"Breath of Hope" 10" x 12" Oil

This is a piece I created for a Christmas card. Since everyone probably received their card by now, I wanted to share it on the blog. It printed out pretty nice and I had a lot of fun with this piece, especially with the border. Hope you all have a great holiday season! Thanks Dan!

Spectrum 20 publication

I received my Spectrum 20 a couple days ago. The book looks great and I couldn't be happier. This is the second year that I've been published in the book and I consider myself very lucky. It's an honor to be next to the artists I highly respect and look up to. Thanks to Cathy & Arnie Fenner, the jury and congrats to everyone that got in! The awesome cover "Lover's Quarrel" is by Donato Giancola. If you'd like to see a better photo of my piece "Peacock Prophecy" visit my website here.

Tiger head study

The rough drawing ready for paint.

Kept it simple and used acrylic black, white, blue, red and yellow. from this chaotic mess came what you see below.

I wanted to experiment and try some loose brush strokes and take a break from my usual tight stuff. I thought my signature wouldn't work here so I signed it with a simple S. It's 6" x 6". Each year I do a piece that gets made into a quilt with pieces from other artists for the Illuxcon Scolarship donation. The quilt gets auctioned off on ebay along with several other donated items and the money helps the scholarship winners. 

I achieved my goal. When the brush strokes just happen without over thinking, when it feels free, that's when special things start to appear. There are some things I'd like to change looking back but I'm moving forward. I may do a series of small, even more stylized tiger head studies in the future? It was fun to loosen up a bit.

Another piece in progress!

Close ups of  two sections of my new personal piece. I'm working on the oil painting stage now. It's 24" x 24" on masonite. So far this piece is working out pretty good with a few spontaneous things happening. Feels good. Thanks to Angie for being my reference model! I have yet to post some photos of my Illuxcon 6 event so stay tuned for that one!

Parallel final and the rough road to it

I finally finished this painting. "Parallel" 12" x 16" - Oil. I started this piece earlier this year with the intentions of exploring textures and I ended up exploring a lot more than I wanted. Definitely a learning experience. I decided to approach this with some of it planned and some of it unplanned and it took me months to figure it out unfortunately. I spent hours and hours looking at this painting. Luckily I had some friend's eyes to critique it towards the end of the painting. It helped me push it along to the end. Below are in progress shots of a few of the stages. It was a rough road but I made it. 

The thumbnail rough I decided on.

The final drawing on board after adding some spontaneous meteorites or whatever they are :)

I decided to add some birds to make the piece more interesting.

I was going to keep the ground white but it needed some color.

The birds weren't interesting enough so I transformed them, shot them off to the heavens and added more color to the ground and the trail behind the figure. I also began pushing the asteroids back.

I pushed and pulled some other areas and finished it off. Here it is! I wish I could show everyone in person after the coats of gloss varnish I applied.

All framed up and ready to go for Illuxcon this year in Allentown, PA!

Spectrum 20, the Chesley award and ImagineFX Magazine

Earlier this spring I found out that this piece "Peacock Prophecy" was accepted into Spectrum 20. On top of that I just found out recently that it was nominated for a Chesley award in the Best Color Work: Unpublished category. I didn't expect any of this at all. It's an honor to be among the other artists that I look up to. Spectrum 20 will be out this fall and the Chesley awards will be presented at LoneStarCon 3 in San Antonio, TX.

Today I received a copy of  ImagineFX magazine. It's filled with some amazing work! I was lucky enough to be published on pages 90 - 93. Anthony Palumbo created the beautiful cover.

Here's the final painting in the ImagaineFX magazine. "Unborn" 10" x 12" Acylic/Oil

The back burner

A couple close up pics of a personal piece I'll be getting back into soon. I had to put this piece on the back burner two separate times to finish a couple other projects. I'm now in the painting phase and it's been kind of a struggle. I'm about 75 to 80% done. I didn't work out the idea solid enough in the beginning and I'm still not sure where it's headed which is fun but unfortunately at times not so fun as well. I'm currently working on ideas for a couple commissions but will have time to work on this. Hopefully I'll have it finished in June.

Exhale 8" x 10" Acrylic/Oil

I finished this piece for Jon Schindehette's "Dragon World" Challenge. After looking at it online a few days back with fresh eyes, I realized that some small areas aren't matching up to the original piece. I'm going to fix it later in case I decide to make prints, etc. I spent a lot of time creating a crude dragon maquette in separate pieces and working out reference photos which gave me little time to paint but it helped. I also had to photograph the painting myself with a new camera. This is my first piece photographed with it. It was time consuming and I only had a couple cheap lamps but it did the job. I managed to pull it all off and get it sent in before the deadline. I may post about photographing it in the future? Big thanks to Jon, all of the judges and artists! Congrats to the winners! You can see the results on Jon's blog here.

Illuxcon 2013 Scholarship contribution

The contribution I painted to help raise money for the 2013 Illuxcon Scholarship. It's acrylic on a small piece of cloth. It will be made into a quilt with donations from several other artists and auctioned off. Since it's pretty much a little study for me, I'm thinking I may take this to a larger more refined painting in the future.

Spectrum 20 submissions

My Spectrum 20 submissions I sent in several days ago. I was lucky enough to get one piece in last year for the first time and I'm hoping to get at least one in again this year. See the published Spectrum 19 piece here.