There's Something Fishy...

I have a good friend, Phil Cannon. He creates these awesome monster fish drawings. Being inspired by his work I drew this fish last summer and recently I decided to paint it. I've been on this kick lately of painting old sketches. It's a blast to revisit some of my favorite drawings and give them some more love. Hope you enjoy... Oh and case you didn't guess he is a voodoo fish loosely inspired by the Princess and the Frog villain Dr Facilier.

Mickey's biggest fan!?

Drew this sketch (bottom) of Darth Maul a few months ago. Ever since then I've been wanting to paint it. With the recent news of George Lucas selling his company to Disney, I thought this would be the perfect time to finish it. (ball point pen ink and marker with a little white colored pencil and of course photoshop)

More Sketch Madness!!!

I really love to draw! Most of my life I have had a pencil in my hand scribbling on something. When I was a little kid I was drawing so much that my parents bought me a large roll of paper. It had to be around10 inches in diameter and I went through that pretty quick. I wish that I had some more drawings from when I was a child. I have a box full of old retired sketchbooks from the last ten years or so. It's fun to go back through them every now and a again and see how I've grown as an artist. So keep those sketchbooks they are like an artistic journal! Maybe I'll scan some of those old drawings and post them up. What do you think?

 I wanted to share a some more recent sketches with all of you. Most of these have been posted on facebook, twitter, and instagram, but for those of you that don't follow me on those social networks here you go.  (Col-erase pencil, ink and marker on toned paper)

Jetpack Jack and the Beanstalk

What's everyone!? I wanted to share my latest painting from Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration Class at UVU. For this assignment we were to Illustrate a scene from the classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. I choose to take it a little further and take the story in to the science fiction realm and rename it Jetpack Jack and the Beanstalk. I know original, right?

You can see that I changed the composition as I moved into the final painting. I felt that there needed to be more visual interest in the image so I cut out jack and flipped him. Doing this created a nice X intersection.

I really enjoyed creating this and as with every painting I learned a lot and can't wait for the next project. Stay tuned...

Borderlands 2 DLC Concept Art

This is some concept art for an imaginary DCL (down loadable content) for Borderlands 2. This was actually a project for my Concept Design class taught at UVU. I was happy to do some  character and vehicle design  for the project. I had a lot of fun with this for sure! Check out Nate Call and Jared Salmond's blogs to see more concept art for this project.

Demo Painting...

Last night I had the opportunity to do a quick demo for the Illustration Club at UVU. For this demo I wanted to show my initial steps for creating digital paintings in Photoshop CS5. I had about 30-45 minutes to work so I had to work faster than I usually like to. This isn't meant to be a full tutorial but quick guide into my process.

Step one: I open a previously scanned image in photoshop.
Step two: I separate the line art from the white background.
Step three: I create new layer and fill it with 50-70%  gray. I place this layer underneath the line art.  Step four: I create a new layer and sandwich it in between the gray layer and my line art.This is the layer that I will start to block in my ruff values. When I'm blocking in the values I stay zoomed out and use a large brush. This step should only a couple of minutes.
Step five: Starts after I'm finished blocking in ruff values. For this step I create a layer above all of my art work, I call this my overpaint layer. On this layer I will paint out the line art. Also I start varying my brush size and start to zoom in and out to get a little more detailed. This is the layer where I start to blend the brush strokes.
Step six: When I am happy with my grayscale painting I start glazing color over the grayscale image. I do this by using multiply and color layers. After I have the colors blocked in I flatten my image and continue to refine the painting.