is gradually turning into this:

I’ve been attempting to get up extra early and get an hour or two of painting time in before work, and it has been….mixed results.  Some days things have been great and some days, the lil 5yold seems to have adjusted his schedule as well…

After a couple days I had a little fun playing with skin rendering and trying to get a sense of translucency. One of the many attempts actually turned out to become this guy, which has a nice tone to it that I like.

Followed by a couple silly monsters following my son’s obsession with pokemon all of a sudden.

And then this thing.. .. this might become a thing.. it’s still rough, but it’s speaking to me.  It started out as a perspective homework.. then became an epic skies homework.. and now it might be something else altogether..

On an art related note, I cracked some oil paints open for the first time in 7 years (it was a disaster then) and … holy cow…I’m loving them..

Something about the transparency and the need to go slow really just works for me.. maybe it’s because I’m getting older and not in as much of a hurry.  Not sure exactly what it is, but I’m doing some test pieces and maybe finishing/reworking the initial disastrous attempt and who knows maybe they’ll be worthy of showing on the inter-tron some day.

However on sketch 32 this little guy popped out.

and then I decided he needed a chance to get a world to live in. And by 37 it was looking like this:

Then pulled in some rough textures and and blocked things in a bit more.

By update 40 the trees were looking flat and the overall color was beginning to be a bit washed out.

And that puts us here at update 41, time spent pushing back the stone some and final rendering of the character and more minor details.

Still need to touch up the bear, abird and pants, but we’re 99% there.

But none the less, scribbles were made, but i’m having a hard time ‘finishing’ even these things. So I’ve been making myself to more and more thumbnails to just start being able to see the composition before starting on the actual drawing. And i feel that it’s been improving my sense of wholeness of each thing, if that makes any sense.   That and watching The Hair lessons on the Magic Box there was a total ‘ah-ha’ moment, where talking about visual rest and the need to NOT render something felt like it clicked. ( see the goblin girl’s hair below)

But finally I’ve watched a bunch of other artist talks and one struck me as particularly poignant,  essentailly you should be able to describe your painting in 5 values.  Which I did below and a couple of them are fairly successful.  Now I used the full range and the same 5 values across the board instead of selecting high key / low key values specific to each thumbnail which was probably a mistake, but I’m actually pretty happy with the graphic result.

Other misc thing a days, that were more of a mental check out rather than focused on actually learning something.

Ok Failing to grasp cloud structure was kinda fun.

Other than the overworked face and broken neck structure.. this was actually much nicer looking 45 min earlier. 

Start of a new year.

But it’s time to get some practice, so in an attempt to do a ‘thing a day’ here’s the first 8 days worth of things,  Even the ugly stuff, even the unfinished stuff.  Lots of it is just technique practice or late nite scribbles (or both).

Took another pass at this, and made a binch of thums and eventually came up with perspective I liked.

Then I tossed into the perspective view maker http://drakkheim.com/perspective/grid.php?image=2a811acb319a27b462e6185e36aa491d.png&save=2 and saved out some guides.

Then a little bit of time blocking out some of the shapes and it’s something I’m beginning to think works.

But now it’s time for some holiday cheer so perhaps things will be a bit slow for a while.

Start off with a sketch.

And then go back and really nail down the perspective.

Which I’m in the process of doing …

Still have a long way to go.

I think this is going to be it!  Gonna sleep on it but I think this is where this journey ends for this piece. At least for tonight. Barring any last changes I’m looking to get this to a printer this week.

And here’s some details of some of my favorite parts of the painting.
The little path into the forest

The little church and houses on the hill

The turtle.. shell and belt buckle just make me happy.

And my favorite part might just be the little glistens on the water.

Need one more pass on the mid ground trees and then maybe some more balance adjustments but I’ve stared at this for over a month now and it’s almost time to get it sent off to the presses.

Mid ground mostly done maybe needs another pass.

Castle almost getting there.