Cathedral City

Finally finished this painting, It's 20 x 30 in. on Illustration board painted in oil.

Cathedral City

close up

Cathedral City

Here's a photoshop sketch for an oil painting I'm working on right now.

Christmas Shark Monster

My brother-in-law asked me to paint his skate board for him a few months ago.  I had so many other things to do I wasn't able to get to it for awhile. It was two days before Christmas and my wife kind of jokingly said it would be cool if I finished it by then. My first thought was "There is no way I can finish it that fast." My second thought was "I'd be a total failure if I didn't."

So I got out my paints and started it right then (December 23rd) and finished it that night, let it dry on Christmas Eve and then gave it to him on Christmas.

TJ with the board on Christmas

Mars

This is a painting of Mars I just finished. It was a commission, and it's just the first of all 8 (or 9) planets.

Apparently on Mars, the sky can have a slight blue coloring during sunset and it can also have clouds that are similar to cirrus clouds on earth, so I made sure to include those in the painting. I really, really want to go to Mars.

Mars

Also check out my Mars Cornhole Board

Other Worlds, A Sea Creature

I keep thinking about other worlds. One's where maybe things could have evolved slightly differently, or in some super alien way.  It makes me a little sad that I'll never get to see any distant worlds with strange animals. And I'll be long gone before they ever find out about any other life-hosting worlds.  So that's kind of sad. 

But I've found that writing about, drawing, and painting them is really the next best thing I can do to actually seeing them in person.  In some ways it feels a lot like exploring. 

So here's a little oil painting I did of a sea creature I imagine is out there swimming around somewhere, in the deep, ancient waters of some strange alien planet. 

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 4: The Painting

The Painting...

My studio becomes a mess whenever I paint.

    After I sealed the drawing with acrylic matte medium, I put down a few thin layers of acrylic paint. On top of that I pretty much just painted background to foreground. Mostly using thin paint at first and then thicker paints later, using my color comp and tonal as guides and changing whatever I think could be better as I go.

you can see the oil paints in the background, and the acrylic in the foreground.

I think it took me about a month of painting after I finished the drawing. I mostly used Liquin and Gamsol to mix with the paints. Sometimes when i need to paint on top of something that isn't super  dry and I'm afraid will pick up, I put down some retouch varnish and that seems to protect whatever's underneath. I did that a lot on this painting. Hopefully it won't burst into flames someday from all the weird chemicals and rushed drying times. I guess at the end of the day this is just a cornhole board, so I can't be too worried about the ill effects of sloppy oil paint procedures.  

slowly getting covered in oil paint.

Here's the finished oil painting. The whole project took me about 3 months. There was a lot of time spent learning technical things, hopefully the next one will go by a bit quicker. I have one more to make the set. Here are some close ups of the finished painting, shot with my iPhone... I should probably get a better camera.

 The whole project took me about 3 months. There was a lot of time spent learning technical things, hopefully the next one will go by a bit quicker. I have one more to make the set.

The finished cornhole board.

The theme of the next board is New Horizons, the current mission set to fly by Pluto in July and take pictures. I'm anxiously waiting to see those close ups. Both because I think they will be awesome and so I can start designing the board.

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 3: Finished Drawing

The Final Drawing... This is where I did the research: built models, watched documentaries, read articles, studied reference pictures, asked lots of questions and tried to get everything pretty accurate. Although in the end I kind of just had to make some decisions and simplify a few things.

An Atlas rocket model, a painted soapbox for the tower, a mars/ rocks model I built from Sculpey and aluminum foil, and a cut out of the rover's back panel on a stylus.

After completing the tonal and color comp, I took the thumbnail drawing to Staples (before I painted over it) and had them print it out the size of the cornhole board on some cheap paper. I covered the back in pencil and transferred this to the board.

I cut around the rover and rocket because I had to redraw everything else like the rocks and smoke. And of course I had to add all the details on the rover and rocket/ launch pad, so I just drew all of that on top of the printed drawing with ellipse guides, rulers, french curves, a T-square and a whole lot of coffee.

The finished drawing on the cornhole board.

But even after you transfer it down, you kind of have to redraw it again to darken it a little more. Otherwise it's too light.

This part took me awhile. It can get pretty monotonous, but it's also kind of fun because you finally start seeing some details.

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 2: Color and Tonal

After deciding on the overall layout and finishing a semi-detailed drawing of it, I painted a few color sketches, the biggest one being done directly on top of that drawing. I kind of used this as my working color guide while I painted the final version.

 I knew I wanted to try and stay within a certain color gamut (which is something I had never done before) so I didn't experiment too much with what colors I used for the whole. But I did experiment  on each individual part, like the smoke. I must have repainted it like 7 times. So this one painting (the bigger one) represents about 10 little experimental paintings. 

I also chose to paint this large to get a little more practice with oil paint. I wanted to try out a few things before going to the giant 2 by 4 ft. cornhole board. After a certain point though, I didn't bother too much with it. I got what I wanted, so there was no point in adding details or fixing small mistakes.

At the same time I was working on the color guide, I was working on the tonal guide too. I did it digitally because I knew I'd be changing it a lot.

In the end I didn't follow either one of these exactly for the finished painting. They were incredibly helpful though.

Mars Cornhole Board Process Part 1: Thumbnails

I was commissioned to design a cornhole board with the theme centered around the mission that sent the Opportunity rover to mars. In the beginning we weren't entirely sure what that should include. It was initially just going to be the Delta rocket and Mars in the background. It later changed to include Opportunity as well. 

I started off with a lot of little pen and marker sketches. I also did a lot of planet studies in oil, just playing around with different textures and mediums and brushes etc. 

Mostly pen and sharpie sketches. Some oil studies too.

After a few dozen of those, I brought it into Sketchbook Pro and did some super rough tonal/ color thumbnails, just to get a little more mood into it. But nothing is final here or detailed at all. 

Putting a little tone and color in

Some of the weirder ones.

After we settled on the layout, I did some research and worked up a slightly more detailed drawing of the whole thing.

The final layout 9 x 18 in.

Mars Cornhole Board

A few months ago I was commissioned to paint kind of a mash up of the Mars Rover Opportunity mission. Heres the finished oil painting Its 4 x 2 ft on a cornhole board.

In the next few days I'll post the whole process of designing and painting it on here.

The Raley's Barn

Here's a little unfinished oil painting I did a few months ago. The sun went down before I could finish, It got dark and the mosquitos started swarming. I set up my little pochade box (you can see it in my last post) on my parents' property while they were on vacation and painted the neighbor's barn. I think I've drawn or painted this same barn at least 20 times in the last few years. 

Fun Fact: This is where Primitive Tim lives, and you can see the barn in a lot of his How-To videos. 

White Whale Process Video

I always like seeing how other people go about painting and what their process is. No matter what level they're at, it's still interesting. Paying attention to and documenting the process behind a painting helps me remember what to do or what I should never do again. 

Instead of posting a bunch of pictures and talking about them, I just made this little slideshow of some earlier sketches and process shots. There's some music I wrote in the background too.

White Whale Oil Painting

I was commissioned to paint this in oil after I painted almost the same thing digitally a few months ago. I just finished this one a few days ago.

The Oil Painting 16 x 20 in.

The oil painting took about 75 hours, and the digital one took about 5. It really is more rewarding in traditional paints though, at least to me. I'll try to do a post on the process of it soon if I can.

Pumpkin Cabin Oil Painting

click to enlarge

Here's the finished "Pumpkin Cabin" painting that I've been working on for the past month or so. 

Octopus Cornhole Board

The final drawing with some digital painting on top.

So for the second Cornhole Board I was asked to make, I was basically told to have the Octopus sort of reaching for the hole, coming out from the corner of the board.

Before starting right away on the board I wanted to learn a little about the octopus. So I watched a lot of documentaries on youtube and did a lot of sketches and a couple little study paintings. Here's a few of them:

Ink and wash on some watercolor paper

a really small oil painting.

I made an entire folder full of octopus sketches. Apparently I had no idea what an octopus looked like until i started researching it. 

After I finished the final drawing (which took awhile), I went to Staples and had them print it out on a huge piece of paper, the same size as the cornhole board. I covered the back in pencil and then traced it straight onto the board.

The final drawing. about 2.5 x 5 in.

The final drawing blown up and getting traced down to the board.

And then of course I painted on top of that for about two weeks...

This is me, probably ruining my back with that posture.

And here it is finished.

Angler Fish Cornhole Board part 4

I decided to take a quick break and just kind of paint a little angler fish for no specific reason. It was more of a sketch I guess. Just for fun. Thats what this guy is. I used ink and wash.

Just a little painting for fun. 

But then I went back to the cornhole board...

I had to figure out what colors I wanted to use, so i did a few smaller paintings just to try things out. I kept it almost monochromatic because I really don't understand colors at all and i was afraid it would get to be too complicated when I was having enough trouble already.

So here are the much smaller practice paintings in oil.

about 6 inches tall.

about 12 inches tall 

These also helped me get used to the oil paint a little more. Or at least they were suppose to.

One of a few reference photos I used.

After realizing I couldn't put off the final painting forever, I did the finished drawing that had to be transferred directly to the cornhole board.

The finished drawing

So this was scaled up and drawn straight onto the board. Which I painted over on top of.  And then... After painting for a few weeks (which actually seemed like decades) The painting was finally finished... And that was that.

Here's the finished painting again, incase you missed it in Angler Fish Cornhole Board part 1.

Of course, finishing this only meant I was halfway done lol... So stay tuned for the octopus board coming up next!

Angler Fish Cornhole Board Part 3

        After narrowing down all the thumbnail sketches in my last post, I ended up picking this one:

It's pretty rough, but I thought it was probably the clearest composition out of the bunch.

        I then had to come up with some actual angler fish designs. I really didn't know how I wanted him (actually a her, the males are tiny) to look. So I brought up a few reference images of different types of angler fish, and just kind of selected my favorite features from all of them. These are a few of the designs I came up with.

And this one was my favorite. I guess I liked the teeth or something.

         After I had the design, I built a little reference model or maquette (?) or whatever you want to call it. A fish out of Sculpey.

wooden stand, aluminum wire, aluminum foil, and sculpey

         I bought A wooden dowel and a block of wood from the hardware store, put them together and made a stand. Made a wire armature/ fish skeleton out of aluminum wire. Covered the wire with tin foil to bulk it out some. Glued all of that together with Two Part Epoxy. Got out the Sculpey and started sculpting.

Covering the foil with Sculpey.

And after a day or two of randomly working on it, It was ready to be cooked.

         I had to turn it sideways in the oven because it was too big. I shouldn't have made it so big, but I really had no idea what I was doing. If I did it again I would... still have no idea.


After it cooled down I just covered it in brown and white acrylic paint.

Finished.

In the next post I'll show you some of the experiment/ practice paintings.