New Beginnings

I've spent the last month moving from Raleigh to Columbus to start teaching full-time as an assistant professor at CCAD. So far Columbus has been great - lots of good food, good people, cool stores (can you believe there is a stationery store just blocks from my apartment?!) After four weeks, my belongings still haven't been delivered to me thanks to those bastards at American Van Lines, but that hasn't stopped me from buying all new art supplies and making some paintings to adorn the many many walls in my apartment. Feels great to use traditional media. It's been such a long long time. These were modeled from vintage photos of Catherine Deneuve and Alain Delon that I googled.

Her Heart Was Bionic

I've wanted to do some Anna / Gaston "movie posters" for some time now.  I have a few more ideas in the works, but here is the first one, inspired by the poster for "This Gun For Hire."

Jon Snow

As portrayed by Kit Harrington in Game of Thrones.

Melisandre

As portrayed by Carice Van Houten from the new season of Game of Thrones.

Concept Art

Here's a painting I did last weekend to warm up a new game design project I'm working on. To follow my progress go to my other blog, Osgood in 3D.

Paul Poiret

This summer I wanted to do a project in acrylic to use up some of the remaining boards I had lying around before I moved to Raleigh. I ended up with 3 paintings based on vintage illustrations from fashion house Poiret. The illustrations date from around 1910 and are done by Paul Iribe & George LePape, who were commissioned over many years to create drawings of the Poiret fashions. This is a topic I touched back in 2006 when I was working on my senior thesis for my BFA in illustration. Similarly, I created 3 illustrations based on the fashion of Poiret. This time, however, it was far more homage because I used the existing compositions & color palettes from the Iribe/LePape images. While I made quite a few changes, the similarities are uncanny. The image below shows my paintings on the right next to their inspirations.

Gaston

Here's a little painting I did for fun over the past week. It's what I imagine the puppy that I had last summer might look like today. I gave him back to my mother, who is a dog breeder, which hopefully doesn't sound too heartless. He really was the love of my life for the week I had him, but the idea of leaving him in a cage in my apartment during my 9-5 was too much to bear. (how boring!) He ended up going with his puppy brother to a home with two little old ladies that probably give him a whole lot of love. And plenty of cigarettes?

...Anyway I had finished the clothing part and then almost scrapped the painting because I was running out of time (more on that below) but really his face and arms wasn't so hard. I also have been wanting to spray a matte finish on something and then put a high gloss varnish in certain areas on a painting for a while, so this was a good opportunity to test it out. Although you can't see in this digital image AT ALL, I glossed the "smoke" and his eyes and nose. It's a cool effect that I'll use again.

Now the other part is that I'm moving to Raleigh tomorrow to embark on a new adventure: the graduate animation program at North Carolina State University. Wish me luck!

CS5 Play

Just got my CS5 Master Suite in the mail last night and wanted to play around with Photoshop's new features. I think the new settings with the brush are pretty cool, but really not all that life altering. I tried my best to use them in this image, but don't like the result as much as the process I've been developing with the previous versions' more limited capabilities. Basically you get some stringier looking brushes and the ability to pick up color that is already on the canvas with a new "mixer brush."

Overall, the software loads quicker and feels more responsive, but on the other end of that is too sensitive and feels a bit glitchy compared to CS4. For instance, I kept accidentally moving or closing my palettes when I was just trying to access them--something that's never happened to me in past versions even thought the interface is the exact same thing. The canvas is a little jumpy when zooming/panning as well. BLERG. (Also played around with the "content-aware fill" which is far less cool than what it was made out to be)

Rachel

I like Sean Young. And I don't care how crazy she is.

Janelle Monae

Painted this little lady in the afternoon after finishing some real work. Was tons of fun to just paint something and not care too much about the result! (meanwhile, two almost-finished acrylic paintings are staring me down begging for those final all-important brushstrokes).

Also some fantastic news, my Mad Men heads made it into the 3x3 pro show. Found out a couple weeks ago.

Clavicle

Here's a painting I did, meant to be the third in the set with Handhearts & XYZach. I don't think it fits, though, so I'll do something else!

White

Here are some fashion studies I did a week ago. First time I've painted traditionally in several months... felt good!

Logan Lynn: Feed Me to the Wolves

Here's a painting I did of a musician named Logan Lynn. I'm also including the process because it might be interesting to someone out there.

XYZach

Here's a new painting inspired by the happiness I got out of painting "Handhearts" below. Another Dlist boy.

Handhearts

Here is a little painting I've been working on for fun. Inspired by a photo of a Dlist Boy named "handhearts." This actually fits perfect as my annual "red-haired" winter painting and it's fun to see how I've grown in four years. Here are the previous:

1. Red-Haired Girl
2. Jessica
3. Man in White Suit

Teela

Here's a little sketch I did of Teela from "Masters of the Universe."

Saint Scholastica

I have finally finished, after more than a year sitting on the shelf, my painting of Saint Scholastica. It feels so good to have this little weight off my shoulders, I must say. It's also interesting to look at this and see a couple stylistic approaches that I was veering towards last year and have now moved away from.

Here is the original post.

The Duchess

This was started as a demo for my class. I'm glad I finished it!

Watercolor

I wanted to see if I could accurately mimic the appearance of watercolor in Photoshop, so I played around with this. I made a couple custom brushes that "bleed" and applied a watercolor paper-like texture to the washy layers I created. Simple pleasures: my favorite part is the white necklace that looks as though it was painted with thinned white-out.

Grayscale + Color

Here are two paintings I did as demos for a class I'm teaching at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. The first assignment was to learn how to paint in grayscale, using a full range of white to black with the tactile experience of traditional drawing/painting. The second assignment was to color that image.