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.

Angels

A few more landscape sketches

I kind of lost momentum with the iPad sketching, and went back to the real paints. Here are the three that I thought turned out the best from the last few months. I have had the pleasure of teaching some classes in the BYU illustration program this fall, and one of those classes was a landscape class where we went out plein air painting as a means of studying light and atmospheric perspective and then applied those principles to illustrations. I did the top image in that class. It must have been a nice spot because a lot of the students got a good sketch there too. Kind of surprising since it's Utah Lake...not known as a very picturesque spot. I have realized that I really like yellow and blue together. Almost as much as yellow-green and purple.

More Illustrations

These are some images that I did for the website for the book mentioned in the previous post, The Magnificent 12. I did a lot more, but these are the ones I like the best.

The Magnificent 12

This is a book cover illustration that I did for a book that just hit the stores last week. It's a fantasy adventure story with a lot of humor in it, which is my kind of book. It's for pre-teens so it's probably about my reading level, too. I really enjoyed reading it with my kids.

I also did a lot of character spot illustations for the book's website: themag12.com. If you are nine or ten years old, or know someone that age, it's worth checking out.

More iPad Paintings

The sunset one I painted last night out my back door. That effect with the red sunlight hitting the rain from behind was awesome, but lasted only about five minutes. So I tried to just get the colors and then did the rest from memory. It was done in Sketchbook Pro, but when I got it to the computer it looked too purple compared to what I remembered so I touched it up in Photoshop.

The other one was done near Memory Grove in Salt Lake City. I started that one in Brushes then switched to Sketchbook Pro because Sketchbook has a smudge tool for softening edges.

iPaint en iPlein air with an iPad

Here are a few of my first attempts at sketching some of the scenery around here on my new iPad. These were done using the Sketchbook Pro App.


I have never been a trendy gadget guy, but I have been waiting years for someone to come out with something like this. It's not quite fulfilling all my dreams yet, since it lacks the pressure sensitivity of a Cintiq, but it is close. Now I can quickly capture (or try to capture)the fleeting golden hour lighting effects that would be gone by the time I went and got out my oil paints. And I can now do digital painting anywhere I want to, even if it's a little more primitive than what I'm used to. The reviewers said that the iPad is a much better media consumption tool than a media creation tool, and they are absolutely right, but it is still a lot of fun. And all that other stuff it can do is pretty cool too.

A few drawings

from our Friday morning figure drawing session at work. I usually show up late and only have about an hour to draw, so I draw small and usually just get the head and shoulders. These are probably my favorites from the last few months of small, figure-less figure drawings.

Tree

This started as a demo for my digital painting class on how to start a painting. It wasn't a very good start. So I felt compelled to finish it to hide the fact that it wasn't a good start.