On the easel

Sorry for the lapse in posting, and apologies in advance for some of the lapses to come. Things might be a little patchy between now and the end of March as I try and get everything ready for the first few conventions of the year. Between work, a large print run I am doing myself (including some framed very limited edition canvas giclees), a complete website facelift, taxes, family visiting and a whole lot of other little things the blog is taking a bit of a backseat.

In the meantime though: here is something cool I am working on: it is a private commission so no NDA!

I don't usually go quite so nuts on my underpaintings/block-ins. But with the effect I am trying to pull off on this one, getting my values and color relationships spot on is very important, so it seemed like a good idea.

More drawings, and some incoherent rambling on drawing for illustration.

In my last post I mentioned that I had gotten away from the red pencil drawings because I was worried the media might be influencing my assessment of the overall image. I want to expand on that thought today and explain my general philosophy for preliminary drawings.

In essence, I try and draw in as boring a style as I possibly can. Everything I was ever taught about attractive draftsmanship goes out the window. Thick and thin line weight, loose charismatic linework, cross hatching, etc... I am not having any of it. While all those things are very important to creating a good drawing, I don't think of my prelims as drawings. In my mind they are blueprints, a means to an end, and therefore function must come before form.


One of the hardest challenges an artist faces is imbuing a sense of life into their work, creating something that "breathes" instead of just 'shows". A somewhat common issue I have heard from several illustrators over the years is that the final painting lost some of the life that was in the sketch. There was some indefinable spark in the sketch that just didn't translate to the painting. When I looked at the sketches of these illustrators, they had many of the traditional characteristics of an attractive drawing that I mentioned above. It made me think that maybe that spark had come from their technique instead of something inherent in the content and that is why it didn't show up in the final.

Therefore, my thinking is that if I draw in a boring manner, and the image still has a breath of life in it, then I know that life is inherent in the content, not the technique, and will transfer into the final every single time.

Just to clarify a few things: by content I mean things such as composition, gesture of the figure, facial expression, storytelling, etc... Fundamental image-making concepts that are independent of style and media. I should also mention that I do start out with much looser and gestural technique, I just choose to erase and clean up as I go along.

Lastly I should mention that I arrived at this way of thinking on my own, it wasn't something I was taught. Therefore, there is a very real possibility I am dead wrong and I am giving everyone bad advice. I would love to hear other peoples thoughts on the subject.

Red Pencil Drawings

I was working in this style of drawing for around a year, not always, but as much as I can. I loved the old world look. And with the erasable colored pencils I was using I could cheat that look with modern easier to work with materials. Ultimately, I ended up abandoning this technique and going back to trusty ol' graphite on white paper for two reasons:

Although I could erase the red pencil, it is not nearly as malleable as a graphite and a kneaded eraser. These days I find I am erasing and redrawing more than I ever have in my never-ending quest to get my work better and better. (Funny, I always thought once you get good you don't have to erase anymore, you just draw stuff awesome the first time).

I also found that the natural beauty of the materials was influencing my judgment as to whether I actually had a good image and a solid drawing. These days I do my sketches in a rather boring style, If they start to look good I know there is something inherent in what I am drawing that is working, not just what I am using to draw.

All that being said, I haven't worked in this style in over a year, and I am starting to feel the itch to do so....

For those who are interested in this technique; I am using Stonehenge fawn paper, Prismacolor Col-Erase tuscon red pencils and General's white charcoal pencils.

Cover art for Miserere: An Autumn Tale

Finally, some new art I can show. And I am really proud to show this one. This is my first commissioned novel cover. Done for Miserere: An Autumn Tale by Teresa Frohock. It is being published in the summer by Night Shade Books and was art directed by David Palumbo.

Dimensions are 24" by 16" oil on paper on board.

Time lapse painting: Sword of the Four Winds

Almost forgot I had this footage, I did this awhile ago for a live broadcast over at the The Illustration Board I am going to start doing those again when NDA's don't get in the way. Also going to start filming more of my process and getting more of these videos out.

They don't look half bad at full screen if you want to see me painting the details.

Without further ado:

Life drawing: Portraits

I am a firm believer in life drawing being a part of any artists development, lots and lots of it. I estimate that I have logged about 3000-4000 hours drawing and painting from a live model, most of which was done in the past five years at Watts Atelier.

By far my favorite life drawing exercise is the 2-3 hour charcoal portrait, I have done hundreds of these and never get tired of them. Here are a few examples:

Behind the scenes: "Discover a Muse"

This image is a great one to kick-off the "behind the scenes" series of articles for my blog. It shows the amount of work I am often willing to put into an image to try and make it something special.. or just how truly neurotic and perfectionist I can be. It is a glimpse into my thought process, usually I come up with and discard many ideas in my head. But in this particular project, to my great frustration, many of my thoughts ended up on paper.

For those who don't know, this painting was done for competition on the ArtOrder blog. The requirements were simple: participants were given a zip file full of reference provided by model Veronika Kotlajic to use as reference and we were to come up with an image that embodied the terms: strong, independent and sexy. I hadn't entered in a competition since I started getting freelance work a few years ago, but I had a break in my work schedule that coincided perfectly with the competitions deadlines, so I decided to go for it.

Veronika has a few egyptian style tatoos that inspired me to go in an egyptian goddess route. After some thumbnails and digital composites with the reference photos, I came up with this:


Looking back, it isn't half bad. In fact having just dug up the sketch today I am thinking I might revisist the concept. But at the time it was just not happy with it. It was solid, I could have made it work. But it just wasn't a winner, it didn't have anything special about that was going to seperate it from the what I knew was going to be a tough competition. (and it was.. here are the entries). After some more drawing and much deliberation, I decided to abandon this concept. I wasn't getting paid for it, and I didn't think I could win with what I had come up with, so what was the point?

I had done this drawing about a year before, and even had it enlarged and mounted on a board.


I had just never got around to painting it. I figured it might be a good place to start. The composition wasn't quite working for me anymore, but it had potential.

Much drawing ensued and I came up with these two ideas:

I liked the simplicity and flow of the wing-arms version, but my friends told me it just looked goofy. So I went with the first option, had the drawing enlarged at kinko's and mounted it to a board, ready to paint the next day.

When I woke up I wasn't happy with it again. I had a pretty strong visual in my head of this angel doing circus style acrobatics in the air, showing off... being all strong, sexy and independent. Somewhere along the line that just got lost. At this point I was getting pretty frustrated with the whole thing. This wasn't suppossed to take this long, it was just a competition and I had other ideas in my sketchbook I wanted to work on. But with so many hours already invested I decided to stick it out and see what I could do.

I played around in photoshop and sketched all morning and afternoon and decided to go back to the original backflip I had, replaced the scepter with a less distracting sword, covered up the breasts (again, too distracting) and for reasons I can't remember, closed the eyes. Went to Kinko's late at night, got a new print, mounted it and went to bed exhausted.

I woke up and looked at, and was again unhappy.. and very, very frustrated. I can't remember exactly how the solution revealed itself to me, I am just glad it did... Looking back it is so ridiculously obvious, I can only assume all my frustration got in the way of my thinking clearly and prevented me from seeing it earlier... Mirroring the other arm for a more symmetrical pose got rid of more clutter and gave me the flow and power of the initial wing-arm version without the goofy anatomy. Since it was a simple fix I redrew the arm on the board, opened the eyes back up and got to work.



Banged out this color comp in PS pretty quickly and the painting went smoothly, even pretty quickly up until this point:


I was damn proud of the face and shoulder area I painted, but the background colors weren't quite working as well on the final as they had on the comp. No big deal I thought. I messed around with it digitally and came up with a better pallette and figured I would just glaze over it to fix it.

This project wasn't quite finished with me yet.. it just had to kick me in the nuts one last time. I ran into serious technical issues with the medium I was using (M. Graham's walnut alkyd) I guess if you mix too much into your paint the surface will become too slick and will not accept another layer of paint. So my glazing layer beaded up (kinda like water on a car hood) and my attempts to correct it by adding more mineral spirits into the mixture caused the bottom layer of paint to peel off. The mountains and much of the sky was ruined... There was not much to be done but to lightly sand down the area and just repaint it, silently cursing digital painters the whole time. I have since switched to Galkyd lite.

In the end though, this was the result:


All the blood, sweat and tears were worth it though: I got to go to Chicago and exhibit my work in Veronika's gallery, where she ended up buying the painting. I scored the cover of the book that was made from the competition, I got a fair amount of exposure and accolades from the whole thing... and I finally broke myself of a bad habit of jumping into the final stage of a painting before it is really ready to be painted.