Digital Painting into the Space Age!

     Here's a little bite of what I've been up to for the past couple of weeks. I painted this, but the brilliant line art was created by Sam Nielsen. I LOVE painting on my computer! It's great! I can just sit down and start painting. There's no prep, no messy cleanup, and I can save as many versions of my work as I like. Handy, yes? I painted this guy in Corel Painter, which I highly recommend to anyone looking into painting via the digital medium. Photoshop is great, and has all kinds of great tricks and techniques to make awesome stuff, but Painter is so much easier to use. I've been thinking about creating a real website one of these days, to show that I can pretend to be all professional, but I know more about aliens than I do about web-hosting. Maybe I should ask the aliens for help.

The dorkfish returns!

He's not much for the social scene, but his choir vowels are impeccable. I painted this in Corel Painter in about 2 1/2 hours for a friend who conducts an open enrollment choir here at BYU. He wanted an image to show his students to encourage proper resonance and vowel formation. Hence, buck-toothed, fish-lipped, bunny-eared dorkfish here.
I would also like to make note that I was paid in taco bell for this drawing. Seriously people: will paint for food!

Look! An obvious distraction!

We all know that I'm just throwing these out to keep you entertained while I try to pretend I'm a real artist. The top one is a line scribble for a college class and the colorful one is my winning crayon coloring entry for the BYU Illustrators' Association opening social. I ONLY COLORED IT! The actual art was done by someone cooler than me, but I won first prize out of fourteen or fifteen entries. It was a childrens' book illustrated by Bob Barrett! I love it!

Sandbender on a Rhino

Your argument is invalid. This is just a quick digital painting I did over a sketch I made at the zoo the other day. Wheee!

Children and Animals

I spent about two hours yesterday afternoon in the Monte L. Bean museum here at BYU. The animals there are such great models! They'll hold still forever! It's just a shame that nine out of ten critters are only heads. I would have stayed longer too if there hadn't been some kind of prepubescent summer program squealing through the museum. Don't get me wrong, I love kids and I got to draw something livelier and less taxidermied than old Monte's acquisitions. I even got to lie to children, which is one of my favorite pastimes. (No, the rest of the animals are just on the other side of the wall. If you turn around really fast, you can catch them blinking.) I had to leave because one little boy's mother thought that it would be really funny to give him six shots of espresso and then make someone else watch him all day.
It was fun to watch for a little while, but after he had run up and down the stairs six or seven times shouting about how the animals all had their heads cut off and where were the cheetahs and that one's a boy, know how I can tell? It started to get old. That museum is nowhere near big enough to escape that kind of constant, high pitched enthusiasm. Then the adult leader of this particular group of manic midgets sat them all down and tried to convince Sir Shoutsalot to help answer some zoological questions given them by the museum. I held on for about two minutes as this little boy jittered his way through an elaborate explanation of why prairie dogs are not really dogs (it's because they dig holes and don't bury things, in case you were wondering) and that the "dolphin fish" was definitely a fish. (No need to explain that one, of course, just common sense.) I left just as he was launching into his third round of That Lion Was a Boy, Guess How I Know?
Since then, I applied a quick color job to two of my favorite sketches from yesterday and have also added a blowgun and some tranquilizer darts to my art kit. Just to be safe.

I am not a gibbering fanboy

Well, I'm not. I don't ever gibber. On purpose.
So, this week my copy of The Art of How to Train Your Dragon finally came! Sometimes I just open it and drool at (never on or over) Nico Marlett's drawings. He just manages to pack so much character into a few simple shapes and lines! I covet whatever mystic talisman grants him his powers. Plus I loved the film. If you haven't seen it, DO. Go and see it, I mean.

Sometimes it Just Doesn't Work

These were two images I whipped up with Painter to hopefully go into a children's book by Diana Smith. It didn't happen though. I guess our visions for what this project should be just didn't match up. Oh well. I figured that since the book wasn't going to happen I might as well post these up for the internet populace to see. I mean, I sort of like them.