Current Studio

Because people ask… I am currently living in the basement at my grandma's house. I've converted her old sewing area into an art area. A lot of the stuff on the shelves is my grandma's and some of my sister's art stuff, too. But this is how I have it set up for painting at the moment. Had to get creative with all mom's grow lights I kept from the move since the basement has stark fluorescent lighting. ;)

I usually like to print out my reference photo to paint from but I don't have a working printer at home, the color isn't always that great, and its sometimes a waste of paper so I usually just have the image on my laptop and paint from there. I can zoom in and rotate the image as needed and even check color and draw guide lines to match my canvas.


Oil painting stuff! Just the things I use as I am painting - I've got a tackle box full of other tubes of paint and more random brushes are living in a brush bag on the shelf. I'm a very frugal painter - this is the same wooden art box I've had since I was in middle school, although I've got all-new brushes and some new paint. (The laser pointer is for my cat - he gets bored watching me sometimes).


There I is!

Alice

Not quite done but pretty close. Oil painting commission. Don't remember the dimensions off the top of my head. 11 hours, I think.

Here it is blocked in (did this last spring)…


The rest of this I did last night. Went over the background to give it texture, impressionist-style but blended. Starting to fill in Alice now…



And here's where I ended up!


Sorry about the glare - it's the best I could do with the lighting I had in the basement. It's kind of got a yellow tint look in the pics. When I'm done and it is dry I'll scan it in and post the finished piece.

Stargate Resurrected

A lot of digital artists of my generation practice their skillz on making fan art. For me it's the ready-made inspiration so I can concentrate on practicing my software techniques.

Back when Stargate: SG-1 was on the air (and hadn't jumped the shark) I made a lot of wallpaper fanart, mostly in the grunge style. I wasn't particularly good at it (hey, it was practice) but I came up with some interesting compositions. A few months ago I was going down memory lane, looking at some of them and this one caught my eye. It was a lot cleaner than my older walls and I thought it would make a great vector piece. The old one had a foreground image of Carter laying on the floor and I thought it distracted from the cool background image that I wanted to concentrate on.

To translate for non-Stargate fans, this was from an episode called "Entity" where a digital-based lifeform from another world downloaded itself into Stargate Command's computer system and eventually ended up downloading itself into Carter's brain, taking over her mind and body. The image of Carter is when the entity left her body, creating arcs of electricity that lit everything in blue light. The syntax in the background was seen on all the monitors in the complex.

About 90% of this was built in Illustrator CS4 (Carter, the background color, all the text) and then I brought each element into Photoshop to add some blurring to the text. It was fun putting all the text into perspective. For the most part, the text is as-seen in the screen-shot I took from that episode, though in a few places it was too blurry to make out so I made stuff up.

All Widescreen, no fullscreen, sorry.
1920x1200
1680x1050
1440x900
1280x800

The Kitsune/Okami Division

Normally I only share visual art here but I thought I'd mix it up a bit and add a song.

I have been playing guitar for 17 years or so, albeit self-taught. I primarily play acoustic finger-style though I do have an electric (and am in the process of building another, which will make an appearance on this blog). I have made up quite a few songs, all instrumental.

This is a draft of a song I made up as part of a healing process. A few transitions have since been changed, other bits shortened, and some complexity has been added in the picking but its largely the same. I record things in GarageBand on my Mac with a cheap external mic, so the sound quality isn't top notch - ends up sounding more indie lo-fi but you get the idea. This song is 3-part guitar; I plan on building a baritone guitar after the one I'm building now and plan on re-recording the song with that later. ;)

I recorded this back in November but I've been offline for the past two months which is why I'm only now getting around to this.

Here's the direct download link:
https://files.me.com/howlsthunder/6jj05t.mp3 - 6:50min, 128kbps, 6.3MB