Scarecrow

Book Cover

Here is a book cover image that I did a while back for this book.

Painting People and Places in Provo with Perkins

Here are a few samples of the many color studies I did last week at the Bill Perkins workshop that I advertised in the previous post. It was my second time taking the color theory workshop, and although I don't know if it's showing up in my work yet, I think I'm starting to grasp some of the concepts that Bill talked about. These were all 40 minute studies of various color and lighting situations.



This one was the last one I did at the color workshop and we got to spend 80 minutes on it, which by that time seemed like an eternity. Ok, not really-it just seemed like 80 minutes. I still had to paint really fast. I took a picture after every 20 minutes during the model breaks so you can kind of see the progression.



The second half of the week was the plein air workshop. We spent a lot of time watching Bill paint, looking for good painting locations, looking for good eating locations(this was the most successful part for me) and in between all that I painted these studies. I don't feel like these turned out particularly well, but I was trying some things that I don't usually do, like paint rainbow umbrellas. Bill gave me some good things to think about, so hopefully my next few paintings will start to show some improvement.


All in all it was a great week of painting with some of my favorite artist friends, filled with a lot of "a-ha" moments, as in "A-ha! so that's what Sargent and Sorolla were doing" and "A-ha! So that's why my paintings look nothing like Sargent and Sorolla." I now have lots to think about.

Painting workshops anyone?

For any artists who will be in Utah the third week of August, Disney artist and painter Bill Perkins will be conducting another painting workshop like the one I blogged about here. This time he will be here for a week and the first part of the week will be the color boot camp part like before, and the second part of the week is a plein air painting workshop.

This is a great opportunity to learn from someone with many years of experience as both a fine artist and an animation industry visual development artist. I thought the last workshop was fantastic and I was surprised at how much information was new to me. And the great part is that the information is applicable to any disipline in the visual arts. If you ever had the thought, " I wish I were better at color" then this is for you.

Anyone interested can contact me, as I'm the guy handling the sign ups for this. See the image for the details.

12 iPad Sunsets

A bunch of quick iPad sketches of sunsets looking out my back window. None of them is that great by itself but I kind of like comparing them all and seeing how much the colors vary from day to day and even moment to moment.

The Hated Heat

I know most people who check out this blog probably don't like basketball. But that's ok because most people who do like basketball don't like these guys in this image either. When I was working on this I figured they would be the eventual champs. But that was before I realized that the aliens from Space Jam stole their super powers and gave them to Jason Terry. How else do you explain LeBron airballing layups and Wade dribbling it off his foot? Anyway, it was a really fun series to watch.

Dirk Nowitzki

The NBA finals start tonight, and I might actually watch this time since the Lakers aren't in it. And since Dirk and the Mavericks were the ones to dispatch the Lakers, I hope they win. Unfortunately, I don't think they will because as I was working on this portrait of Dirk, my wife said, "Oh, are you drawing Jon Heder?" And although that was probably just because of some drawing errors on my part, I realized that no one who could ever be mistaken for Napoleon Dynamite is going to beat LeBron and Wade.

From this morning's life drawing session

Done on the iPad, using the Brushes app, two hours. I like this one much better than my last few of attempts on the iPad. Painting on the iPad is fun, but it's a fight. I remember watching the documentary "It Might Get Loud" a while back and hearing guitarist Jack White talk about how he feels like playing his guitar should feel like a battle, and he's trying to conquer it. That's kind of what painting on the iPad feels like to me, and maybe that's why I haven't given up on it yet.

Clouds

Sometimes, just for practice, I will paint the clouds that I see outside my office window. I painted these yesterday, which was an exceptionally good day for clouds.

Color Workshop with Bill Perkins

Last week I was able to go to a painting workshop with Bill Perkins. Bill is a very experienced artist who has done a lot of things. Check out his two websites here and here. He described this workshop as "color boot camp" designed to teach us as much about color and light as possible in just three days. He had us do many quick (30-45 min) paintings from the model under different lighting situations. I really enjoyed the colored lights, but the flat light situations were particularly challenging. It was a lot like doing plein air paintings, but of people rather than landscapes. He kept telling us not to worry about our drawing since there was no time for that, and so some of those sketches look pretty bad, but I thought I'd post them all up here anyway because I wanted to show the whole experience.

A lot of what we talked about was familiar, like starting with just values and talking about tonal contrast before moving on to saturation and hue contrasts, which is the way I teach digital painting. But there were some new ideas too, which really shouldn't have been new to me but somehow I managed to come this far without understanding them. Overall it was a great experience and I am excited to try out some of those new ideas in a painting when I can spend longer than 3o minutes on it.

And if you are interested in seeing what some other people did at the workshop Greg Newbold has blogged about it, and I thought Simini did a really nice job of capturing those colors.