I am happiest when helping other people get excited to make things, so please drop questions and such in the comments fields and let me know what you’re hoping to make these days too!
Twelve character designs created as a private commission for use as a selection of NPCs, with inspiration lifted from deep sea photography, Byzantine court robes, 17th century french coats, European folk costume, and Errol Flynn outfits. Available to license. — read more —
I’ve been practicing taking pose ref and building a fictional scene around it, and decided to focus in on people having quiet moments together; I’ve also been trying to use more soft gradients in watercolour, which is DEFINITELY one of the trickier parts of the medium, so it’s been a great challenge! It’s also taught […] — read more —
This winter I was approached to work on a commission based on the heavy metal portraits I did as studies last year, which, friends, that’s the dream, hey? Do a personal project, hear from someone who connected with it so much they want a private commission that seamlessly extends that body of work? Incredible! […] — read more —
I treated myself to a new watercolour set, higher quality than the sets I’ve used in the past, about on par with the one-tube-at-a-time purchases I’ve made in terms of lightfastness and pigmentation and such. It’s a Mijello Mission Gold pure pigment palette! The premise of a pure pigment palette is that each paint is […] — read more —
I’ve been continuing doing studies in Procreate, and have been saving process videos more and more – it’s really neat to see how paintings change over the course of me working on them. — read more —
I try and break out the gouache regularly for photo studies; it keeps my hand painterly and reminds me to think about values and simplifying the planes and shapes and also it is always a real challenge! I got some new gouache paints this past year, a Himi/Miya jelly gouache set suitable for painting a […] — read more —
I’m a huge fan of the strangeness of satellite imagery of earth, and how it intersects with how we draw maps for navigational or other uses. I also love watching pigment flow around on a surface, and I’ve been thinking about how liquid dynamics of watercolour can mimic liquid dynamics of water tables, geologically. Which […] — read more —
I’ve been using Procreate and a selection of MaxPacks chalk and gouache brushes to do some looser, more painterly digital studies from photo ref. Here’s a selection of recent ones: — read more —
These illustrations were created for WisCon’s convention app! I worked with Ayizan Studios to take the existing WisCon mascots and designed a whole world for them and their friends to mirror some of the main elements of the convention itself. We were focused on retro sci-fi feel, but with appealing, contemporary colours. — read more —
Inspired by the retro scifi themed album “Warp Riders” by The Sword, this piece is designed to be used in whole or in part. Here are some details: — read more —
Studies from reference, exploring applying limited colour palettes and narrative composition choices to figure and portrait studies. Using Max Ulichney’s MaxPack brushes in Procreate; inspired by symbolist and post-impressionist painting, especially the works of Odilon Redon. — read more —
oil pastel pinterest study; i bought a pack of much firmer pastels and did the whole under drawing with those, and then layered the thick opaque pastels on top, and it really worked well!
really love the colour palette i achieved here! not sure the drawing was strong enough to support it though, and the canvas was definitely too small for me at the level of precision in comfortable with right now. in the end i called this off before feeling 100% satisfied, but that’s simply the nature of exploratory work and no harm done. as i said, still very proud of this colour scheme!
my latest oil pastel experiment is this painting of three pine grosbeaks, referencing a CC0 photograph shared as part of an observation on inaturalist.
this one was created on illustration board, with a full under painting in watercolor first, which you can see in the third image. The illustration board texture has a wonderful grain and could be a very satisfying surface for oil pastel, but it tends to warp pretty dramatically when painted on with water-based media. you can see any image on the right how much it has bowed out while wet; what you can’t see is that it has an inverse warp in it once dried. clamping it down to draw on it released some but not all of it. unfortunately this means it’s just not a good solution for anything with a watercolor under painting.
inaturalist has been a really exciting thing for me to explore, and once I discovered that you can search observations by image license I got really excited. if you’re also looking for reference, especially of specific animals, it might be a great place to start.
I painted this one on sanded paper, the much admired pastelmat type, and found it desperately unintuitive. The grippy surface could be nice, but it’s completely unabsorbant, and i found myself unable to layer the way I’m used to on rag papers, or honestly even on wood. that said, you really can blend infinitely on this stuff, so if that’s your jam you might get more out of it than i did!
Subject-wise this is based on my own photograph from a recent roadtrip, and it was a delight to get to zoom in on something I shot myself and try translating it into oil pastel! I’ve been playing more and more with macro lenses and extreme depth of field, and have been meaning for a while to experiment with translating that effect into paint of some kind of another.
That said, abstracting, blurring, and softening things is both really easy to do with oil pastel and really tricky to add nuance to. I can see some places in here where the effect is really landing, and others where things feel almost into only two planes, rather than the three or more I’d like to have had throughout. So, much to learn down this path, but I’m excited to keep going with it!
i did a quick watercolour (first) and gave it a coat of fixative so i could try out layering oil pastels on top for a mixed media look (second), but I’ve hit a few challenges:
the oil pastels are very opaque and happily fully obscure the watercolour under them very very quickly
the fixative has reduced the absorbency of the paper so the pastels are staying greasy and moving around very easily, giving me wonderful nuance and also no control somehow at the same time
my original value plan was loose and crappy and had little contrast to speak of, not a strong place to start
and watercolour has, naturally, such incredibly dark values compared to oil pastels, that i can’t get them both in the same range whatsoever. i dug too deep into the darks, as it were.
also i had very little plan to speak of and a pretty terrible drawing, so this was maybe doomed from the start
so likely I’ll toss this now and move on, but it has taught me a fair amount of interesting technical facts, which i plan to remember, and also reminded me of some basic truths about planning, drawing, and values, that i would like to remember but will probably ignore once again at some point in the near future.
this is the biggest thing I’ve painted yet with the oil pastels; gonna be working in it for a while
i was looking at digital paintings from 2022, and thinking about the method I had started using back then of having a mark making stage and a blending stage as two separate things; and the oil pastels are letting me start to approximate the same workflow, but on paper! interesting…
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