fennec and dragon WIP

5x7in acrylics
Just messing around a bit tonight.

Lost Fox Final Image

-11x14in acrylics-

I'll be selling prints and the original at Seattle's Emerald City Comicon this weekend.

fox WIP

Final Image

I popped out the legs, pushed back the head, and increased the color and contrast on the fox. I did a green and blue wash on the bottom of the image and a little around the edges. I should probably work on this some more but I'm hitting that over working point. My shapes are becoming stiffer and stiffer. :( I may come back later, but in general I'm gonna call this done. I metioned this earlier, but this point right here, this is why I hate painting.

On another note, I listened to this 46 times in a row.
A winner is me?

Still working out color. Added small details and highlights. I'm considering cooling down the color at the bottom of the image some more. Maybe add a bit of fill light. I did a wash of light green over the background which seperated the warm figures a bit. This had the effect of muddying the colors though. I don't like that too much. Also added dark green and purple to the bits of plant along the edges of the image. I'm thinking I should lighten the background in a larger area from the side of the image, through the dragon's neck, and towards the fox to make the contrast a bit more intense. I'm a little concerned because this is the time when I become uncertain about what the next move should be. It's likely I will stop working on this before I ought to.

Note: For some reason the photos are coming out more saturated than the image actually is. Which is a shame, because I like the orange-r quality.

fox painting WIP

Continuing to push lights and darks. Tightening up details a little. Maybe too much. I can fix the areas that are becoming too light with another wash I think. I'm considering switching over to prisma colors at some point, but I'm not sure yet.

Time for ultra violets!

Pushing the values and cooling off the shadows with violet. I'm just sponging on color willy nilly. Acrylics dry quickly, but even when they are dry you still get a little work time. One sponge was used for putting on pure paint. A second sponge was blank but dipped in water which I used to tone down and erase through areas that got too dark. I'm trying to make the dragon's face and the fox the main focal points. Because I want the fox to stand out first he is going to be light colored on a dark background. The secondary point that is the dragon head will be dark on a light background, but also the contrast between dark and light won't be as pushed. The eye jumps to high contrast first. I'm going to do another sponging with a light color next to pop out that fox.

I've lost a lot of line work, I can't see much any more at all in areas. That's kind of scary. The image looks icky right now, but I think it'll be okay later. Sometimes you just gotta let the lines go, but that's hard.

Don't worry, just do it. Worrying is the destroyer, or rather:
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Oh also, I've been eyeballing Tony DiTerlizzi's work a lot for this project. I love the way his paintings turn out because you can tell he draws with the paint. It keeps it's life.

Old Skool Charr

These were drawn when Guild Wars was still in the stages of defining it's style. The first drawing was used to "sell" the Charr as creatures that could fill the niche of Orc without being yet another Orc in an Orc rich genre. They had to be something fierce and intelligent and feral, and still likable. People both love and fear cats so demonic hell cats seemed like the way to go. The rest of the images were done later as we fleshed out things like Flame Wielders. Between the concepts Doug Williams and I initially put together we got a pretty nice little race going. Doug is responsible for the Axe Fiends and Martyrs, you know, the lovable, bad ass stuff. :) Later in GWEN Kekai Kotaki took these guys over and cranked up the bad ass about 100 fold. That was when Pyre and guys like the tiger Charr were introduced. I've been unbelievably happy with how the race has changed and evolved over the past few years and their inclusion in Guild Wars 2.

I'm a Dimetrodon!

Matt n' I made a song, and then I tried to bite people...

painting WIP

I've had a bunch of painting supplies for years and years. I've used them a little for small things here and there. Generally though I hate painting. It takes forever and you have no idea when you are done. I don't even like painting in Photoshop, which is relatively painless. Emerald City is next week and I need to have anything I want for it done pretty much this weekend. I got really agitated a few hours ago and grabbed one of the boards from the back room. I said, fuck you gesso board, I am painting on your face! I didn't know what the hell I was going to put on it though. Instead of doing the smart thing and making some thumbnails I just kinda sat staring at the board for a long time. I guess I should put something dragony on it... Those are easy. Eh, I don't really want to deal with wings, but now the sort of awesome part about being a dragon is gone. Maybe somebody is riding one? Well... I drew a few things I like a lot, except now it's just a dragon standing there...Kinda boring. I don't really want to change what I drew though. Okay then, they must have stopped, maybe the guy is lost. Sure. I'm feeling uncertain too fella. Not much in the way of composition... Oh well, lets do this. A few hours later and I'm feeling okay about the beginnings of this. I'll work in some planes to separate the back, mid, and foregrounds next. Then I have to think about color. That is scary to think about, so I'm just not til I get there. By the way, putting that first paint wash over pencils is scary as hell. The speckly texture in the paint comes from really old hair spray I used as a fixative in the hopes the pencil wouldn't just melt away with the paint. It worked fine as long as I didn't get too much water on any spot for too long, and I like the speckles.

This is my fancy workspace next to Taz and the bookshelf. I do have a desk...but desks suck. I'd rather just move around, so the desk becomes storage space. I get a lot of paint in the carpet.There's something nice about paint in the carpet.

quick seahorses

ZBrush Sketch

35 min sketch of Taz.
It feels more like him(cranky) than it actually looks like him(also cranky). I'll probably mess around with proportion later.

ZBrush sketch

50 min sketch.

dragons and kelp stalker

Matt and I were musing over octopus and squid designs, for current Earth and a no land creatures yet Earth. I liked this one the most from what I came up with and actually drew. The Kelp Stalker! It finds pads of floating seaweed and eats creatures attracted to the seaweed pad. It's tentacles look like curled up weed and change color. It hangs out with it's eyes swiveling above the surface of the water waiting to snatch up birds. Primarily carnivorous it will feed on most any living edible thing that makes it's way to the weed patch. The thought was that this was a good stepping stone to get them onto land, also that it would just be straight creepy and I wouldn't swim in the ocean with that kind of thing around.

B-Day card for my Uncle John.

More inane tutorials

First I added the mold making part of the relief sculpting tutorial from earlier here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Quick_and_Dirty_Relief_Sculpting_and_Mold_Making/


There is also a cheap and fast hand puppet and mache seed bomb tutorial added. Both of these have instructables pages if you care to vote on them! I hope you do!

Hand Puppet Intructables Page


Seed Bomb Instructables Page

art rage quickies

"-You just took off six inches right?
-Looks like six to me!"

more art rage quickies

quick faun sketches

-5 minutes in Art Rage/Photoshop
I've been more into faun/satir/centaur creatures recently. Maybe it's just a natural step towards better people. ..or more likely, Linda Black has been giggled at too much in recent time...

Dragon Dreams

It's pretty late. Been drinking, been drawing, daylight savings is robbing me of sleep again. Time for some ramblings, as is the nature of the hour.



This guy, he's from high school. 9th/10th grade. Something like that. For many years growing up I believed in dragons and dinosaurs as things that were hidden in people. If you could focus on that part of you, you could call it to the surface. I think the idea sort of came from the movie Monster Maker(5:16), sort of.

I had a dream many times that I was a howling dragon falling through the sky, screaming it's lungs out. I never breathed fire, blood maybe. Sometimes the dream would simply end mid fall. There was no ground, just gravity. Other times, if the dream went on, I'd roar into the school yard, landing and laughing, and calling out. I dreamt that if I were a dragon people would like me. In a way, I guess I dreamt of being happy scaly playground equipment. Usually, when I woke up I'd start crying because it wasn't true. Or rather, I thought it was true, and couldn't understand why the world was false.

When I think back to those dreams, I'm a little sad I don't have them anymore. Though, if there is any meaning, it must be that I'm happy enough now to not have them.

Coffee Shop Sketches

Crummy ladies.

Hipposaurus Rex!

Mammal Lizard

Idealized idea of a baby Dimetrodon cause Matt was talking about them, but not at all actually a Dimetrodon, and a pony zebra dog I wish they'd genetically engineer. I also wish there were owl cats.