After 4 months, I finally am able to do personal work. I came up with this dragon design out of frustration while sketching some red cloth. Red is a difficult color to master for me so I set out to paint a red dragon as practice (and I thought it would look good on a t-shirt). Since this is supposed to be practice (and a small t-shirt design) I painted this at 5x7", and brought it here at full size.

I also painted this to try out a more "Donato" painting style. It is similar to how I prefer to paint, but his medium is a little different than my typical. I also painted on gessoed panel when I prefer canvas. All in all, I enjoyed it a bunch.

"Autumnal Dragon" 5x7 oil on panel

For a while I've been drawing with a col-erase pencil and these are some sketches in graphite. It seems strange to think how different the similar media are. (does that make sense?) I also feel the need to state how much I appreciate the Deviant Art people who create stock images. I also decided to follow Steve Prescot and draw some African Tribal hair, but they ended up as just face sketches.

From the blog "Art Order", John Schindehette put up several illustration descriptions that were used for print in D+D rule books. This is a 1/4 page illustration showing a glowing tower on a bluff. I thought this was a great opportunity to add this to the "Muddy Colors" blog for their random critique cession. Even if I don't get picked I still wanted to do this, and I'm fairly happy with the way it turned out.

I tried a different approach for a fine art painting. I planned on this being just a sketch, but took it a little to far.

This is the first day



Day 2


Day 3


For some reason I didn't take any shots of the color, but here is a bad shot of the final painting.


This picture was found on DeviantArt, the photographer was Marcus Ranum
http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/art/Art-Nudes-C-12-79372186

Crazy assignment for real money.


On a sunday a few months back I recieved a call about painting the cover to a prop for a movie. The deadline was the next Sunday. So I had one week to create this paintings and send it off (digitally). That was the tightest deadline I have worked with and I created my best Illustration yet. BAM.

I have to say that it's success was solely based on the intentional areas of no detail to play off the form and composition. Now I just need to replicate this idea consistently well.

I usually like the old school, and yesterday I went to the MET to draw from the statues with graphite on tracing paper. Tracing paper. It's fun stuff and I like the durability of it and Vellum.

Here are the three sketches I did. They are in the Greek section and all are from stone.

A marble statue of, I'm not sure who.

A small statue of PAN.

And a column topper, or some other similar thing. It looks like it belongs on a column but it doesn't seem to hold anything... like a ceiling.

After many trials and great tribulations I have finally figured out Dreamweaver and Fireworks from Adobe. I knew Flash from when I was in school, but I never learned HTML or CSS. I can't say it's a great site, but it does what I need it to do. I painted the Dragon you see at the top of the Blog specifically for my site, but didn't like so much for the site.

On a side note, I am finally somewhat comfortable in my painting ability. I still have much work ahead of me, but I can now say with confidence that I have improved and am heading in the direction I've wanted to go. Here is the head of the Dragon at 100% scanned size. The actual size is an inch plus horn.