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I'm doing my best to keep trudging ahead and make weird work. Here's the result. Who doesn't like pink anyways?

eth.

january

It's been quite a while now. I'm excited to be doing new stuff in the new year. Good changes happened.
Here are some of my more recent, more successful experiments. In various state of dress. All works done in Painter 12. Usually taking under an hour.
Yes, the second to last one is just fanart, I'm listening to all the Fleming novels through on audiobook for the second time, the first time was last summer and it had a wonderful effect on my work. My only issue with this piece is that it looks a bit like package design for cologne. Ah well, it's only a sketch anyways.

eth.

self portrait and stuff.

Two little things I did today. I haven't done very much painting this past week and it had really started to bum me out so I uninstalled a bunch of video games, unplugged my router and did these. Also, I recently upgraded to Painter 12, so far I'm very pleased with what the program has to offer. I'm mostly pleased with the fact that it didn't break any of my PainterX brushes.

I also have to credit my buddy David Stout ( see some of his work at http://everybodysalone.com/) because I sampled one of his drawings for the top landscape. We've been collaborating a bunch lately so expect to see more work from us in the future!

45 minutes

30 minutes

eth.

purplescape.

Sometimes I just really want to use the color purple.

40 min. painterX

eth.

112412_sketches

This is what I did in a coffee shop today. It's funny.

eth.

being silly

A sketch for this evening. I don't quite know what I'm doing right now. Probably overkill, but I'm trying to fight with myself to not use certain brushes that I use too frequently as well as color combinations that I gravitate towards too strongly. 

30 min. in painterX.

The outcome I'm hoping for is that I'll do these more wild experiments with lots of technical flaws, and then use the new ideas to make work that might be more conventional...more illustrative anyways, but still referring back to my forays into bad decision making. Trying to be an artist is a silly thing.

eth.

Pulp Science Fiction

I went to a wonderful bookstore in St.Louis today called The Book House, on Manchester Rd. and I found a gold mine of inspiration, a bin full of old pulps! It was from a range of eras but I just took my favorites.
I'm a big fan of John Schoenherr so I was immensely pleased to have found a bunch of his works. All of the scans are in a fairly large format so hopefully some of you might get some use out of having them in your own inspiration folders, I know how hard it can be to find decent resolution images of work from guys like these.

William Timmins

Van Dongen

John Schoenherr

Kelly Freas

Rogers

Modest Stein

Thanks for looking.

eth.

fighting with myself

This is what I did tonight in 30 minutes or so. Trying to break myself out of my use of certain brushes and colors...it's a difficult fight. And my drawing really starts to suffer. Oh well, experiments are experiments for a reason. I'll start finding my way past arbitrary color choices once I feel a bit more confident.

eth.

Got a new job climbing the walls.

 So I'm still adjusting to life with the new job, but I've realized I really have no excuse not to be posting on here every day. So here it comes. Get ready for lots of experimentation, hopefully. I started this as a sketch yesterday but I'm trying to migrate toward not spending more than a day on any given piece...partially as discipline, but partially because it usually means I'm overworking things.

I also included a step by step to give you a sense of how things progress when I'm painting.

5 min               15 min.            25 min.

Sargent had a principle when he painted that at the end of every sitting it had to be completely resolved, which was probably different than "finished" in his eyes, but having an even level of information throughout the entire piece. Of course it's always a good idea to strive in Sargent's colossal footsteps, but I'm going to try to be particularly cognizant of that idea.

110412_update

It's been quite the month. I'm no longer living in Kansas City, as I've taken a full-time job as a Concept/2D Game Artist at Simutronics Corp., in Maryland Heights, MO to work on a new project. Not a huge move but enough to shake me out of my routines for a couple of weeks. I recently just finished this piece which was printed today in the KC Star. Here is a link to the story for those who are curious. More stuff to come...

eth.