Joe's Scotsman

So this was one from a recent art challenge at work. One of my co-workers (Joe Olson)is an outstanding artist and did the drawing for this one. There is a link to his blog over on the right hand side in the list of artists that I like. The assignment was to just do a color version from his excellent line drawing. This was my color version. I'm also posting his original line drawing.

Japanese Girl

I've been working on this for the past few days. I found a picture a while back of the costume being worn in this painting and thought it looked beautiful and would make for an interesting part of a painting. At the same time it would be a good challenge for me because I struggle with value and color range when I paint whites. So using this as an excercise I gave it a shot and here's where I ended up. I'm not completely happy with the whites (as I expected, I guess I need more practice). But the overall feel of the image I'm happy with.

Commentary on the Great Perfection of Wisom

So I had a little spare time at work for the last couple days so I thought it would be a good idea to work on a painting. I had a fun photo to work from as reference of the Dalai Lama on his visit to Hawaii. So I sketched out a quick version of my own and get to painting. This was a really quick and rough painting but all in all I like how it came out. No disrespect to the Dalai Lama at all with the characaturization. Having lived in Taiwan for a couple years and being somewhat familiar with the Buddhist religion and other far eastern religions I have the utmost respect for him. Anyway fun painting and nice to get a little break from regular work.

In the background is the Buddhist painting depicting the circle of life, and a Buddhist text called the Commentray on the Great Perfection of Wisdom.

Broken Nose

Well, I never would have thought a relaxed game of pick-up basketball would result in something like this. Oh well. Here's a few progress shots over the last few days. Starting with the earliest. Swelling and bruising has gotten worse over time, but it should start going away now.

Gangster - color version

Finally wrapped up a color version of this guy. Not exactly what I had originally planned but turned out ok I guess.

1920s gangster

This was a quick drawing for an art challenge at work. The topic was 1920s gangsters and I had worked out a fairly complex composition with several characters and city scene background. It has a much more realistic feel than this drawing but I realized it would take much more time than I had for the art challenge. So I worked on this little guy instead. I always found the idea of the "boss" as a little squirly guy that was still able to intimidate his minions kinda funny. Oh, what you can do with money and power. This guy is intended to follow that cliche a bit.

A couple o' wierdos

I figured I could post these since they are quite out of date and obsolete now. These were a couple of character concept sketches for a project at work. Both of these were pretty fun to paint and design. There are some serious issues with both of them but that's part of the point of the concept work is to figure out the problems and fix them. Anyway, it has been a long time since I posted anything so I figured I better add something.