Drow vs Mindflayer part 2

So a week has gone by since I submitted my Drow vs Mindflayer to ArtOrder (yes, I know I just posted on the blog today... that pretty much sums up my blogging timetable). I've actually been able to get some more sleep at home, think about my piece a bit more, access my "virtual studio" of friends on Gorilla Artfare, skype and beyond, and do silly things like, say, google images of crossbows (that first drawing was clearly made up). I'm not sure I'm done with this painting yet, but I feel like I'm making headway in the right direction.

Vacation and Drow vs Mindflayer

Jon Schindehette is at it again on http://artorder.blogspot.com/. The challenge this time around was a book cover assignment, color, of a Drow (aka Dark Elf) fighting a Mind Flayer (if you don't know... well, it's a D&D thing). The span of the contest actually coincided with my vacation... perfectly. So perfectly that I emailed Jon before we left to ask if I could turn in my piece a half day late because we would be without internet until returning from vacation.

And so we were off to New Hampshire. Every year my in-laws rent a house in the Lake Sunapee area and my wife's family pops in and out over the two weeks (her parents and my family "hold down the fort" and 'suffer' through the whole two weeks of lounging lakeside). For Jon's challenge, it meant I was bringing my

sketchbook and my laptop and nothing else. I had no internet, no

reference pictures, no oil paints like I would typically use. Just me, some pencils and Painter/Photoshop. It was an interesting challenge for me, and

not really one I was prepared for. I was even less prepared for a 9 month old sleeping in our room and having several days of awful nighttime sleep-- so awful that one night the baby and I took a two hour car tour of western New Hampshire and Eastern Vermont at 1:30 in the morning. Admittedly, the dock on the lake in the early morning is beautiful (as the panorama shows-- my brother in law got up special to take this sunrise picture.

I was always too busy holding a baby at those hours to photograph anything). Somehow the lack of sleep killed my working method, and the finished product turned in to Jon, pictured here, was pretty weak. I would likely

have bailed on the submission altogether if I hadn't already talked to Jon about getting my piece in. Oh well. I've been working on the painting quite a bit since, and will get the updated version up later today-- I think some serious progress has been

made (though more to go before it's portfolio ready)

Slightly bigger version here

Gwenth and Garreth

Jon Schindehette has hosted a number of weekly challenges on his D&D and fantasy-art themed blog ArtOrder. His blog has quickly become one of my daily reads for insights into the industry and samples of great genre art. This week's challenge was a B&W vampire piece. Details can be read here. I will say, too many late nights and a jam packed weekend (facepainting at a local fundraiser in addition to lots of social engagements) caught up with me in the end, and I'm not in love with the final piece. There's a lot more refining that needed to happen in some of the drawing, and a quick reference shoot could have saved me some pain in pulling some forms out of thin air. Oh well-- deadlines are deadlines.

Digital Color Study

I have mixed feelings about revisiting old work, but in the end, I usually come back to the "finish it before you can move on" mentality. It may not be the most productive from a portfolio standpoint, but invariably I learn something new from(and oftentimes bring something new to) the piece. Here's an old sketch that has been kicking around for a while. Drawing was mounted to masonite and even started laying some paint down before I set it aside, but it's been leering at me from the corner of my studio whenever I work. I decided to take it into Painter and play around a bit to get something resembling a color comp. Still a bit of tweaking to go, but crits are welcome.

Thank you Frank Miller

It's been a crazy couple months. New baby + insanely busy day job = no time for personal work. We've also taken on a basement finish/remodel ourselves, which will keep my evenings and weekends pretty busy for the next month or two. In the end it will mean that I'll have a nice new studio space to work in, though, so I'll take the pain for now. 

Back around Christmas, my brother in law got crazy with some carpentry and was building bird/bat houses for his yard. He decided he would give bat houses to the immediate family as a "bonus" Christmas gift (natural mosquito repellant) and asked if I would be willing to paint them as my gift. We joked about putting a big Batman logo on them, but I wasn't sure how it would fly with all the recipients. In the end, I decided to do a little homage to Frank Miller and do a take on one of my favorite images from Dark Knight Returns. Here's the result. These weren't completed until just recently because I foolishly decided the best way to paint four of these would be to cut a pair of stencils and airbrush them. Yes, those bats are one stencil. Shows how well I take the easy path on things. At least I can make a hundred more if I was so inclined. 

Busy month

My new baby girl, Grace, was born 10/23. It's been a heck of a month, even with paid leave from the day-job. Most of my time has been spent rocking, bouncing, changing, and generally cajoling into some sleep like state, along with chasing my three year old son around. We even managed to play a little dress up for Halloween. With all that craziness, I did manage to sneak into the studio to finish out two LARPer portrait commissions that have been plaguing me for a while. One was done in the same head and shoulders style my previous ones were done in (not that exciting) but the other requested the application of my more illustrative talents. Not necessarily a piece for the illustration portfolio, but a good exercise in painting some various lighting effects, etc.

Speaking of LARPs...

Here's a couple portrait sketches from the end of last week. All oil on canvas. It's fun to have friends that play "dress up."

Quick little digital study in Painter, trying to level-up my digital skills. Roughly one hour, from ref.

Once upon a time I considered LARPing (Live Action Role-playing) among my hobbies. I embraced the uber-geekiness of combining my love of fantasy with social interaction, creativity in costume and weapon creation, spending a weekend in the woods, athleticism in combat and lots of my old acting skills in the form of improv. Dressing up like an elf for a weekend may seem to be the super-nerd activity, but I actually found it much less so than table top RPGs and MMORPGs like WoW or Everquest.

I've been out of the game for a few years, but I still retain a lot of the friendships I made there, and occasionally I get fun little side commissions like the one at left from those old friends. This was a request for armor design themed around a spider. Pretty rough painter sketch, but the leather-worker that will be doing the final build was pretty happy with the design. Hopefully I get some good pictures of the final product. Should be fun.

Distractions

I find it terribly ironic that I've intended to write this post, about distractions, for several weeks now. And, well, I've been distracted!

It's incredibly interesting to me the more time I spend with working artists the level of commitment they put into their craft. Twelve and Fourteen hour days spent in the studio, 6 or 7 days a week. It's this singular, directed focus that makes them successful, that elevates their work beyond that of their peers. The reason I find it interesting is that it is in direct conflict with what I perceive to be the nature of the artistic mind. Most artists I know are also craftsmen (or women), musicians, or writers. They have a multitude of "non-professional" creative skills. I for one have found myself pulled away from the studio to build furniture, craft leatherwork masks, "weave" a chain-maille shirt, play drums in a band, or a whole slew of other creative pursuits that will never further my illustration career but somehow aid in keeping me sane, and hopefully allow me time to come back to my "real work" with a fresh set of eyes. Having a kid only adds to the opportunities for distraction, as my latest little project proves. 

Around my son's last birthday, my wife and I decided we needed to get a toybox for my son's growing collection of wheeled doo-dads and plastic thingamajigs. My brother in law, being a reasonably skilled carpenter, decided he would give a gift certificate for toy box construction as his gift. Little did he know what he was stepping into. After several sketches and designs, someone (I think my wife) suggested we build a toybox to look like a school bus, given my son's fascination with the bus parking lot barely visible from our back yard. We were off to work, sketching, prototyping, cutting, routing, painting, and improvising at every turn. Luckily, after far too many work sessions, everyone was somewhat pleased with the final outcome (as with any "custom" project, there's lots of little personal touches, from the father/son portrait, to the license plate to the id number on the bus-- lots of fun to play with):