presents

Christmas presents for the g/f's family. I wrote "katy" right die up intentionally :)

winter is here

First of all, yes Derrick this is you. Second....I'll leave this alone for a while. There will be some cartoons coming up next for my g/f's family including my own for the holiday. I encourage everyone to give gifts and good feelings throughout the year and not just on a designated date of the year. The new job at Rue Lala has been a blessing upon my humanity. It pays well and opens up my doors to new things. I'll throw the a picture of the kids book on here for good measure also.

nearly done

Not as much palette knife as I thought, but just about done with it all.

more experiments

Thought I would document some more process on my experiments before I start adding the highlights and messing with the background. The next round may call for a palette knife.

a study

enjoying the discipline with limited pallettes for a change. It's pretty liberating to just mess around for an hour.

and the "almost as good(s)"

Some of them still have their issues, but again fairly minor. The dragons on the doors were intentionally done as one being larger than the other, including the flame wrapped around the door handle. Lastly, there are sizing issues on the top page in the "people to house" sizing ratio, even if it is small. Pretty boring houses I guess.

It's high time that I return to some more personal experimentation and begin preparing my work haul for Elissa Della-Piana's bird show next March which will run till late August next summer at the Gallery Della-Piana where I will be grouped with 8-10 big-name artists. Hopefully I won't be the youngest one with work on the wall. Throughout the remainder of the Fall, there will be many more interesting updates of things to come.

It's Here

Finally, 2 highlights from the Childrens book I've been laboring over during the summer and early fall. It feels relieving to know that my name will be printed on the cover of a book, even if it is for someone else's self published story. The project paid 800 dollars for 7 full color Illustrations displaying the closest thing to any type of "style" I've produced other than my natural science work. As shown above, the story is titled "The Witches that Saved the Dogs", a jam-packed story about 2 girls named Hortense and Esmerelda who have their puppies(Waggy-Tail, and Princess) kidnapped by an evil witch. Throughout the story, Hortense and Esmerelda must discover their own magical powers in order to save their beloved puppies.
One of the issues I had after reading over the text was that there were plenty more scenes that could have been executed, but would have cost the authors more than the 800 dollars they had available for me.

Another issue was the formatting I was confined to for each painting. No landscape at all, only portrait format and 8.5' x 11' inches. Because of these limitations , most compositional elements rely on warped views and tend to follow the same sizing in terms of hierarchy in content and where I put the most detail. These aspects give a majority of the pages a sense of consistency, but also a slight hint of forced feeling. The remainder of the successful ones are coming!