Before and After photo Reference

After I posted the last painting, there seemed to be some confusion as to whether I'd become an abstract expressionist, so I thought I'd post both the photo reference and the painting side by side so you can see what I'm up to.



I generalized some of the information, but i think the foreground rock in particular is pretty observant of the source material. These are meant to be portraits of specific rock formations from photos I've taken myself--I'm not sure how successful I've been, but that's the general aim.

Two New Paintings

These are the first two of what I hope will be a series of rock and water themed watercolors.



I'm on the fence about this second one. I used guache for the sky, and went nuts trying to make this perfect, flat application. I'm not sure if the painting benefits by it. It's kind of dead.



These were painted with Chinese brush, ink, watercolor, guache and just a little acrylic. This is my first really serious attempt to do landscape painting. The landscape painters I'm probably most inspired by are Emile Nolde, Turner, and Hokusai. I was going to do this series in oil, but I wasn't getting the immediacy I wanted. It was too easy to overwork the painting, to paint over mistakes. Watercolor records everything. There's no faking it or fudging it, which is why I ended up painting the first painting about 3 times. I'm pretty happy with it now though. It has an unusually muscular look for watercolor which I hope to maintain throughout the series.

Pence Show

The Pence bicycle show is up now, and will be up till the 15th. There will be a reception the evening of the 13th. The bicycle show is meant to celebrate the Amgen Tour of California as it makes its way through Davis. This is apparently a big deal, and Lance Armstrong will be in the race. I didn't know anything about Mr Armstrong until recently. What I've been able to gather is that he's won the Tour de France 6 times, and aside from having a really annoying website which is probably not his fault, he's a remarkable guy. He came back from a serious bout with cancer to win the Tour deFrance again, but I'm not sure which time that was.

The Pence will be selling my posters and prints. I have two pieces in the show.

I'm currently working on a new strip in collaboration with Tin Salmunic. I'm plotting, writing the dialogue and lettering, and he's doing everything else. At the age of 25, (he might be a little older by now, I'm not sure) he's done work for the likes of ESPN and Playboy and many others and teaches illustration in Virginia. he draws constantly as you will see if you check out his blog just about every other day. We're all of about 2 pages in, but Tin seems fired up about the strip and I'm optimistic about where we're headed with it.

Here's a sample page:



I set out the basic plot, plot a scene, Tin draws it, and then I put in the dialogue. It's a science fiction/humor sort of deal, nothing like what I've typically been involved in with comics. The feel is something between Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and Phillip K. Dick, and possibly a Coen brothers movie. I'm making up a lot of it as I go along, which is both exciting and frightening.

Where's the art?

The art is still in progress. Because of recent responsibilities I've slowed down a little on my comics, but the new story will be up soon. I've also just started what I hope will be a new body of work, a series of landscape paintings with a rock and water theme. I'm working in acrylic and oil, so the style's a little different than what I've been doing before--it's probably closest to what I've done in watercolor, but more painterly, possibly less line oriented. I'll put some of that up soon as well.