Space Ruffian

Assets

-something I recently worked on. :)

Everything Starts with a Plan

I've been a little too busy lately to paint much in my spare time. This week doesn't look much better, but hopefully I'll have a little more to share by next post.

Sketchbook 2.0

I bet you thought I was talking about new software. ;)

Nope, this is just some new 'hardware'.

You might remember my custom made sketchbook from a couple of years ago.
Link and Link.

I present to you his new bigger brother!

I found I was missing drawing on a full sheet of paper and the idea occurred to me to just make a bigger sketchbook. My smaller one is great for it's portability, but there are some times when I want to take something a little bigger (especially if I won't be needing to stand or walk around at the destination).

It's basically put together the same way as my smaller one.

You can see both of them together in this photo.

-bonus sketch from my new, bigger sketchbook-

"Saint George and the Blancmange"

Waiting in the Shallows

Completed this one in three hours -one hour a day. I just wanted to do a sub.

I consider paintings like this to be more like a doodle. I didn't spend any time doing thumbnails to find good a composition or color scheme. I didn't even play around with drawing different kinds of submarines to paint!

Still, doing something like this without any kind of planning (and just seeing where it takes me) is fun to do from time to time.

THIS happens . . .

Remember that speed-thumbnail exercise I did in my previous post? I took one of those little thumbs and decided to take it to a more finished piece. But . . . I wanted to give myself a little challenge.

At my previous job, I was required to work around specific color schemes for a certain publication. This was always a challenge since the subject for each cover was different and the color theme for each issue was usually something atypical I usually wouldn't think to use. I really enjoyed doing those because they challenged me to think up creative ways to incorporate that color into a composition in ways I normally wouldn't gravitate too. ( Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind doing some more of those, either!)

So behold! I found a random color generator on the web and this was the first choice which came up.

To make things even more interesting, I used Google's special image-recognition-searcher-feature-thingy to find similar images to my thumbnail and this came up. I decided to use one of these images to distort, scale, and paste multiple times to create some sort of an environment in my painting.

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Voila! The finished piece!

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Here's a process of how it went. Bonus points if you can figure out which image from the Google search I used to create the environment.

Quick on the Draw

I read in another blog about a sketching exercise in which I do one little thumbnail per minute. Man, that's crazy, but so refreshing. I noticed I really started looking at the big shapes, the overall design, and major values. I haven't done any quick painting like that in a while. Doing one a minute really makes the time fly by.

Although none of these are really anything to look at, the value comes in training the mind to visualize things quicker. (plus all the things I noticed in the previous paragraph.)

A Day in the Life of an Adventure Guy

I generally spend no more than maybe 15-20 minutes on each one of these. I work at 150dpi at about the scale you see here.

If I chose to take one of these and create a finished painting from it, I would take one of these single ideas and start playing around with composition, lighting, scale, contrast, etc -and do maybe 8-10 additional little sketches based off it.