A difficult summer...

     So it has been an unexpectedly difficult summer for me.  Not long after finding out about Brian's accidental death while he was night skiing over new years, I got a call from my oldest and closest friend's mother.  She was having a hard time speaking, but through passing the phone back and forth with Nathan's father, they had informed me that he had experienced a seizure while getting ready for work July 2nd and died from what is believed to be the accompanying heart attack.

     Nathan has been a part of my life for around 25 years now, and through all that time his seizures were an ever present annoyance, but I must admit that the call still came as a shock.

     This last weekend was his memorial and the night before it took place I was asked to write "Welcome to Nathan's Celebration of Life" on a poster board to put next to the road to show people where to park.  I felt that since art is what I had to offer, art is what I would give.

     I have always been a fan of the art nouveau style, and Nathan was a fan of brewing his own beer, so I tried to make it feel a bit like a beer bottle label.  The beer bottles are there to help with the composition, but also because he brewed his own beers and had been considering opening a indie brewery in Eugene, OR.  I also took the info they had and made a program for the event, which I felt was important and was well received.  I wish I could have done more, but for being asked to do it the evening before I am happy with the results.  

     Strangely enough, I found that our yard sale sign seemed to be designed perfectly to fit that size paper.  A convenient break I hadn't thought about since I never buy poster board.  One thing I learned from this was that I need a better ventilated area if I am going to spend 2-3 hours with Sharpies.  :\

     After the event, my brother and I, as well as our friends Mikey, Shana, and Karen went to the pub Nathan and I used to frequent to drink a shot in his honor.  Whenever we found ourselves back in our hometown at the same time, we would go down to the Black Sheep, have a pint or two and throw some darts.  I am not a whiskey drinker, but Nathan was a fan so I downed a Jameson.  He would have laughed at my expression.

     He was a great guy, and he will be missed.

Well, it has been a pretty hard summer...

     A few months ago I got word that my childhood friend, Brian, had passed while doing some night skiing on New Years Eve.  That was hard for me, especially since I found out about it two days before his memorial service.

     About two weeks ago, my oldest and closest friend, Nathan, passed away from a seizure while getting ready for work.  While seizures were a big part of his life as long as I had known Nathan, it still came as quite a shock when I got the call from his mother.

     I will post more about it when it comes time for the memorial.

     I have been keeping myself busy so I don't think about things and as such, I have pretty much finished the oil crayon piece I was working on.

     I still need to look over it one more time, sign it and frame it, but there it is.

Brother's birthday card...

It was my brother's birthday a couple days ago and I couldn't find card I liked at the store I went to, so I decided to just sit down and paint him a custom one.  I went through my reference pictures I had taken of animals around the house in Oregon and found one of a raccoon I liked so I painted a watercolor for the front, folded it half, put in an artisan brown paper lining on the inside and then attached a small piece of writing paper on the inside.

Then I grabbed a bit of charcoal drawing paper and cut it to size and layout of an envelope using the card as a sizer and used a scrap of the interior paper as an added element to the hand made envelope to tie them together.

Here is the result.  For a last minute thing, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I love watercolor for the drying time.  I can go from drawing to painting to sticking it in a sealed envelope with very little wait.

WIP - Traditional piece...

     So... very often when I enter a gallery or looking through an art book I find myself thinking, "Well, I can do that."  This is from one of those occasions.  I had never used oil crayons before and I ran across a semi-local artist who used them for nature illustrations.  I was inspired and thought I would give it a go.  There have always been a large number of deer around my family's home in Oregon and I had a good amount of reference, so I found an image I liked and used it to create this piece.  What I really wanted to focus on with this was trying to push a depth of field in a traditional piece, so I went really loose in the background and have incorporated different levels of snowflake to really push a 3 dimensional feel to the piece.

     I would say it is about 70-80% done here as there is a lot of snow left to draw/paint, I need to push the shadows on the ground and I want to go back over the deer once more for just a bit more detail attention.  Sorry for the camera phone quality and yellowing.  When I finish I will break out my real camera, take some archival images and post a final piece both here and on my site.

The Last Apple of the Season

Oil crayon and acrylic on paper, 22x30

Some graphic design work...

I was going through some graphic design freelance work files to update my site and thought I would post some here.

A few months back I did some work for a web design company looking to hire a few web programmers.  It is a pretty cool small business with a superhero / comic theme.  I enjoyed brainstorming with them as their theme allowed for a number of fun ideas.

This is a printed flyer looking for new employees.  I have removed the text, website and address of the company.

Front: We had a pretty specific idea for what would work.  A cape and cowl patiently waiting on a hook for the new team member.  Because finding an image to exactly match the concept would have been neigh impossible, and photomerging stock images together would have produced less than ideal results while taking the same amount of time, I was given the go-ahead to model/render everything in Maya.

Back:  I created the characters in illustrator, then brought them into PS and went from there.  I like how it turned out.

For good measure I threw in a free square blurb image in case they also wanted to 

post the available jobs on their facebook page.

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While I was living in north Hollywood, I helped out an e-cigarette startup with logo, oil bottle stickers and an example menu to try to raise the professional feel of their company.  The text in the menu was filler I made up and not formatted for final print.

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I also did a bit of freelance for an architecture firm in Oregon helping with some retouching to raise the presentation level of their proposals.  I have added some before and after images to show what I was able to achieve with a bit of Photoshop manipulation.  I enjoyed being able to do some retouch manipulation again.

This image was for one of the project lead's personal portfolio.  (billed separately to him)

Color correction, removed person, added lights and glow, added signage, populated with people, plants, office supplies.

Most of the images I worked on were like this.  Small changes to darken distracting areas, add texture

and add people and plants for scale and to make the room feel more alive.

Slight color correction, background added, floor texture & carpet fix, cleaned ugliness in stair walls,

populated with plants, dishwasher, added company logo as a sign.

I have been working on quite a lot of traditional work recently.

When I was at Ringling I was lucky enough to come across an art store that was going out of business.  Since I was showed up the day before it closed its doors forever, I was able to get everything at 75-85% off.  Never one to pass on a great deal, I pretty much just bought the rest of their supplies and found myself owner of hundreds of tubes of watercolor paint, a medium my mother dabbled in when I was a child and one that always interested me.

Not too long ago, I decided that now was as good a time as any to start working in it and, since I needed a new self portrait for avatars, I decided that would be a good place to begin.

I think I need to spend a bit more time in the initial drawing phase.  I realized quickly that the angle I drew the line work was way too low in relation to what I was drawing off of, and the proportions turned out to look like a Modigliani painting.  No problem for a little photoshop adjustment in post, but stressed to me the importance of getting the drawing right before starting in on the colors.

I have also started a piece in oil pastels of a deer eating an apple because I had never worked the medium before and I have a thing for trying out every possible art medium available.  I will post some work in progress images of that and some landscape paintings soon.

:)

Boots....

So I talked to Paul at Pixologic and he said that as of right now there is no current way to do turnarounds with the package, and he is unsure about future deals with Keyshot for making that an option.  They are too busy with the launch to really think about it right now.

No turntables is a bit disappointing, but after playing around in the program, I anticipate fun is to be had no matter what.  This is about 10 minutes fiddling around with importing a pair of boots.

The boots are off of the Clara model I have been working on, just to see what is what.  I haven't textured them, or really added any high res detail yet, this is just basic primary and light secondary shapes.  I added a brown leather material to the boots and changed the color to a lighter brown since stock it is pretty dark, added a black leather material to the soles and an old metal texture to the spurs.
Let it do its thing and... voila.  As a thumbnail, I could see these mistaken for real boots.  Add in texture and detail and I think It will be able to put out some crazy photoreal images.

Zbrush to Keyshot package....

Well, Zbrush 4r7 has finally released and with it came the 4r7 64 bit beta as well as the much anticipated Zbrush to Keyshot package which includes the bridge and a limited version of Keyshot specifically for Zbrush users.  I have been waiting to snatch this up since it was announced months ago, and bought it straight away.

I love the ease of use and the great renders Keyshot provides, but was confused when I went to render out a turntable.  The normal turntable option was nowhere to be found.  It seems that one of the limitations on the Keyshot for Zbrush package is a lack of rendering turntables native in Keyshot.  Since (I believe) this is mainly marketed to artists in the entertainment industry (and even artists who deal in jewelry) I find this to be a major flaw in the package.

I have heard rumors that it is still possible to set up the turntable in Zbrush and THEN render it through KS, but I have not yet tried it so I can't say one way or the other.  I will do some research, tests and re-edit this post if possible.