Post College Graduation

You may or may not have noticed the long absence of blog updates. In fact, today literally marks the one year anniversary since my last post. Which, to be honest, is a complete coincidence and was in no way planned. I actually meant to get back to posting much sooner, but things didn't really work out that way.

So what happened? Where have I been for the last year?

Well to put it simply, I graduated college and got a job.

But it's a little more complicated than that. I had to move (three times). Get situated as an independent adult in a different state. Find new doctors. And a whole slew of things related to relocating alone. Not to mention being on Crunch for a project the last 2 to 3 months.

On top of all that, since I am no longer a student and am instead working full time, the majority of the work I do now is under NDA. And while I'm still creating new art, a good portion of it falls into that category which means I'm not at liberty to share it here.

So not only have things been extremely hectic, but I also haven't had as much to post about.

The good news is, things are finally settling down. My job is fantastic. I've been learning so much every day. And I recently got to play a pretty major role as the environment artist for a game we recently wrapped up(sorry, I can't say much more than that), which was an unbelievable opportunity.

And that about sums it up in terms of my year long absence. Of course before I go, I've got a few new images to share.

The first thing I did over the summer after graduating was a small some what experimental canvas painting. I had had this image in my head for a while of a painting I wanted to make that also incorporated actual buttons sewn onto the canvas. I initially wanted it to be more abstract in nature, but ended up so focused on painting her skin that she turned out fairly more realistically styled than I intended. Each button was hand sewn onto the canvas, which was a huge chore and caused me to burn out on the painting before I got everything I wanted done. But I'm still pretty happy with it, considering it was more of an experiment than anything else. I might come back and work on it again in the future, but for now it's done.

This was a quick 1 maybe 2 hour mix media piece I did because I just felt like it.  It's fairly large, 18"x 24." If I remember correctly there's some charcoal, china marker, and white paint. Maybe a some type of wax crayon as well, I'm not too sure. I was using a bunch of the random art supplies I had left over from school. 

I improved my digital painting quite a bit, much of which is thanks to owning a cintiq. The thing about this piece is you can literally scroll down to my second to last post to see where it was when I picked it back up. I only spent 4-5 more hours on it and managed to get it to this point.  It's still not done but I'm loving all of it except for her face, which needs some work.

I've been happy with my improvement with digital painting, but since I still want to get even better I decided it would be beneficial to do a traditional still life from observation. I didn't want to go all out though, so I decided to keep it simple and to just do a small clove of garlic. It took me 2 and a half hours exactly and I couldn't be happier with it. The small peel on the left is my favorite part because I really feel like you can really see it's translucense, which has been something I've struggled with rendering appropriately in the past.  The only downside was that by the time I was done my entire bedroom smelled like garlic!

And that's it. Well not all of it, but by far the best picks out of everything I've done outside of work over the last year.

I'm hoping that I'll have enough new work that I will be able to do another post next month or maybe sooner. Weekly posts are unfortunately going to have to be a thing of the past as I simply just don't have enough work that I can share.

Artificial Light

It's been a while since my last post, so I thought I should go ahead and share some new stuff.

This quarter I'm taking a lighting class along with my thesis, and while I don't really feel like my first assignment is worth sharing, I'm really happy with the latest one so I wanted to post it.

I had much bigger plans for it, but for the time being I'm having to put them off until I'm done with my thesis. I wanted to have some weeds growing near the fence and put some big rocks in the ground that kind of lead towards the shed. I also want to eventually sculpt the ground a little bit so it's not just a completely flat plane.

But considering the amount of time I had to work on this, I'm really happy with how it looks despite not having everything I wanted. I think the lighting turned out really well, and I'm happy with pretty much all of the textures except for the ground. This is definitely  a project I will be coming back to to fix up for my portfolio.

Aside from my lighting assignment, the rest of what I have are just quick drawings I've done to help myself relax and take away some of the stress from thesis.  Most of them where done in under and hour, usually 30 minutes.

Dreaming is definitely my favorite part of sleep.

The More I look at this one the more I dislike it. There are a couple of strokes I wish I hadn't put in, but it's okay.

 I don't title my work often, but I've been calling the drawing above, "Fear."

Can you tell I was stressed/frustrated when I did this one? Pretty much all of that went away once I was done drawing it. It's really great to be able to just get rid of all that negative energy by doing a quick drawing.

This was actually one of my favorite drawings from high school that I decided to color. It's funny how easily I can recall the original image I had in my mind even though it's been 4-5 years. She actually has a feathered tail in the original drawing, but I didn't have enough time to color it and it looked weird leaving the pencil in so I took it out for now.

I've always wanted to do a large scale painting of this, I'd still like to some day. I think the anatomy might need a bit of adjusting first though.