Forest Goddess

Finally gotten back into oil painting after a several month hiatus.  this is also a return to some themes and stylistic choices that I was developing and exploring a little over a year ago and I am excited to develop them further.  This painting is 16X20 oil on board.  Stay tuned for more updates on my work in the coming weeks.

The Mighty Thor

This has been an idea that has been kicking around in my head for several months and I finally had some time to work on it.  I had an absolute blast painting in the clouds.

New Work

As always I am really bad at updating this as often as I should, a lot has happened since my last post.  I attended my first GenCon as both an attendee and as an exhibitor in the art show.  I had a ton of fun catching up with art friends from past shows and workshops, finally got to meet some people that I only new online and also got to meet and hang out with some very cool new people. The show was absolutely amazing!  I sold a lot of prints...I mean A. Lot. of them, talked with some new publishers about future work, I won an award!!!! and I also sold an original piece of art.  The plan right now is to try and see what other shows and conventions I can do.  After I came home from GenCon I was really excited to get back to work with my newfound confidence and motivation and I painted these two new portfolio pieces.  Now that these are done I looking to get back to doing some more oil paintings and traditional stuff.  I you are interested in following my sketches work in progress and other whatnots the best place to follow me is my instagram here instagram.com/stephennajarian/ and my art page here facebook.com/Stephen.Najarian.Illustration

Intimidation Tactic

So I realized that my L5R card was released and I can finally show it!  This is my first card and first time working on L5R, I can say I had a blast working on it and I think it is safe to say that you can be on the look out for many more cards from me in the future.

I though to commemorate my first card on the set I would share my process on how I worked on the painting (yes I actually remembered process shots yay!)


Okay first off here is the brief I got for my assignment

A very big young Crab Clan samurai stands intimidatingly with a huge ax chest puffed out as he stands in front of his much older shorter smaller thinner but wise old Crab general who’s sent him ahead of him on the castle bridge. 

Okay so now that I have my prompt I started coming up with an image in my head of what is happening in the scene.  Usually I will try to do a couple different ideas and send in about 3 sketches for each assignment but because the prompt was so straight forward (there are only so many ways you can depict that particular scene) I just went ahead with the one sketch.  When I do my sketches I make sure the document I am working on is the size requested for the card, nothing looks more unprofessional then submitting work that does not fit the dimensions requested.  After I got the figures and composition placed I added some color so my Art Director will have an idea of what I am looking to do for the final, also it gives me a great reference point to work from as I work on the final, to make sure I do not change things too much from the approved sketch.

I am always super nervous that the Art Director will not understand/see what I am trying to do I also write in a description of what I am doing/planning on doing in the painting 

the main figure arrogantly standing in front holding his axe over his shoulder, ready to kick some ass with the general behind watching.  Everything is mostly in shadow with just the light hitting the figures down to their torso.  they are on the bridge and you can see the bridge span overhead.  there is smoke in the background (laying siege to a castle maybe?) and smoke and embers from a fire flying around in the foreground.  I am going to keep the armor of the young samurai plain and simple as opposed to richly designed and embroidered armor of the general.

After getting a little bit of feedback from my art director, he asked for me to place the helmet of the foreground figure in his left arm it is time to start the final.

I did some research on Samurai armor and right on top of my sketch I drew out the design of the armor.  I also shot some reference of me arrogantly holding a broom (I was very intimidating looking) and pulling out a sword for the general so I had good reference for the hands and a basis to work on for the faces.  Here you can also see I began to lay in the base colors on the two figures.

I spent most of my time here working on the foreground figure, at this point I am working on a layer on top of the drawing painting in the armor.  I was also tweaking the colors of the image, I was really looking for a warm light/cool shadow so I lowered the temperature of the shadows to a more purplish blue as opposed to a warmer looking teal color from the sketch.

Here I am finishing off the armor on the foreground figure and beginning to work more on the background general, I changed the shape of the axe, I wasnt liking how it was looking so I changed the design to a more traditional looking axe.

Here I am starting to render the General and I also finished painting the axe

Here I started working on the background, I wanted you to see there was an army back there but I also wanted them obscured by the smoke/fog so your eye stayed focused on the main figures.  Blending between the organic shapes of the smoke and the figures was more challenging than I thought.  Also this is where I realized the large bridge spans from the sketch were not going to work so I changed it to a more simple wooden stakes and rope.  I made some final adjustments on the main figure, I fixed the swords (I had the curve backwards) and I also finally gave up on the tassels on the breastplate...I felt they looked too much like, lets be honest....nipples.  Not the look I was going for so they had to go

Remember I said I was having trouble with the figures in the background?  I decided I did not like what I was doing so I erased them out and started over.  I also did another color adjust to get the colors more where I wanted them.

Here I added the army in the background and did some final color tweaks (have you guessed that I love color adjustments yet?) and sent this off to my AD

 I got an e-mail back from him asking me to tweak the colors on the figures, their overall color was not looking like the color associated with that particular clan/army, I did a few adjustments and sent this off.

If you made it to the end of this congratulations, you have an attention span!  I hope this was in some way interesting/helpful and I will see about doing more of these in the future.

Belerion the Black Dread

Here is a new piece that I just finished depicting Belerion the Dread and Aegon the Conquerer (he is in there I promise) as they overlook Harrenhal before they attack after the sun sets.

Reference and figure drawing

I thought I would take a break from working on the final drawing of my Game of Thrones painting to share a little bit about how I do the drawings of my figures.  The most important thing is to have good reference,  It is very hard to create a piece of art from your head without having some sort of jumping off point for theme, concept, idea, anything really.  Generally speaking, if you want to have believable figures in your paintings then you need to shoot and have reference.  A couple of weeks ago I had some friends came over and we all took turns posing for some of the various figures for the painting.  I make and use props when I can (I do not have a suit of armor to wear for a knight) but posing in the right or similar stance gives me a great jumping off point to add the armor around the figure.  Household items like broom handles or swords (what you mean to tell me every house does NOT have a sword!!???) or some fabric from a fabric store can give you a great place to start from when it comes designing and drawing characters and items for a painting.

(I have to say I make a very fine Barristan Selmy)

After I shoot a bunch of photos with my camera I load them onto my computer and start looking for the photos that match the look and feel I had in my rough sketch (also always be on the lookout for something different and interesting in the photos that you did not think of when drawing the sketch, the more photos and different poses you use the better chance of finding the right image or series of images.

Once I have found an image that I like I bring it into photoshop.  I then lower the opacity on it and start tracing over the image onto a new layer.  Lowering the opacity makes it easier to see both the drawing and the important information that I need to see while tracing, you dont want the image too dark or saturated or you wont be able to find any of the important lines or edges.

I make a quick initial pass of the photo only tracing the important landmarks like the face and hands and any special props that I have in the image.  After that is done I turn off the layer with the photo and I start refining the drawing, making the arms thicker, adding more of the drapery and fabric of the costume, changing the pose to get it to fit and feel the way that I want it.  Once the drawing is finished I then copy and paste it into the document with my final drawing, there I will size it, rotate it, and maybe even make more changes until it sits and feels right in its placement and context of the overall drawing and composition.  I then repeat this step ad nauseam for every figure (in the end there should be at least over 20 figures!)

More progress

So after taking a break from my big game of thrones painting doing some freelance work I got back to work tweaking the composition.  I showed the painting to some artist friends and it soon became apparent that people were confusing the characters of Missandi and Daenerys...not good.  Most of the changes revolved around strengthening Daenerys's focal point and making the sure the eye goes directly to her.  I also thought it was a little too cluttered with all 3 dragons close together so I decided to have 1 in the air flying overhead.  The rest was just me moving figures here and there, trying to find good places for the eye to rest while accenting my secondary characters and focal points.  I think I am now ready to start compiling and shooting reference, then the fun really begins.