Portraits

Recently I've been dabbling in portraits. One of these I did for fun as reference. The other was a gift for my uncle Peter on his 60th birthday.

The Phoenix War

I had the pleasure of working the amazing Richard Sanders again on the next upcoming book in his series, The Phoenix War. I'm not usually one for sci fi space battles but Richard always seems to rope me in with his descriptions. Ater a long time of laboring over this image here is the end result.

Art Order: Viking

Had a lot of fun with this one. Im going to try limited pallet paintings more often.

DnD Art test

To my chagrin I learned that I would not be getting the job of a life time and becoming an in house concept artist for DnD. Oh well. The job was offered to an artist far more talented than I.

Since that trial is over I thought I would at least show the world the test I took to try to get that lofty position. The devious minds of Jon Schindihette and Richard Whitters conceived an evil test with several prompts that were to be completed in only 24 hours. This mess of chicken scratch is the result of that 24hr art test.

Art Order Challenge:Nymph

With the return of the ArtOrder comes a new art order challenge. The prompt was very open ended and allowed for a lot of creativity. It was simply, draw a nymph. Here was my shot at it.

Persnickety Princess

Cupid's capture

Another cover from the Three Lost Kids series.

Head study-3

I went home for the Holiday of Thanksgiving and foolishly brought client work with me because I should have known none of it would have gotten done. Family, I love you but you are not vey good for productivity. So instead to take up the free time between events my family members were planning for the brief time we were back together I decided to try to paint something mindless and still beneficial.

For some reason I always go back to head drawings when ever I want to paint who knows what because its something I never tire of painting and never get stressed about. Also painting hot chicks is fun.

I had actually started this one some time ago but now with Illuxcon gone by, I wanted push myself interms of detail and what makes faces recognizable. This is image is a study of a photo I found on the internet but I hope to eventually bring this much detail to my other more creative works.

Finally an Environment

Lately I've been realizing there are a lack of environment pieces in my portfolio  So I sought to remdy that by painting this. It was an odd but productive experience in lighting and color. I think I learned a lot of over the course of painting it.

Smaug

With a slew of conventions and competitions coming up I thought it best to take some time and focus on my person al work and try to make my work the best it could be.

With how much time I spent crying over it, shoving it in other peoples faces for advice while failing to be a normal human being that spoke and ate meals, I can confidently say that I learned..........I'll get back to you on that one.

The only thing I can say for sure is that I hope you like it.

Christmas curse

This is a cover I did a bit ago and forgot to post.

Angel of Grace

This is the result of my work at the Terese Nielsen workshop, courtesy of TLC workshops. 

We were given the assignment of designing art for a magic card. The sketch is final concept that I had achieved during the workshop.. 

Everyone should go to one of these workshops whenever they have the chance. The amount that there is to learn makes it very worth while.

http://www.tlcworkshops.com/

Phoenix Crisis

Its been a while since I've done any sort of environment piece. Im glad how this one turned out. This is going to be the wrap around cover for the third novel in Richard L. Sanders's Phoenix series. I had a lot of fun with it and it always a pleasure to work with Richard. :)

Death of the Sugar Fairy

Another day, another cover.

Virgin of Guadalupe

This was a personal commission for a friend of mine. She's moving to a new place and asked me to make something nice for her to put on the wall.

Ring Binder

Here is cover I recently finished for Ranee Dillion's Ring Binder.

Doodle

Its been a while since I took a day off and did no client work for the entire day. Decided to doodle for a bit and this is what came out.

Spirals

Another cover that I had the pleasure of working on.

For Carl,

 The powers that be have decreed that I need some traditional work in my portfolio and that I should do more life drawing. So over the past week I've gone to life drawing sessions and done various sketches of different things. At one point I grabbed a mirror and starred at myself for several hours. It's the first time I've drawn with an actual pencil in months. It turned out to be a great learning experience.

Another Head Study

Probably the thing I'm most dissatisfied with when ever I paint is how I draw faces.  The best way to improve at something is to practice. So, I grabbed photo of a pretty face online and with the few minutes of free time I've had over the past couple days, I painted this.