Red Rocks

Digital composition based on the oil sketches I did in southern Utah below.

Morning on the Shore of Tibble Fork Reservoir

How's that for a catchy title?

Recent Drawings from Life Drawing Session at Work

The first three were drawn in my sketchbook with a Prismacolor pencil. The last one is bigger in charcoal. All were done in an hour or less.

Zion Painting Trip

Last weekend I was able to go on a painting/sketching/reference gathering trip with some BYU illustration and animation students and faculty to Zion National Park. They are doing a student project on environment design and will be using the sketches and reference they gathered for their designs. Since that's kind of what I do for a living I got to come along. It was a blast.

These are the paintings I did while I was down there.

Drawings

Here are a few drawings that I did in the class I taught last fall.

And a couple more for good measure.

More little paintings

Here are some plein air sketches from this spring and summer.

April

Really Cool Colorful Costume

You can't have a model like this and just do a charcoal drawing. A dress like that calls for paint.

She is from West Africa and is a really good cook.

Demo Videos

Here are some demos that I recently did. The first one is a landscape that was just out of my head without any reference. I have nothing against reference, in fact I am very much in favor of it. I just mention that I had no reference as a disclaimer for why it isn't better.



The next two are digital portrait studies that I did from life of a couple co-worker friends, Emily and Dillon, who were nice enough to sit still for me. I tried to do an approach similar to what I would do with real paint.





Also, I am not very good at talking while I'm painting (or at any other time for that matter) so I decided to borrow the audio track from someone much more experienced in painting demonstrations than myself. I think his commentary is probably at least as instructional as mine would have been, plus something about his voice just makes me feel happy. Special thanks to Tom for help with these videos.


Here are the finished images.

Drawings

I realized that I haven't posted many drawings on this blog, so here are a couple from the last few months of study at Kamille Corry's studio.

My two latest plein air attempts

This one was painted up the street from my house. 6x8

This one is somewhere in Laguna Beach. 8x10

Cast Painting

This is a cast painting that I worked on last year at Kamille Corry's studio. I feel like I learned a lot about oil painting and how to finish a painting over a long period of time. Most of my oil paintings have just been studies done in one sitting.

I also gained an appreciation of ancient Greek sculptors. It was pretty tedious painting just this guy's head. I can't imagine how long it would have taken them to sculpt the whole thing.

The Jazz

As a huge NBA fan I have drawn lots of basketball players, but not for a long time. So I thought I would celebrate the start of the season with a portrait of some Utah Jazz players. I originally was going to exaggerate the caricatures more but they ended up more idealized. But these guys have been playing well so they got the flattering treatment.

Yellow Leaves

Probably the last plein air of the season, unless I decide to go paint in the snow.

In honor of football season...

Recent Oil Sketch

This is my son in his favorite spot in front of the TV. That day he wasn't feeling well so he actually stayed still enough for me to paint him. It also helped that he fell asleep halfway through the movie.

Latest Plein Air

Considering the ruthless onslaught of insects that my freind Steve and I had to endure while we were painting, I think we both did all right. Hard to go wrong with Aspen trees. I think I got all the bugs picked out of the paint.

Star Wars Fun

The topic over at the Avalanche Blog was "stupid Star Wars characters." I don't think she's stupid, but the fact that she wore about 37 different hairstyles per movie made no sense.

The Princess Bride Guys

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Princess Bride. Cheers, Vizzini.

Another plein air sketch

painted up in the hills above Salt Lake City

Last Week's Plein Air

Latest Plein Air Attempts

Mossy Falls

Old environmental concept art.

MTR

Some concept art I did for the Meet the Robinsons game.

Zion Canyon

A plein air painting I did last month at Zion National Park.

Bono

Here's something to make me feel old. It has been 20 years since The Joshua Tree was released. Oh well, Bono is older than me and he's still cool. (I think)

This is for the Avalanche Blog. The theme is Rock Star.

Also this was done using ArtRage, which I just discovered. I don't know if I would use it for professional work, but it sure is fun. They have a free download and if you want the full verion it's only $20. Check it out.

The Captain

This was done for the Avalanche Blog. The topic was "Villain."

Old Tak Art

Well, it's time to get something besides my losing art contest entries up here to look at. Apologies to those who may have clicked here multiple times in the last month only to see nothing new. I haven't been able to do any personal work for a while, so I will have to resort to posting old art. Here are a couple pieces from Tak.

Losing Art Contest Entries

My former office mate Justin who now works at Blizzard talked me and a couple other guys into entering the Blizzard art contest. They posted the winners today and neither I nor anyone I know is among them. I probably didn't spend enough time on these to compete with the ones that were picked. Oh well, at least I have something to post on my blog now. I don't know if Todd and Ryan will post theirs. We may have to pressure them a little.