Happy spring! 'Tis the season for pollywogs (tadpoles)! Here is a new piece to celebrate:

"Madame Hélice de La Mare"

I have plenty of process documentation for this one since I was doing it as part of an online course. Honestly, I can't say I got that much from the course, but someone in an earlier learning stage might. You can, however, pretty much get the same amount of information and feedback from online communities like Awesome Horse Studios and Crimson Daggers. The main reason for my doing the course was because 1) I'm a huge admirer of Justin Gerard's draftsmanship, and 2) there was a promotional discount. 

So, here's the process:

Thumbnails (There were actually more, but I didn't see the point in scanning them all.)

Rough Sketch & Values

Color Comps

Final Painting

So, that's that...now to see if someone will critique it!

Here is "Paint" again, with a few tweaks, plus a snapshot of my work space with brainstorming and thumbnails in progress:

Maybe something to do with snails..

Hey, so you remember that "teaser" I posted a little while back? Well, lo and behold--I dropped that idea and went with this! I worked on my that first version for a few hours before realizing it wasn't what I wanted. I don't regret changing my mind--just goes to show that you shouldn't be afraid to trash an idea if it doesn't feel right.

"Paint" will be the last addition to my series based on dreams for a bit. There are more pieces to be done, but I need to work on some other things first.

Model credit: KristabellaDC3

I'm pretty pleased with it (at the moment), so I'm going to post it around for some feedback before I tweak it any further.

I made some more tweaks on "The Aerialist" thanks to some feedback from Monkeybread, which was greatly appreciated. I'm still not quite happy with it, though, so I'll move on and look back on her later when maybe I'll have a bit more insight. Here's the series so far with a teaser for the next piece:

Presenting "The Aerialist"--a new digital painting in the same series as "The Room". I'm posting this up to a few different communities, hoping to get some feedback. I had lot of trouble creating an effective background and I would have liked to use a vertical format instead of this wide horizontal one, but the reason I am using a horizontal one is because I hope to put this whole series online, each painting a full page--hence the widescreen format. I don't want a "lightbox" (like the one I currently use in my portfolio gallery).

I don't regularly do graphic design because my last job really turned me off to it (although it taught me a lot), but when I occasionally do it now, it's pretty fun! Here are two recent logos I did:

This was created from a photo courtesy of The Vertcal Barre and Sincerely Vintage Photography.

This one was created from a really old photo of me back when I first started trapeze!

All right, voici une nouvelle version de Monsieur La Tortue ! This new and improved version is thanks to the great community of artists over at Crimson Daggers. A big thanks to Simon Palmer, David Shearer, and Jacob Anderson for their paint-overs!

Also, after doing so much digital painting I decided to revisit "Pelagic Hominid", so I could push those values a bit more:

It's a big difference, no?! I don't know why, but I'm always reluctant/lazy/hesitant to push my values the way I do in my oils. Maybe it's just that I never feel like my lines and edges can be as precise and crisp in digital--but that's not true, I'm pretty sure it's strictly related to my ability to stick with it!