I've moved to London!

Well, as some of you may know, I got a job as a matte painter at Framestore CFC in London. I've been here about a month and a half now and I can finally say I'm reasonably settled in, so I thought I'd take a moment to finally update my blog after half a year of neglect. I've had to immediately focus on work and setting up my infrastructure, so I haven't had time to do any art on the side yet, but expect some soon. I'm going to Salzburg and Amsterdam for the Christmas break and I hope to do some sketching while I'm there. Cheers!

New Character and Vehicle Designs

Here's a couple of new character and vehicle designs I've been working on. The top one is a heroine and her sidekick based on the main personalities of the Chinese creation myth. The god Pangu created the world, then Nuwa created people. At some point after creation the world fell into chaos and Nuwa struggled to restore order to the world. Sounds like an excellent inspiration for a super heroine to me. I think I might develop their backstory further in the future. I had a bit of a struggle with getting all the reflections to work well in her suit. I think it was an excellent learning experience. I think I've got the mojo of the physics of it all down pretty well now.

I was inspired to do the second piece when I saw a kick-ass fully restored, cherry 1968 Camaro at a shop where Hally's car was being fixed. It was up on the hydraulic lift and I was able to really thoroughly examine it. It looked so aggresive and I imagined that it could make a pretty intimidating Mad-Max-style war machine in a post-apocalyptic world. voila.

The Realm of the Little People

I'm finally starting on a series of PhotoShop paintings. I'll be doing some environments, character designs and vehicle designs. Hope everyone enjoys them.

Something Different...

I have to say the plein air landscape studies have really sharpened my skills in the way I was hoping they would and this portrait piece I did this week benefited from that. I really think I've loosened up, sped up and improved my command of the brush.

I've been doing some sketchbook work lately and I'm trying to express myself more. The Fox News piece had to be done. I watch it sometimes just for how ludicrous it is. It's like watching the American version of North Korean television (which, by the way, you can see on YouTube - very very entertaining). I think it expresses my feelings pretty well about what our current administration is up to. I'm curious as to whether all the metaphors come across clearly. The piece with the pigs is an old piece I did for Barron Storey's class a few years ago about the fashion industry and the pressure people have to be thin. I plan to do more like these.

Sketchcrawl 14 sketches

I had the pleasure of being a part of sketchcrawl 14, which was a benefit for Emergency, an organization to help the civilian victims of war. I also attended the auction they held the next day. I was outbid on most of the art pieces I wanted to buy, but was very happy to win my bids for some very nice artwork by John Hoffman and Evelyn Hahn. I had a great time all around and you can't find a nicer and more creative group of people!

The first of these two sketches was done just before the sketchcrawl to warm up. I was very happy to find out that someone had bought it at the auction. The second was done during the crawl at Koit Tower in SF. I was blown away by the quality of the sketches from other artists on the crawl and I came to the conclusion that I need to practice sketching to improve my speed and to learn to create more aesthetically pleasing quick sketches. My sketches have always tended to be just studies for more extensive projects and I haven't focused on making them artful in themselves. Hopefully next time I'll come up with more I want to post.

Painting with Friends in Morgan Hill

I went painting in Morgan Hill with some old SJSU friends: Noah, Jackson, Dela, Nikki, Kendelle, Scott, and Jules. I managed to paint this old building in downtown. I'm finding architecture a bit of a struggle to create in plein air, but I plan to keep working on it. I think the secret is to treat it as shapes and colors just like anything else rather than try to do an architectural rendering in such a short time.

More paintings...

I did some outdoor painting in the Berkeley hills with Noah, Jackson, and Daniel last weekend. The top two pieces are what resulted. On the first piece I had the challenge of simplifying enormous amounts of visual information. It was pretty difficult and I learned a lot from it. For the second, my painting of the hillside was pretty dead and wasn't going anywhere, so I took inspiration from Noah's recent pushing of his artwork and decided to do the same with this one, taking it in a whimsical direction. I don't think I'd ever done anything quite like that before. The third painting was done the next day in my own backyard.

The last two paintings are the same ones from my previous post, but with more work added to them. I thought they had a lot of potential as pieces to put in the gallery, but felt they needed a bit more pizzaz. For the dirt road I brought out more of the colors in the shrubbery and developed the shadows more. I originally created the Monterey coastal cliff image just to practice rendering the rocks and didn't pay much attention to the composition at the time. As such, I felt the composition was too blandly horizontal and lacked a focal point. I added some opposing mass to it in the form of the kelp forest and added some interest with a cute little sea otter. I think people visiting Salinas/Monterey will like that. How can you resist one of those cute little fellas?