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.

Doomtown

Last May I got contacted to do some work for Doomtown Reloaded and now that the set has been released I can show this painting that I did for the game.  This was by far my favorite image that I worked on on the set and I thought it would be cool to try and show a little bit of a step by step that I took in completing the painting.  For the most part I hate having large files with lots of layers, it takes longer to save and I am always afraid of photoshop crashes so I usually merge layers down once I am satisfied an area is complete so there will be a few steps missing but you should get the idea.

Okay first is the sketch, the prompt I got for the card was for a slightly crazy middle aged man working on an unruly steampunk machine.  I did this quick sketch in my sketchbook and off it went to get approval.  For some reason when I am sketching I freeze up when I try to draw within the confines of a box/layout, so although I am thinking and know the general dimensions I like to sketch something on a wide open page and then later size it and fit it into the dimensions of the page layout (which is what the black box is)

After getting approval from the AD it is off to shoot some reference,  I am cheap and do not want to hire models and because I know the expressions, look, and feel that I want for the character I usually find it easier to pose myself.  I set up some lights, put my camera on a tripod and have a remote timer in one hand and start snapping some photos.  Having good reference to work from is super important and this was one of the reasons the painting came along so easy, I had a good foundation to start from.  DO NOT skimp on the reference!

My next step is usually looking at all of the reference photos and picking out the elements I like best and combine them together, for instance a head from one photo, a body from another, favorite hands and then combining them into one image.  I merge them together and do a loose outline to help nail my proportions and get the hands and face right so I have a good base while painting.  Because I like to merge layers semi often the drawing got merged down and painted over during the course of painting but you get the idea.

On to the actual painting!  The first few steps are establishing base rendering for the all of the major elements like the background and the figure.  Once I was happy with those I started working on the steampunk machine in the foreground.  I started with basic shapes and slowly built up the rendering and detail, I merged all of those layers down unfortunately so there is nothing left of the build up of detail, however I do have a lovely shot of the figure with the base coat of paint on the body and face and he is lookin pretty ugly at this point.

Here you can see me slowly building up the figure, I keep certain elements on separate layers, especially if I am not sure if I am going to keep them or change them.  I have individual layers for the stripes on the shirt and the tools incase I want to make changes.

Here is the finished face and hands on the figure.  Not gonna lie, the facial hair was put in specifically to help cover up what felt a very strange looking face, without it you really could not tell where the nose ended and the lips began (illustrating 101, if an area is looking weird sometimes one of the best and easiest things to do is to cover it up with something else!)

Next is the smoke/atmosphere.  Not gonna lie I could not wait to paint this in A because I knew it was gonna be really cool and be fun to paint but also B to cover up large areas of the painting so I did not have to needle away at painting steampunk machinery and detail (hey, any shortcut you can find while working on a deadline, especially if it makes the painting better as a result!)

At this stage I am really happy with where the painting is at so I started thinking about making some color adjustments to help push the color.  I felt that you couldnt really feel the heat and warmth from the machine so I added an overlay layer at a very low opacity to help give the painting an overall warm "glow"

At this stage I thought that I was done, I showed the painting to some friends and my friend Mike Burns gave me a helpful paintover and showed me some places where the painting could be improved on and made better.  I went back and added those things and sent this off to my Art Director.

I hope that this was in some ways helpful, I think in the future I will have to plan these step by steps out from the beginning so you can see a better more linear progression of the painting than a series of rapid jumps.  thanks for reading
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Refined sketch

So finally after several months of putting this on the back burner I am getting back to work on my ambitious Game of Thrones Painting.  Before I get too far ahead of myself and talk about the drawing and composition and what the message and themes I want to get across in the painting I thought it would be best to start at the beginning and explain the inspiration for this piece.

Anyone who knows me knows that one of my all time favorite artists is Alphonse Mucha.  Most people know him as one the driving forces and pioneers of Art Nouveau and his posters for Sarah Bernhardt.  What most people do not know is that he was an exceptional oil painter.  His crowning achievement as an artist was completing a master series of work called the Slavic Epic, a series of 20 large scale multi figure paintings depicting the history of the slavic people. When I first saw these paintings I was completely blown away, I was fascinated by the sheer amount of work skill used on each painting, let alone all twenty of them.  There was one painting in particular that has stood in my mind constantly.

The Hussite King Jiří z Podĕbrad

What I love about the paintings in this series is the powerful emotional impact each painting has, each painting moves you in different and interesting ways.  What I love about this painting in particular is the tension between two powerful forces and the bystanders waiting to see what is going to happen/who will win the standoff.  I have always loved emotional high drama paintings and this is one of my favorites.

In the fall I thought it was time to push myself further as an artist and I thought a great challenge for myself would be working on my own epic multi figure painting.  As a huge fan of the Game of Thrones books I thought it would be the perfect subject matter to use for my painting.  One scene/event from the book that really fascinated me when Daenerys Targaryen conquers the slave city of Mereen. There is no exact scene in the book or the show but I imagine that at some point soon after taking the city she would have presented herself to the ruling families of Mereen.  There is a lot of tension in Mereen with Daenerys taking over the city, releasing all of the slaves, and upsetting a social order that has been in place for thousands of years.  The people of Mereen are obviously intimidated and frightened of her, I mean she has dragons...Dragons I say!  Though they are scared and intimidated by her they are also angry at her for imposing her foreign rule on them and taking away their primary resource of slaves, and they are not going to go down without a fight.

This is exactly what I want to depict in my illustration, Daenerys, the conquering mother of dragons presenting herself to the elite slave families demanding they submit to her, giving up their whips and control of their slaves.  The slavers on the other hand although they are submitting to her, some of them are showing their anger and dissent, showing the seeds and tension for a combustable conflict.  Daenerys and the slavers, the battle may be over but the war has only just begun.

Below is a more refined sketch for the painting, all of the major elements are starting to be placed and the figures starting to be grouped while also trying determine the overall lighting scheme.  Next up is cleaning up the sketch some more and beginning to acquire some props and maybe begin shooting some reference.

A Message for the Bloody Gate

I know that it has been a while since my last post, but freelance work and some small personal pieces for my upcoming convention C2E2 have gotten in the way of me posting more updates to my big Game of Thrones painting.  I am still working on preliminary  designs and sketches and now that the freelance work is out of the way I will have more time to work on it and post updates to it so stay tuned.  In the meantime here is smaller and less ambitious Game of Thrones painting of mine, a painting of everyones least talked about great house House Arryn.  Stay tuned for some more Game of Thrones inspired work, including updates to my huge Daenerys painting.

Taking that next big step

     So with the beginning of the new year and everyone talking about their goals and plans for 2015 I thought I too share what some of my big plans are for 2015.  For the past two years running I have started my new year with an ambitious painting that is meant to set the stage for my work for the rest of the year.  In the fall I look back on my work and I look at all of the things that I want to improve and work on for the following year and decide to tackle them all in one large ambitious work of art.  The first year I did this I wanted to work on something grand and epic, an epic fantasy landscape.  I wanted to throw everything I could possibly throw into this painting, I wanted to work on my architecture so medieval fantasy castle check, I wanted to work on my landscapes so I added mountains, grassy plains, rivers, and waterfalls check,  I wanted to work on depth, atmosphere, detail and overall rendering.  It seemed like a daunting task but with some perseverance and almost two months of hard work I ended up with this.

    This at the time I finished it, it became the best painting in my portfolio, got me my first professional illustration work and helped me take that next major step in my artistic development.  This past year I had some portfolio reviews with two art directors that I really wanted to work with, one told me that they thought that my figurative work was my strongest and that I should focus on that, the other told me that they thought that my landscape work was my strongest and that I should focus on that.  I got two very different reviews from two companies that I both want to work for!  It was then that I decided to please them both by painting a figurative landscape painting, taking the critiques I received and turn them into one grand painting.  I wanted to take everything that I learned from my last epic landscape, improve the things that I thought needed and I wanted to improve while also adding figures to the mix.  To give myself an even bigger challenge I noticed that my portfolio had no animals or monsters so I added some into the final painting.  I wanted to work on my overall detailing, keeping the foreground elements super detailed to help push them foreword from the background.  After a few months of work on and off I ended up with this

    This painting got me even more work and helped set the stage for even more better work throughout the year.  So this year I want to push myself even further and harder, the goals of this years painting is going to be a large multi-figure oil painting.  I really want to start getting into working on and with book covers, so one of my main focuses will be on my storytelling and narrative.  The idea for this painting is going to be a massive multi-figure scene from one of my favorite book series "A Song of Ice and Fire" and for all of you non book readers also known as the hit HBO show Game of Thrones.  At times in the past I have taken shortcuts the "I will make it up as a go along" routine that is almost always to the detriment of the final painting.  With the an ambitious piece like I am planning and with all of the figures and dragons (yes there will absolutely be dragons) the only way to do this is with a lot of planning, research and studies, studies and reference for every aspect of the piece.  I thought to make this even more interesting I am going to post all of my reference, all of my studies so you watching at home can follow me from start to finish as I work on my painting "Daenerys Targaryen accepting the surrender of the slave families of Meereen" 

The Conjuring

So I am in the final stretch of getting everything ready for Illuxcon in 2.5 weeks and I though it would be cool to show a little bit of my process on how I completed this most recent oil painting.  This was a piece that I have been working on and off on since May, it is my first oil painting in about 9 months or so, I have to say it felt great to getting back to painting in oil and smelling all of those wonderful toxic fumes, I had a lot less fun constantly picking out dust and hair from my image as I was working on it, that is probably at the top of my list of things that I hate most about painting traditionally, (and the fact that you cannot use adjustment layers!) 
At my previous job working in the mail room of a law office I had lots and lots of down time either during my hour lunch or towards the end of my shift (I worked closing shift) and I would spend that time drawing in my sketchbook.  I have almost an entire sketchbook of drawings from while I was at my day job, many were pieces that I wanted to elaborate further and turn into finished pieces.
In May I finally got around to scanning the images into my computer and begin turning some of the sketches into finished pieces and 1 small sketch/doodle caught my eye, I thought there was something interesting in the sketch that made me want to develop the image further.  This is my initial sketch from my sketchbook.

I then started to gather reference and refining my drawing, the initial inspiration for this piece was a sample Magic the Gathering card, (I am a huge fan of the game and have always wanted to work for Wizards of the Coast illustrating cards for Magic).  I was imagining a Blue creature or spell, that the character is drawing energy to cast powerful magic or sorcery.  With that idea I went about expanding the image, making the horns more graphic and ornate and adding a torso and hands so my evil sorceress isnt just standing there with a scowl on her face, that she was actually doing something. 

I made this rough line drawing in Photoshop, paying extra close attention to the face and hands.  In this stage I wanted to get all of the major forms and proportions in place.  I then printed this out on my 13X19 printer and printed it on newsprint, I then used a light box to transfer the line drawing onto bristol paper so I could render the final drawing.  I do it this way so I can make changes to the drawing without the lines from the printed image getting in my way, there is nothing worse than being half way though a finished drawing realizing you want to make a change to the drawing but realizing you cannot because you are drawing on top of your printed line drawing.

After hours and hours of drawing (and even more hours) I finished my drawing and scanned it back into the computer and began playing around with color and getting a color under painting.  I kept it really lose, I used all multiply layers and never painted on top of my drawing so the pencil lines stayed visible through or on top of the color under painting.

After I was happy with the colors I then had my image printed out onto watercolor paper from a local printer.  I then mounted the drawing onto a piece of hardboard or masonite using matte medium.  I then coated the top of the piece with matte medium and I began to render the final image with oil paint.  And after several weeks and some long hours painting I got to my final image here

Malmar the Apocryphal

So I realized I completely forgot to post this up on my blog, here is a card art I did for Romance of the Nine Empires expansion pack, Malmar the Apocryphal.  I can say I had a total blast painting the frosted/foggy window in the back.  This is my first interior piece and I have to say I am really happy with how it turned out.