dino-rider. For a given value of serious, at least.