Even if you're not working in oils, or doing fantasy art, this guy is just absolutely fascinating to watch paint. He's so careful with every stroke he puts down, and his painting philosophy is really interesting to listen to. I heard he's working on another one.

Go download it!

It's also a little tough not having any days off, but I'm sort of used to that. When I was at Apple, my days off were spent doing art. I have a feeling things wil slow down a bit after I finish this huge AEG commission. It's due the day before Caroline and I move to Boston, and few weeks before Gencon, where I'm hoping to get some more work. I can't overstate how great it is to get 8 hours of sleep though. That may not last to the end of the month as the deadline pressure gets turned up, but for now it's been great!

All in all, I'm thoroughly enjoying myself. I'm still applying to a few video game companies in Boston for a concept artist position because it would be nice to have a steady paycheck doing art, but I'm willing to keep my options open. There's a lot of opportunities presenting themselves in recent months, and I want to take advantage of it as much as I can.

This one's for another ArtOrder contest.  Sadly my last piece got stuck in the spam filter and didn't get put into the running. It was fun though and I thought I'd give this next one a shot:

(from the post on ArtOrder)

Concept Name: Way back machine
Due Date: May 19, 2009, Noon PST
Concept Description: We've made thinks bigger, we've thrown them into the future and we've even caused them to evolve, but often in D&D we play the game where we have a creature that has an older, more primal big brother. This would be the difference between a giant and a titan. Ralph Horsley did up the Frost Giant/Titan image for the D&D Monster Manual® 2. As you can see, not only is the titan bigger - he has a more primal look. You could say he is less evolved than his giant sibling.

That, should you choose to accept it is the challenge this time. Devolve a creature so that we see his more monsterous and primal 'big brother'. What creature are we going to use for our baseline? This is when I get evil...the GNOME! The Style Guide sneak peek from last thursday. I want to see a silhouette of the normal Gnome in the image, and then show me your devolved version in all it's glory!

Deadline's tuesday! I'll post a link up.

In the meantime, here's the process:

I did the sketch in my sketchbook again, then scanned it in.

Then I dropped in the values. I didn't get as much time to get as detailed so I jumped stright to color at this point:

Then the final:

I'll need your votes when the contest goes up, so I'll post another link :)

and here's the final piece:

It's a sample image for a client I'll be working with in the coming months.  Strangely enough, it's not a gaming company, it's a museum doing an exhibotion on faerie houses.  I'll just be doing to map, but my dad (who's also an illustrator) will be creating one of the houses in the exhibition.

I'd like to refine the image a bit more before it goes into the ole' portfolio, but they needed the image by today.

Recording the process was pretty neat.  It made me feel like I was being watched, so I was very aware to not waste time and keep moving. Also there's something intensely satisfying about watching around 8 hours of work get boiled down to a minute and a half...

I learned a few things by doing this and I'll be giving it another shot in one form or another soon!

Every tuesday he holds a contest where he throws out a concept and you have to send in an illustration based on that within a week (sometimes two). Last tuesday's concept was a "Boll Deevil":

Sometimes the best source material for a new critter is right under our own noses. In this case, I want to take the innocent little Boll Weevil as a concept base for our next critter. The "Boll Deevil" should bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife a large and imposing critter - at least 15 feet in length. The attacks it can have I will leave up to you, but I want to see them. In other words, if it has a claw attack, I want to see claws that look like they can do real damage. If it has a breath weapon - show it's effect. This is pretty straight forward. So have fun with it.

So I thought I'd take a stab at it:

I started out with a pencil sketch, which I've moved away from recently but I thik I'll start doing this more often.

I brought it into photoshop, put it on a new multiply layer and started blocking in the values

Another method I picked up at Reverie was doing a finished grayscale image before jumping into color, so I gave that a shot this time around:

Then I went into color. With the values and drawing completely worked out it was a lot easier I think:

So there's the final.

Regardless of whether or not I'll win anything, I think it was a fun experiment and I ended up with a potential portfolio piece :-)