Work in progress . . .

I'm working on this painting right now. Hopefully it won't be much longer before I finish, but one cannot predict what interruptions one may encounter. Thank you for stopping by and checking things out!

Condi Rice Sketch

What can I say? In the past I've had people write to me about my Condi drawings and tell me that I have no heart or that I must be racist or a left wing liberal or whatever. They got all that from my Condi drawings?

The truth is, Condi is a very odd looking women, she may be "good" or "bad", I don't know, but what I do know is that I love drawing her. She's got such a great face, so much character, she's very interesting to look at. No matter what expression falls upon her face, there's a great drawing to be had!

Quick Sketch

I'm still trying to adjust to my new life of not much sleep! I love my girls, one is three and the other is three weeks old, but it is quite a change to get used to. Lately I haven't had much time for sketching on my own, so this morning I gave it a go, had to get a sketch out of my system, and hopefully I'll be able to continue until I feel back to normal. I used a dark purple prismacolor pencil, and then dashed a bit of blue with photoshop.

Final watercolor

Well, this was an interesting job to take on, a little different than I usually do. Most of all of my work is done either with oils or acrylic or digitally, and for private commissions, almost always oil or acrylic. My watercolors work is more sketchy,really washy, and usually used only in my sketch book, I consider those works to be like writings in a personal diary.

For this job, my client wanted a "washy, loose, and artsy" feel to it, sort of like my sketches . . . so that's what I did. The challenge for this job was in my photo reference. The photo that I had to draw and paint from was a black and white photo, and on top of that, half his face was in a dark (black) shadow.

I'm finishing up my Marco painting, hopefully I'll be able to post it soon, a couple other works in the mix as well, thank you for stopping by!

A private commission

This week I started a private commission, a watercolor portrait for a birthday gift. At first my client wanted a caricature-ish portrait, not too exaggerated, so that's what the first sketch was. After the first sketch, the client decided to go for more of a portrait-caricature, more portrait than caricature. I didn't mind, I prefer the second sketch over the first anyways.

I started the final painting today, painting with Winsor and Newton watercolors on 140 lb cold press paper. I'm going for a loose, washy, fine art approach, so the final and end result will have a much different feel and look than the sketch shown here. So far it's been a fun challenge because the photo that I'm painting from is black and white, and the final has to be in color, so I'm using a few Rockwell paintings that I like for reference; which is appropriate because that's the feel my client wanted.

Marco Cholo . . . progress

Sorry for the blurriness, not the greatest picture, but the best I could take with the camera I'm using at this time. The original is much sharper, the color is off as well. Also, please check out my website, just updated it!

Do you remember Harpo?

Finally published, so I can finally share the finished painting! This is one of my favorite pieces that I did in '06, some serious time went into the rendering of this, I'm very pleased with the final result! This was done for Kenyon Alumni, a magazine out of Minnesota.

Working on Marco

Worked a bit on my Marco painting today, these two images were taken with a digital camera, so not the greatest quality. When I finish I'll scan it in. I'm painting this in oils with a limited palette, Ivory Black, Bright Red, Yellow Ochre, and White.

Some of my best work yet!

Well, I'm finally back in my studio, I'll hopefully have some new work and sketches to share with you all very soon, thank you for checking in!

The best thing that will ever happen for me in 2007 already happened on January 3rd, at 9:10 a.m. My beautiful girl Ava Dawn was born. Everything went well, my wife is doing well, and her older 3 year old sister Isabeau is adjusting well too! God has truly blessed me a lot in this new year!

Hillary

Fred Harper mentioned that I should try using a little gouache in one of my sketches, so I did this one this afternoon. It was fun, I'll have to experiment a little more with it, see what other kinds of fun I can get myself into! I wanted to push her features a lot more than I did, wasn't as successful as I had hoped to be, will probably try drawing her again sometime soon.