Trenchcoat Speed Paint

I’m very, very happy that I started this blog, it’s helped my analyse my work from a fresh viewpoint.  I noticed that for a sketchbook almost everything posted is pretty tight and constrained.  And looking at what I’m posting has made me realize that the rough and raw energy, the controlled chaos of other artists is something that I need to unleash in my own work.  I need to move beyond just designing things that look good and into executing images that feel good.  I want to incorporate movement and energy into my sketches.  Perfect detail is great, but I need to know where to sacrifice it for the sake of the designs overall vitality.

I know how to put tons of detail into an image and refine everything to a slick and shiny finish.  pretty, painfully tight detail is easy – artfully using bold brushstrokes and quick splashes of color is a challenge.  So one of my current goals is to loosen up my execution and imply detail with a few choice strokes and let the viewer fill in the rest.  I’m comfortable with where I am in terms of producing a finished product, but I think my quick sketching and speed painting skills need to be brought up a couple levels. 

So here is my first speed painting in… a long time.  It took about 15 minutes.  It’s not perfect, it’s not a brilliant design, and it doesn’t yet have the dynamism that I’m looking for, but it’s a start.

Bad Images

There are a lot of Red X’s on my blog right now.  WordPress is having some problems with upload images and they’re working on it.  So be patient and check back, hopefully they’ll get things worked out soon.

Environment Scribbles

My big job at the moment is getting into crunch time…  I have an end of August deadline and a sizable amount of work to finish up so I doubt I’ll have much time for personal stuff for another month or so - but I’m being paid to do the job so I don’t have much of a choice.  It’s enjoyable work but I’m itching to sketch some ideas for my Flawed project… grrrrr… 

Ah well, until later here’s a couple scribbles from my moleskin…

    

    

Environment Quick Paintings

There’s not much going on right now.  I’m just working away at a couple of jobs I have right now – one for Mindstorm Labs and another for Fantasy Flight Games.  The 3DS Max class that I’m taking is going well and is pretty easy so far, I need to start pulling together a 3D portfolio fairly soon.  A lot of busy work, but nothing really exciting.

My wife has had me helping to organize the apartment this whole weekend, but I’m taking a few minutes to post this before I start the daunting task of separating and archiving the last year or two of my sketches…  It’s a stack of loose leaf pages about two feet tall not counting my sketchbooks… this is going to be a long boring night.

                

     

    

Hot

It’s been miserably hot the last several days here in Seattle.  It’s only in the 90s, but our apartment stays at least 10 degrees warmer than outside and no one in Seattle has air conditioning.  So this rough color sketch seems appropriate – a superheroic flame chick, heat entity, fire elemental inspired kind of thing.  I’ll post some more sketches once it cools off a little and my sketchbook pages no longer wrinkle under sweaty hands.