Somewhere in Rome

A 30 minute quick study from a photo I took in Rome a few years back.

ArtRage quick study

Just playing around with ArtRage. They've made a lot of improvements to it since I last tried it a couple years ago. Then it was sort of a "poor man's Painter". But it has gotten a lot better.

Monkey Knight

One of my daughter's monkey dolls (she loves monkeys!) and a stuffed horse my mom gave her. In our backyard chillin'. Just having fun with a little quick sketch. Been so long since I had a free moment to do any personal art.

Snow Ride

Woodland Friends

Or foes?

Z-Day 1878

It is a little known fact of history that William "Rawhide" Cody prevented Z-Day in 1878 with his swift action on undead cowboys who had been inadvertently buried in a cursed Indian burial ground.

Flapper quick study

It's not often I use Painter, and even less often for quick studies. But I wanted to capture some thick buttery brush strokes in this sketch.

Ink splats

I've been playing around with creating ink splats to make Photoshop brushes a lot lately. I must have made a dozen pages worth of these:


This quick sketch was painted in Photoshop entirely using ink splat brushes:

sentinel

As so often happens when I experiment with Painter I end up taking the image into Photoshop to finish it. This is still pretty rough, I'd like to add some decoration and design to her dress, but I kind of like how her hair came out. Her left arm is freakishly long, I really need to work on proportions.

Digital Quick Sketch

20 minutes. Photoshop cs2.

canyons

A digital quick sketch of some canyons. Nothing special, I was just trying some new techniques with masks and embedded layers.

And can someone please suggest some good music to get Katy Perry out of my head? Thanks.

Another Digital Sketch

Here is another digital sketch from life. Some chiaroscuro action. 20 minutes.

Digital figure sketches

So a while back I took our laptop into a figure drawing workshop with a Wacom tablet and sketched from life onto the computer in PhotoShop. It was an interesting experiment, but too much stuff to lug around and set-up.

Acrylic Quick Studies

While I love oils, I work naturally in acrylics. The reason I take to acrylics is that it forces me to avoid some bad habits: over blending and noodling. These were done at a figure painting workshop, each of these is 20 minutes! I used techniques I learned from Craig Nelson's quick studies class. Craig is a great teacher, he has a way of teaching artists to overcome their fears and just going for it. His book and video on quick studies are good lessons for anyone interested in painting in oils or acrylics.

This was another acrylic quick study done on location in Sausalito.