Breaking off is misery

I began this doodle at a sketch group session last night and finished it a few minutes ago. As you might have guessed, I've been looking at Jana Schirmer and Benjamin's paintings a lot lately. Those two are so good!

I don't know why I like to paint sad girls. Maybe because I'm always so happy, I feel like I need to counterbalance it somehow.

Or perhaps I'm still in shock over Satoshi Kon's passing. I really loved his films, and to hear that he passed away at such a young age breaks my heart.

Surf's Up

El Matador State Beach, Malibu, CA

El Matador State Beach, Malibu, CA

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with Dreamworks Animation artist Mike Hernandez. He lectured extensively on lighting and color theory. I hope some of what I've learned from his talk is manifesting in these studies. Both were done in under an hour and on site.

Beauty and the Beast

Here are a couple of paintings done for Kevin Chen's Character Design 2 class at Concept Design Academy. The project was to design different races for a fantasy role-playing game. These two are set in a desert world with African/Middle-Eastern influences.

Thanks again for all the help, Kevin. Your class was a blast and it helped me grow immensely as an artist.

Amy

12" x 16", oil on canvas board

Four hours.

Hippopotamonster

10" Super Sculpey maquette painted in Photoshop

I discovered this guy under my bed plotting dastardly schemes and amassing an army of dust bunnies.

Brant

9" x 12", oil on canvas board

Three hours.

Adrienne

9" x 12", oil on canvas board

Four hours. I normally don't sign my paintings, but this one turned out well, so...

Heather

9" x 12", oil on canvas board

Five hours. Trying out a method of painting directly a la Morgan Weistling in which you start from one feature, resolve it to a finish, and use that as the standard to go by as you fan out towards the edges of the canvas. I find this process fits my perfectionist personality well, and it's a really fun way to paint too, because you're constantly drawing and refining.

Malo

9" x 12", oil on canvas board

Four hours.

Jadyn

9" x 12", oil on canvas board

Four hours.

Be like water, my friend

Eaton Canyon Natural Area, Pasadena, CA

Two-and-a-half hours. I walked around Eaton Canyon for a half-hour until I found what I was looking for - a tree above a stream - as I wanted to take on the challenge of painting moving water and reflections. I'm still trying to understand why there's such a stark contrast between the warm part of the stream in front of me and the cooler section behind it. I know it has to do with the way the light is reaching my eye, but I can't figure it out exactly. Anyway, it looked really cool. I'll have to sit down and study Sargent and Zorn's watercolors for a better way to apply these colors - those guys are virtuosos in this medium.

Vikki

Vikki as Joan of Arc

Four hours in Photoshop.

Distant Storm

Eaton Canyon Natural Area, Pasadena, CA

Four hours, 6" x 9". I struggled with this one in the field, so I took a photograph of the scene as reference and tried to remedy my problems in the studio. I'm not sure if I was successful or not, but I definitely learned a lot in the process. That's more important than making pretty pictures anyhow.

Through the Forest

Eaton Canyon Natural Area, Pasadena, CA

2.5 hours, 6" x 9". As I was painting this, I kept imagining that wood sprites would pop up. Only squirrels did. What a disappointment.

Eaton Canyon

6" x 9", two hours, Eaton Canyon Natural Area. We moved to a larger size watercolor block this week, and the transition was what you would expect if you watched movies on your iPod touch all your life, and suddenly your dad wheels into the family room a shiny big 40" LCD TV.

I need bigger brushes.

Arroyo Seco Dog Park

4" x 6", two hours, Arroyo Seco Dog Park. There's a small stretch of park space along the 110 FWY that I drive by every time I head from work in Downtown to school in Pasadena which has these amazing trees that, for some reason or another, have decided to grow parallel to the ground. I spent my afternoon painting them while dogs and their owners ran circles around me. A Great Dane at one point shoved his face into mine out of curiosity. I had never seen one in person before so it was quite a treat to experience such an encounter.

It's kind of funny and serendipitous because I also got The Art of Bolt in the mail today and I was thinking it would have been so fun to work on this film. The great landscape and urban environment paintings in the book by Paul Felix, Bill Perkins and others are along the lines of what we've been doing all semester in class. Hopefully if I keep going, someday I can join a top-notch visual development team like the one who worked on that movie. I won't give up!

Roxanne

Photoshop, four hours. I got a bit of flak for bringing a laptop and Wacom tablet into an uninstructed painting workshop today. I honestly don't see why it's such a big deal. To me, tools are tools. It's what you do with them that really matters. People need to be more open-minded about these things.

Pink

No reference but my daydreams. This girl has been bouncing around in my head for the past couple of days, bugging me to let her out. Had no choice but to oblige. It feels great to draw in a more cartoony style - too much realism can sometimes give you the blues.

A Walk in the Park

4" x 6", two hours at Eaton Canyon Natural Area in Pasadena, CA.

Landscapes and Seascapes

More studies from my Gouache Landscape Painting class. All are 4" x 6" and were done with a limited palette on-site with some minor touch-ups back in the comfort of my own room. We open up to a full palette tomorrow. I can't wait.

Nicole

9" x 12". Three hours.

Heather

Four hours, 11" x 14". We're working with a warm/cool palette of seven colors (titanium white, lemon yellow, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, ivory black) in my figure painting class right now. It's liberating to work with so many options.

Landscapes

I'm still alive. This quarter has kept me very busy - I've got four night and weekend classes on top of an already hectic workweek at the office. One of the courses I'm taking over at Concept Design Academy is a gouache landscape class that's being taught by Jackson Sze. The objectives of the course are to study light and develop a sense of color and design. We go out every weekend and paint small 4x6 studies en plein air (i.e. on site). The class started off doing black-and-white value studies and has now moved on to a limited palette of the three primaries plus white.

I really enjoy this class because I love to explore and be outdoors. A couple of weeks ago I found this amazing park trail just minutes from my house that offers incredible vistas of the San Bernardino mountains (the first several studies above were done there). It's funny, I've lived here all this time and had no idea this sort of treasure lay in my backyard. Makes you wonder what other kinds of secrets you might discover if you just took the time to look around...