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. As I see the list all put together here, it's quite a lot. I think there's some good work here, with a good bit of variety and it showcases some different directions is subject matter and technique that I have been trying.

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, it still is quite a creative process and I find it challenging 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 small reference image wasn't a photo; it was a digital painting by a concept artist called Daarken. You should check out his work. It's really good. So what I did was pretty much a copy, but that can be a useful exercise.

Now here is something else unusual for me. I was watching a very artistic stop-motion movie with a lot of wild and varied imagery. For a couple of seconds there was some imagery If found interesting. It involved a moai of the sort found on Easter Island and some modern mechanical structure. I was intrigued by this visual idea and started painting this. Moai aren't just big heads; they are full figures that are mostly buried. This is my idea of what we might find underneath the ground.

Another odd entry that could be called whimsical, fantastical, or otherworldly. A student of mine created an illustration that involved alligators swimming around at night and I liked the imagery of their glowing eyes, something I have experienced myself. I wanted to try something creepy and eery with the illuminated eyes acting as lights reflecting on the water. The mystical structures in the back are just there. Perhaps the alligators are the guardians. Judging by the shape of the snout now, it looks more like a crocodile. I'm still working on a looser, more painterly style using my new brushes and trying to get acceptable results.

This traditional drawing was about my last of the year. As I've used before, it's with charcoal and Nupastel. It's a portrait of my granddaughter, created as a Christmas gift for her parents. I worked from some photos I had taken of her around Hallowe'en, so she's wearing a jack o'lantern costume, her first. Painting and drawing babies and small children is challenging because their proportions are so different from grown adults. I was really trying to nail her likeness here and I hope I did it.