Dragon

So, the past month or so has been tumultuous to say the least. Unsurprisingly my work ethic has suffered a good deal but it's also forced a lot of odd inspiration and raw emotion to be pulled back into what work I was doing. School projects of late have been rather mediocre and very draining so a few weeks back I wound up starting a personal project and only recently completed it. Unsurprisingly it was very refreshing to do something that was 100% for me, and I'd like to keep the trend going here in my spare time.

However as fun as it was it wasn't without any kinks as it went along. Either way, I did take a couple of pictures here and there of what actually went into this guy (had meant to take many more wip shots but obviously forgot to do so)
But thumbnails were the first thing to accomplish here, and my goal/subject was simple. A dragon. King of the beasts as far as fantasy is concerned and I knew I wanted to draw on a lot more of the sleazy hoarder legends than the really cool monster idea.

I know my thumbnails typically border on illegible, but being a personal project I continued on from this point with a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to accomplish.
I chose one of my thumbs, blew it up digitally, finagled with it's design and line work before printing out a copy that I could transfer via the opaque projector on campus (that machine is magical).
After that I was in high spirits when I got home so I started out painting right away on a sheet of gessoed crescent board I happened to have. My first mistake here was to leap in without an under-painting. With no value established on the board I can see from the pictures I had taken that I was really just making more work for myself in the end. But I never got that far.
In my giddy impatience I began baking (carefully, mind you) said painting in order to continue work on it asap. Now, I've baked several pieces this year (mostly for class when I don't have time to let the poor things dry) and each time everything's gone fine. I consider it a small miracle that for all my class work I'd been working on Bainbridge illustration board. I'm presuming that the Crescent board led to the result of a rather nasty bubbling effect that took place under the gesso.


I was too busy trying to save the painting at that point to get pictures but I assure you the bubble was fantastic in its own right. I'll be holding more tests on illustration board scraps I have lying around to confirm/deny that the fact that it was crescent board led to it's early demise.

In the end though, things worked out for the best. The next round I did an under-painting (no pictures again, I'm terrible at this).


And on a whole the painting progressed fairly fast.


I only just finished it a few days ago and I'm going to have to get some scans of it, but in the meantime have a not too shabby picture via my camera.

The End of a Semester

(queue dramatic music)

On a whole it was pretty good. Between Illuxcon and several great classes with great teachers it was a great ride the past few months. So it's with a cheery mood I present to you some random things accomplished so far.









Clearly oil paints are the choice of the semester.

And then random sketchbook doodles of late- with winter break here I've decided to indulge myself and do a lot of fan art (*cough*doctorwho*cough*sherlock) but I also really want to get going on that huge personal project involving angels and whatnot. I have no idea if it will go anywhere but I'm working on character development which will soon head toward more involved story development. But the sketchbook finds a lot of these things floating around in it so I'll throw them out here for now.






But being at the end of the semester is especially frustrating for me (particularly how graduation is approaching faster). But looking at my work this past semester, I'm surprisingly pleased with what I have come up with but then again my style feels like it is struggling more than ever. It feels detached somehow and I can only hope I will accomplish a more connected feel next semester.

Landscape Painting

(a rare "artist habitat"- presumably the artist ran away into the brush)

I figured I would give a more in depth post on what occurs on location when painting at parks for this class (mostly because I had time to goof off with my camera this last time).

The park we painted at last Friday is the Highbanks metro park (about a 30min drive outside CBus). It was a brisk day but the hike from the parking lot to the back field we painted at keeps you warm long after you're done walking. Basically we hike until we something that we want to paint then stop and set up. Everything was going really well (nice overcast conditions, nice weather, nice space, nice trees, nice colors....etc).

(le in progress painting)

But about an hour and a half in Mr. Sun decided to peek out and being the genius I am I had forgotten to take pics of what I was painting before it became sunny. The sun was also shining directly on my painting making it really difficult to figure out the colors I had down compared to how they'd been and how they were now. This is where that photo opportunity sneaked in.

(bad sun BAD SUN)

(as lovely as this lighting is it was ALL WRONG)

I got to play around with my camera buddy for a while before some clouds decided to creep back into view and I was able to shoot my reference and essentially finish my study.

(macro shots are fun)

On the way out I took pictures of everything (terrible side of college- deprivation of nature)

(NOM)

(some of the trees were just fantastic!)

(this guy and several slugs wanted to hitchhike back with me for some reason)

We're blowing these studies up in class as studio paintings and I'll post more on that when it gets further along.


This weekend however I will be at Illuxcon- if for some reason you read this blog and are attending as well shout at me and I'll say hi or something.

So many things so little time...

For internet that is. Once again my lack of posts is in no way reflective of the amount of work being accomplished in apartment R this year. I do have a large post planned for landscape painting (again) and illustrative drawing but I have so much work due this upcoming Tuesday I wouldn't expect them till a little later.
In the meantime here's the most recent project for C.F. Payne's class (Illustration Styles and Concepts). The assignment was meant to establish lighting for photographing reference and working from that. It was also meant to build on our previous assignment (master studies of portraits- John Singer Sargent and Dean Cornwell were my choices, shown in that order):



So for this most recent assignment we had to shoot good reference and create a portrait of a character from a novel/graphic novel. I wound up doing Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I'm rather happy with how it turned out (especially color-wise).

100th Post!

(and there was much rejoicing)

Today I want to post a bunch of my work from landscape painting thus far- it's been a really nice class so far and I've been picking up on a lot of stuff I'd been missing in my painting. And hey- playing with oils twice a week? It's keeping me sane.

We did some palette knife paintings which I conveniently forgot to take pictures of....but I'm cozy and comfy watching The Mummy while wrapped up in my Wall-E blanket so I'm not moving for a while. Luckily I have everything else we've done so far. First up- in class painting and the first time we were allowed to use both colors and paint brushes (huzzah!)


Amazingly enough it looks better in the picture I took.....but moving on! We went out to a park on Wednesday because for once it wasn't raining (apparently this has been one of the wettest Ohio autumns on record). But of course we get there and get going for about an hour before it starts to rain. Moral of story? Paint as fast as possible and revise later.


And it was unfortunately slightly damaged from the rain (you can see all the little missing flakes) but we (my roommies and I might go back to the park to hang out and paint this Sunday). If that doesn't happen we're supposed to go back there in class on Wednesday if it's nice out.
Then today was also a b-e-a-utiful drizzly disgusting windy cold miserable misting day of grossness. But we went outside anyway. Take that weather. We went to a different park and hid under shelters while painting. Got a bit more accomplished and took pictures at the end to work from to try and finish it up.


I particularly like what was going on in that section in the back on the right:


Granted I can't get any decent pics of it now since it's still wet but later this next week when it's done and dry expect an update.

SCHOOL.

It hath begun. Three weeks in and I'm managing to stay on top of homework for once in my life. Granted it's only three weeks in. Anywho not much time for a detailed post tonight- if you want to see my ventures (once a day every day) head over to le tumblr:
http://klang-art.tumblr.com/
Since I can't go into detail about current projects (my head is spinning just thinking about them all) have a painting I did at the zoo last week- there's a bear in there (the sleeping blob in between the trees). Not that good but hey, it was an hour and a half in oils. It was fun practice.

Now I'm going to go back home and do more homework (seriously). A much more complete in detail update should make an appearance sometime this weekend.