#21days

21 days of practice.  An hour a day.  My goal is to get better at indicating detail in my painting.  Using movie stills from the tumblr of the (now shut down) cinema squid website.

A New Hope

Bone Dry

Made a morning trip to the Museum of Osteology and had to do a bit of drawing. What a great place.

But next time, earbuds. Especially during field trip season.

Just paint

Using new software is like drawing with gloves on.  Everything takes thrice as long.

Trying Photoshop free for a month.  Starting to get the hang of it.  Took Feng Zhu's advice and did the following (mostly) on a single layer with only 2 brushes.  Normally I'd throw a bunch of photo textures on at this point and integrate them in with some more paint, but the goal of this one was to limit my toolset and see what I could learn.

Pretty happy with it.  Feels more like a traditional painting.

Doing a lot of figure study right now.  Have a lot of figure illustrations coming up and HAVE to step up that part of my art game.

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou

My first nice sketchbook page of the new year. These were all fish we saw at the Waikiki Aquarium which I highly recommend.

More to come soon. Lots of great inspiration on the trip.

Cold November Rain

I had very little going on in June.  Would have been a great time for painting.  Instead, this challenge comes along now when I have more books, games and traveling to do than I have all year.

Today's dreary weather help get me in the artistic mood though.  Several of these have been in progress since the last post, but I wanted to start off with today's new piece from my backyard.  Last two pieces are Master studies of The Oxbow and Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  The latter being originally painted by a long-time inspiration of mine, Albert Bierstadt.  His work is gigantic, detailed, romantic, and helped shape America's view of the West before photographs. I'm pleased it turned out so well.

They can't all be like Day 1

Had a tougher time today.  Not sure what the issue was but I'm not competely pleased with any of these or the other few that aren't even blog-worthy.  Oh well, I have a good start.  My expectations are for my paintings to improve as the month goes on and I get more into a groove.  Fingers crossed.

National Novel Writing Month

...is not for me.  I haven't done creative writing since my last English class so I don't feel comfortable trying to participate in NaNoWriMo, a writing exercise with the goal of a 50,000 word novel completed entirely within the month of November.

But a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'm aiming for 50 paintings this month.  I've only allowed myself some notes and hand drawn thumbnails before today.  Really I'm just hoping I can have some fun with this and push myself a little more.  The main point is quantity so these won't be ultra refined...yet.  The good part of digital paintings is that they are never really done.

Here's my first batch.  Today was pretty fun.  I didn't expect much out of my first few days, but I'm pleased with the start. Hoping to have some themes over the course of the month.