My personal work from last year

I'm pleased with a lot of my work from the previous year. It looks like there wasn't much in the way of professional illustrations, although I did a good bit of work in the way of video editing, animation, and compositing. Even with all that, there's nothing I really can or want to show here, but instead, I'll be putting up my personal work.

This little guy was my first painting of the year. I came across a funny little photo of this frog and I just had to paint him. I used a bit of a different process on this one, painting with different brushes and utilizing a looser method. I liked the end result and am thinking about trying more like this. But the original photo needed something, so this little guy gets some swim trunks for modesty. I hope you can tell that those are flies on them. And since he's a bit nervous around water, he has his water wings on.

This is an example of photobashing. I'm teaching a new class in advanced digital painting and included a photobash assignment, so I felt I should do a few of my own. This is my attempt at a sci-fi scene and I'm not sure it's completely successful, but it's okay.

Here's my next photobash that I jumped into right after the previous one. I went for a different genre, a bit of an adventure type of setting. I think this one turned out a bit better. Even though photos are used instead of a lot of painting, but it still is quite a creative process, but I find it hard to do.

I had been wanting to do a portrait of Grogu for a while and finally had a few moments to bang this one out. There are a lot of cute images out there and I was trying to find one that would be interesting. I liked the mood of this one and had some fun with the lighting.

Back to my figure drawing. I hadn't done one in a while and wanted to make sure I could still do it. I do like adding a bit of color with Nupastel to the charcoal drawings as a way to accent the greyscale approach on the figure.

In the summer, I had my figure drawing class again. I tried out some new models and some I hadn't worked with for a while. This is Cassandra posing for the long drawing at the end of the class. This one was about an hour and a half, but when she was done, I spent a good bit of time finishing up the background. I really tried to put a lot into this one and I like how it came out.

I've done a lot of drawings of Gordon and I can really get his likeness down pretty easy. There are some models that I can't quite do that with. This was another longer pose from my summer class and I was going for something a bit moody here. I was experimenting with limited color palettes for these drawings just to see how much I could pull out of just a couple of colors. I thought it was good enough to submit to a juried exhibit on the nude, but I guess the panel deciding on the submissions didn't think so.

I taught figure drawing again during the fall, which I don't often do. I tried out some new models this time and enjoyed seeing what I could come up with. The only problem with these classes is that they are a lot shorter, so it's hard to fit in a long drawing with my students. This is Ivy, a new model I worked with and I do like this resulting pose, which is a bit unusual. I didn't have as much time as I really needed, but I did what I could.

Another new model for me from my fall class. I tried to do something different on this one with some unusual bits of color. I don't do a lot of rear views of the figure, but I tried to find something interesting this time. Again, I didn't have much time, so I rushed through it and tried to get some level of completion.

Here's a very different thing for me. I was collecting images to submit to that exhibit on nudes and I decided to create a brand new image for it. It's a digital painting as usual, but I haven't really done a figure like this, so I tried a new way of painting to experiment. I created custom brushes and worked in a way that more closely mimics a traditional approach. As the painting developed, it went into more of a fantasy direction, which I really don't do, but I took the opportunity to try it out to see what would happen. This year I've really been trying to switch things up and see if I can expand my style and this is one result. I do like it and thought it was a strong image to submit to the show, but again, the panel doing the judging didn't think so and it wasn't selected. Bummer.

Something else new. I keep a large selection of photos I've collected over the years that I find interesting. I was wanting do do a city painting, so I worked from this one. The foggy scene and overall feel make me think of San Francisco. I used the same set of brushes that I had used on the previous image and really concentrated on how the colors interacted. But surprise, my reference image wasn't a photo; it was a digital painting by a concept artist called Daarken. So what I did was pretty much a copy, but that can be a useful exercese.