finished painting!

So I finished my latest painting, which was a commission of a warrior wearing the armor of God. The result is above. Overall I'm pretty pleased with it, although there are some things I would change, like the glow on the sword and the eyes, but it was a commission and the guy I painted it for wanted them in. And I also would have given more consistency and accuracy with the armor fitting with the sword, which they don't. Before I started on this painting I was looking at one of my old school chums awesome paintings and figuring out how I'm going to paint his armor and show light reflecting off of it, but not too much. I was looking at Chris Rahn's awesome work, which you can see at www.rahnart.com and tried to mimic what he was doing with hardly any success. I was able to get some good advice from him before starting though, which I was grateful for. Anyway, here it is, my latest finished painting since May!

color comp

So, here's a quick color comp for the commission I'm working on mentioned in the previous post. I wanted to get something with lighting as dramatic as possible like my other paintings. I think I still need to work on it, but I'll do it in paint. I don't like to spend too much time on a digital color comp when I'm just going to paint it anyway. Doing the armor for me is always a challenge, especially if it's somewhat dull but has a shine to it. One old classmate of mine, Chris Rahn, is a master of painting armor in my opinion. I'm happy I could say I went to school with this guy, although I wish I got his secret on painting armor when we were in class together! His work is awesome, he's pretty successful and has done numerous illustrations for Wizards of the Coast and their Magic cards. Check out his website at www.rahnart.com . I was looking at one of his paintings for almost an hour yesterday trying to figure out what measure of saturation he puts in his armor and how much of a highlight is in the armor, it's still a mystery to me. Anyway, looking forward to actually start painting this one, should be fun!

New painting!

It's been a while since I posted anything on here, yes I know that everyone's been waiting in eager anticipation for a new one, haven't ya? I recently had a show up at a coffee shop in Redlands called Augies, with great coffee by the way, and it was pretty successful. Well it was as successful as I could hope for. I was able to sell 3, and the night that I was hanging I sold one! Talk about a great start right? It was the painting titled "The Struggle Within", and the guy who bought it is commissioning me to do another one. The painting I'm working on for him is called "Full armor of God" and it depicts a warrior in between the realms of heaven and hell wearing the Armor of god. The armor is a little too Roman for my taste, but it's what he wants so I'm going with it. Oh and also, a little more news, there's actually someone out there who thinks I'm interesting enough to write about! Hard to believe, yeah? I'm meeting up with Kylie DeForge, a local blogger and aspiring Journalist for the New Yorker, and we're gonna have a sit down and talk about whatever and let her pick my brain. You can check out her cultural musings at her blog, http://kyliedeforge.blogspot.com/.
Hopefully I'll update again soon with a color comp.

painting study!

Here is a small study I did earlier on in the week. I posted outside and painted my parent's fountain. Planning to blow this up and elaborate on it a little be more, add some more detail to it.

Some sketches

I went to a live model drawing session tonight and had a great time! It was hosted by Rachel Schwarz who runs the blog page "Art for Arts sake" which you can go to here: http://sanfranartsake.blogspot.com/ . It felt great to get some drawing in, seeing that I haven't done that for a while I really needed the practice. Here are a couple sketches I did, Enjoy!