oh pioneer

Based on a cool old time sepia photo I came across. I apologize if this is your great grand aunt. The finish work on this ended up taking forevah, but I think I am pleased with it. Sometimes you work and work forever on especially finish work, then I can't really say whether it is necessarily worse or better. It gets very subjective. Whatever, it's up and I can wash my hands of it, then move on to another old time photo.

in process

I often start with a blue pencil, then just go right on finishing with a blue pencil. I think it looks nice. This one is in process.

doodle

For no good reason.

Tracing paper

A very good trick for getting an accurate drawing before you spend hours on an oil painting only to realize your initial drawing was way off: Do the drawing on tracing paper, then pull out that page and put it under the next page. Trace the lines that are correct then remove the page and do the drawing again. Repeat this process over and over, maybe 5 times or more if needed. Each time you should be able to tighten the drawing and get much closer to the correct proportions. This is the 3rd try at this drawing, the first was not nearly as close but I like this one. Actually the second and third were very similar, its a great exercise and you will get better as you do it.

I plan to paint this soon(I hope).

fridays sketch

A good interesting angle for this weeks sketch. These angles are extremely tricky to get correct proportions but it is a very useful exercise that prevents you from relying on what you know, instead you have to measure and analyze.
This is close, I will not point out the problems though.

Here is Sam's angle. And Adam's.

Bump - Cover

-Updated-
I wanted to give some extra publicity to the Author Bruce Newbold. For anyone interested in a Harry Potter type good read with a nicer cover, the book has just been released and can be found here: The Baseball Box Prophecy

A just completed book cover commission I am unveiling for the first time. The book is titled "The Baseball Box Prophecies" and is still in the late production process so it's not yet available but it was a fun project that turned out better then expected.
I used Adam Ford's layered painting method for this which turned out to be a fantastic process for a complicated lighting setup. It took more time to fully plan it out and resulted in huge files with many layers but again I am happy with the effect. I have tried it since with simpler paintings and it hasn't turned out so it may be just for specific uses.

Bell

In a desperate attempt to drive traffic I have sunk to the level of painting Disney princesses in hopes of snatching a few unassuming Google searchers.

Actually it is a Avalanche blog topic which was prompted by these to nice princess paintings done by Sam Neilson(since childhood Disney princess coloring book pages seem to be a specialty of Sam's) and Ryan Wood.
Kind of enjoyable to not have to worry about the drawing, just go to town with colors. The color scheme was taken from one of my favorite paintings evah, Jean-Francois Millet's Louise-Antoinette Feuardent(I think the colors on the link are not that good) which you can see at the fantastic J. Paul Getty museum in LA.