Hunting Party

Well, Friday came and I hurriedly finished up edits on episode 73 of the Ninja Mountain Podcast before heading down to the con to enjoy the evening. I joined my friend and cartoonist, Don Higgins, who produces the web comic , “Dark Magic and Donuts“.

I had some time to kill while at OGC in Nashua this weekend and so I sat down with some sepia tones ( a mixture of cerulean blue and burnt sienna) and started noodling with some blobby shapes on 140 lb cold-pressed paper.

They eventually evolved into this warm watercolor sketch. I fell in love with the theme and spent the better part of the day working on it. It was a blast.

It was a fun show! I sold the piece entitled “Cliffside” to a friend along with a character sketch I did for a con-goer named Jim. He was really pleased with it.  I’ll be sure to share it here on the blog soon.

I am pleased to say that the artwork I had on display got much positive reaction from folks who attended the event. I hope I receive a similar reception at GenCon this year. I have a lot of new work to share and it is very different from last year’s stuff. Fingers crossed….

Now I must get to work preparing for the big show. It is just over a week away!

Beast Man

Today’s piece I think may have been inspired by my early love of Masters of the Universe.

Beast Man rocked!

I was not in the studio yesterday, but am happy to be back today.

This is another 4×6 painting which was great fun.

I had another scare from my hard drive today, but it turned out to be a conflict with a piece of hardware which is no big deal. Phew! I’ll be watching my computer like a hawk from  here on. I rest much easier now that I have a hard drive to back my files up to. :)

Gotta get caught up on matting of artwork for the convention this weekend.

Socar and I recorded episode 73 of the Ninja Mountain Podcast today and I will be editing that this evening. We received some interesting questions from a listener and I share my sad story of computer woe.

Not to be missed!

I’ll post that when it’s ready.

So far a much better week than last!

Onwards!

Sepia Wyrm

Well, what an eventful last few days it has been.

Due to a catastrophic failure of both this computer’s hard drive and its absent-minded owner ( who forgot to back-up said hard drive) I have lost the large print-worthy files of my old work and daily warm-ups.

The old hard drive remains in a vacuum bag. It is sphinx-like in its silent refusal to reveal the secrets within…

A rather terrible event for me.

Were I to imagine a positive side to all of this, the daily warm-up pieces do not necessarily represent a huge loss individually ( having only spent an hour or so on each one), but not having the large files means I will be unable to produce the sketch book I had been planning.

A sad day, though not crushing, since I still met the primary goals of these assignments which was to learn from them .

The jpegs posted to my blog are quite safe and available for continued enjoyment. :)

As for the other art files from my professional work, all of those files are owned by the various publishers with whom I’ve worked since having gotten this computer which is less than two years old. I could do nothing else with them in any case.

“Que sera sera”, as the more wistful would say.

I have dusted myself off and am back in the fight with a new watercolor sketch.

I’ve picked up a couple of watercolor blocks ( a 4×6 and a 9×12) that were on clearance and am having a blast with the heavier paper. The paper undergoes minimal buckling and is a much heavier 140 lb weight which deals well with my rough scrubbing techniques.

This little piece is on 4×6 paper. I rather like the smaller format for this sketch. :)

It is a mixture of burnt sienna and cerulean blue with a few dashes of chinese white.

Well, back to the grind and off to a new beginning, if you will.

Onwards!

Handlebar final

Well, I pretty much finished this experimental piece.

If you follow this blog, you may remember that this began as a watercolor sketch which I then refined into a grayscale under-painting. I decided to finish up this experiment with an over-glazing of acrylics.

I also placed a wash of digital color into the background to cool it down and pop the main character forward more effectively.

As you can see, I focused on the face for this piece. I have too much to do to devote too  much more time on this project. I still have lots of other cool stuff to do!

I broke out my shiny new Liquitex soft-body acrylics for the final pass. They performed admirably and the paints handle in a way that I much prefer over the heavy-bodied tube acrylics I used to work with.

They thin beautifully with water and provide excellent glazes when mixed with gloss medium.

I may even start doing the occasional daily warm-up with these acrylics to further acquaint myself with the paints.

In other news, I am currently laying out a sketchbook collection of my favorite daily warm-up pieces to bring with me to GenCon. I’ll offer them for sale at my table I think. It is currently 64 pages in length and will feature a little under half of the warm-ups I’ve done so far. I am looking forward to seeing it printed!

It is blindingly hot here in the studio this week. A small heat wave is raging just outside and this place is hotter than magma in the microwave.

A little fan tries to swat away the hot gusts of wind and is putting up a valiant fight, but this is one Goliath it can hardly hope to overcome.

I may have to leave the studio for the hottest daytime hours and seek the relative cool of the main house today….