Buffa Lo-Fi complete

   I had to get together a piece of art for an art show and what a great reason to pull up my socks light a fire under my ass and get this thing finished !

I finally got my studio set up in a way that i had good light and decent space to leave things where they need to be and with access to everything. I made a McGyver spot light as well to create decent mobile lighting so i could paint morning noon and night with out needing daylight. I will share the creation of that in another post .

   I  started this thing 2 years ago and then it collected dust for a very long time!I really didn't know how to tackle such a big piece of art (4'x3' ). It really gave me a headache just contemplating it but you know how you paint a big painting ? Big brushes! who knew? ha-ha!! the smallest brush i used was a 1/4 inch wedge brush 3/4 flat comb brush  but the biggest and most used brush was 2 inch house painting brush .what a massive learning experience and confidence builder for painting larger pieces .

I got a lot of great mentoring through this project from my pal Joe ! thanks Joe !!Special thanks to Maisy doodle for keeping my studio free of squirrels !

SMG wip step page

SMG final

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While were on the subject...some smg thumbs

sub machine gun not Seattle modeling group :P

Assault rifle final with variants

This was an an experiment to expand my portfolio and try and go through the process of concepting .By doing this it was clear to me that thumb nails are a key part of concepting not only for myself but for your client.

When i was coming up the with the design for this i was drawing in ball point pen on a piece of yellow stripped paper which you could show to a client but it may be a point where they are unable to give you feed back because they dont see what you see hidden in the lines and the mess.Because of this i have been practicing doing pages of themed thumb nails on plain paper.
As I move onto the next exercise i will make sure i am able to present my work along the way in some fashion.nothing fancy but something that conveys some clear ideas.What may seem like chicken scratch to me is a valuable tool in creating a pleasant interaction between you and your client .

any way yes Assault rifle ! The original was painted in grey scale with acrylics then scanned and cleaned up colored and rearranged in Photoshop.

compact assault rifle concept

airship shack painting Done

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little bit o base color

airship shack sketch wip

A spoil of last weeks sketch nigh that i will painting .A couple notes about this one:all my most recent paintings have been on 5x7 boards and with this one im graduating to an 8x10 so that should be a little jolt to the system to have more room to paint on .

 Im going to try and channel a little Hayao Miyazaki magic onto the board this time .his work is always a beautiful blend of whimsical and believable and if i can capture a fraction of that i will be happy.

hang'n monkey gift

A life long friend of mine recently had a little cutie poop kiddo!! what  a good excuse for me to paint one of my favorite things for them.A MONKEY!! i need to remember to stop glossing my work before i scan it because the scanner ended up reflecting allot of texture noise and other little bits .I think the human eye is quite forgiving of art in person.
    I'm pretty happy with this piece as far as process went .Did an under coat wash of warm browns added some rough sky and leaf color and then just continued to tighten up from there .i think this went well but i stayed in my comfort zone .I'm going to try and start employing more real life lighting scenarios into my work  and do some (shudder) scenery painting studies for fun.my next piece will be employing allot more challenges:)

Space Squirrel painted

got him finished last week but just now posting him .scanning these paintings doesn't seem to do them justice but i think its not  helping that there recently gloss coated either.Still trying to get a method down for finishing my stuff:/
  The pumpkin paining i did a few weeks ago was a lesson in quickly under coating with color as well as some real simple shadow work which i used here as well.I mixed burnt sienna, yellow and white and thinned it down as a wash then pure burnt sienna to block in the shadows and shape .

 originally I had worked in a brownish bounce light onto the blue metallic suit but it looked very confused and didn't give the viewer any good clear information so i painted it out .

Colored punkin!

did it !all finished !spattery.this was fun .

Red Russian on red planet!

this was so much fun to paint! looks a bit odd scanned in .its never easy to get true color with a scanner but i think its fairly faithful.This was done as a concept for a possible munny figure mod I'm planning on doing in the future .

Painted Astro!

  I told you i would do it !So yeah i got this done yesterday .it was lots of fun . I drew it a while back and inked it with a brush and black ink. I was under the impression it was water proof but when i started painting over it  bled into the paint a bunch . Once the first layer was on and i was more or less painting on paint it was OK .I guess the trick would be to get some sort of spray coat between the ink and the paint .Ive recently Heard of transparent Gesso so i may give that a try . We will see what i come up with .Any suggestions?

Maraccoraygun