Happy spring my colorers! It’s still cold as hell up here but the snows melted at least so there’s that…Been keeping busy juggling work and trying to keep up on the paintings too.

Sunk some more time into that snow scene I posted last month. Here’s a time lapse of painting that central tree…I turned it upside down because it’s way easier to paint branch shapes with a down stroke. Just yields more natural looking results.

Once I got that laid in it’s been a lot of pushin and pulling on the pond and snow. Snow in low light like this has proven to be a tricky problem for me…but I’ll keep at it and hopefully something will click.

This is the phase of the painting where a lot of the stressful stuff has been tackled so now it’s detailing and adjusting smaller things. Kind of the fun part so long as I can find a good solve for that snow and don’t screw anything else up.

Also recently finished up this pizza coat of arms for my friend Will’s new pizza place that’s opening up here in town. Will is sort of a local celebrity in these parts. He owns a few restaurants here in the peninsula, and he competes internationally in all these pizza contests, and has done very well with it. He’s a super cool guy and I was stoked to help him out with this.

He kind of let me go wild with it which was a lot of fun. Gave him a page of thumbnails, he picked the one he liked and I got to it. Drew the initial thumbs in photoshop but worked up the final almost entirely in Procreate on my iPad. The auto gesture and shape features are really amazing tools for doing linework-based stuff. Impressive how fast you can get through something.

Up to this point, Id never done a ton of line work in Procreate, and hadn’t devised much of a game plan for the line language, so I had to kind of learn on the job by trying a bunch of stuff out and redoing lots of things, but eventually I found a groove and was able to finish it out. Took it back into photoshop for final little tweaks but I wanted to keep a hand drawn look so I kept it minimal so a not to drop too many clean photoshop lines into it.

Here’s an 11 minute time lapse of the process where you can watch me redraw those damn wings like 5 times. I’ve done a few more jobs since where I’ve been able to explore doing line work in Procreate and have to say I’m beyond impressed.

Also been working on these paintings of two very special ladies in my life, my mom and my wife. While they are now a set, I didn’t initially plan it like that. These paintings happened organically, where I had these two 18×18 square panels prepared, but no idea what to paint on them.  One afternoon my mom was over, and it hit me that I hadn’t painted her in some time. I snuck her out to the barn and shot a few quick photos of her, playing with a few different lighting arrangements. I thought it would be fun to use two lights positioned on either side of her, not only to better illuminate her face but also so I could really get that bright blue to pop in her eyes.

I started with a line drawing done in vine charcoal and charcoal pencil. I took my time with it, referencing a few different photos and drawing from my familiarity of her face because, well she’s my mom. Worked directly and as always tried to get a good amount of paint and surface established on the first pass to build upon.

Think I’m 4-5 sittings into it and its close…just wanna wait for it to dry and gem it up a little more. Pretty happy with it so far.

At some point during this I realized I had another identical panel, and thought it might be fun to paint my wife on it, and make it like a mother/daughter in-law thing.

Persuaded Mel to come out and sit for some photos, and have been wrestling with this one along side my mom for the past week or so. Worked this one up the same way I did my mom, staring with a charcoal sketch and building on top of that. I have a much harder time on her for a host of reasons, but it’s getting there slowly.

Before starting these two paintings, I did a couple little warm-up self portraits from life. I time lapsed them (but really only one of the movies came out okay) in case you’re interested in seeing how i typically work a portrait. I always have fun painting self portraits, even if i keep looking older and older in them..

 

Lastly, if you’re in the LA area I’m gonna be in a group show on Saturday the 16th over at Arcadia contemporary gallery. It’s a great line up and I’m pretty excited about it. Wish I could make it down there but hope it goes well regardless. If you can make it check it out! Round paintings!