Getting faster! A couple of Environment Speedpaints

Nasty but posting anyway!

A quicky from this eveternoon :)  I've been trying to learn more about architecture and spatial lighting.  While not a masterpiece, I feel that I definitely learned some things working on this one.

This is a church across the street from Smith's Supermarket that I've had a hankering to paint for some time.  This afternoon I parked across the street, rolled down my window, and painted from my laptop & wacom; twas cramped, but the fun. I may give it another go lol :)

As much as I love working with traditional media, I feel that digital tools offer some flexibility and insight that couldn't be obtained with pigment and canvas.  In a way, digital painting is an even more "raw" form of image-making than painting in oil or watercolor.  Rather than mixing from a pre-packaged set of colors bought at the store, digital painting forces you create your own swatches and deal with the properties of value and color at their most fundamental level.  You pick the hue and saturation from a limitless palette with no limitations or reference points, and no where to hide.  This makes it hard at first and often the initial paintings can look really bad (for that and other reasons).  It also makes for a lot of brain-work, but the understanding it brings is worth it.  Again, all respect for physical media, but for me digital is just as valid and respectable a media as oil or marble, not to mention much more flexible and full of potential for innovation.

Last and unrelated, something to make you smile:  Link

Making Memories

My girflriend and I took a trip to Wyoming to visit my family last week, which was an absolute blast. This is a painting of an experience from Saturday. We were in the middle of a cloud during a rainstorm, a frightening experience but also a very beautiful one. Not much luck fishing, but we made some good memories :)  My girlfriend and I are in the foreground, my family fishing in the background

Plein Air Speedpainting at thanksgiving point

(photoshop and Wacom 3, painted with a hard square brush)

Yesterday there was a community art get-together up at the gardens at Thanksgiving Point.  My girlfriend (plug!) was kind enough to invite me, and she sketched oil pastel while I painted.  If you live in Utah, Thanksgiving Point is right outside of Lehi.  But then, I probably shouldn't phrase that conditionally, as it's right outside of Lehi regardless of  where you're from, but. :)  I suppose the point is, I would highly recommend it.  The gardens are breathtakingly beautiful, and just up the hill there is a fantastic dinosaur museum that you should put on your bucket list.  Here's a link: (<- the link . . . aforementioned?)

"City of Enoch" concept

This one's part of a series of illustrations for my Doctrine and Covenants teacher.  It's still rough and painterly, but I kind of like the way it turned out :)

The people of the City of Enoch, or Zion, became so righteous that the whole city was brought up to meet God.  Hearing the story as a child, I always wondered what it would look like to have a city uprooted out of the ground and pulled into the sky, so illustrating this chapter was particularly fun :)

I thought it would be neat to take dirt up with the city, like the dirt clinging to the roots of an uprooted tree.  Also in this concept there's a river that ran through the city while it was on the ground, so that as it rises up into the sky the water spills off the sides in waterfalls

Speedpaint: Roomies

I've set an early new year's resolution to do a speedpainting every day to hone my digital painting/ concept skills.  Not all of them will end up here, but I promise I'm doing them!  This is number 6, painted this morning while my oatmeal got cold. I came down the stairs to see my roomates vegging out on Paper Mario and was like, "Huh.  It would be fun to do a speedpainting of my roomies vegging out on Paper Mario". lol I kind of liked the result, so I posted it :) Finals and today!  I better go work on something school related lol. Wish me luck!