The evil rocket Scientist!

I have been trying to make a greater effort to draw and to paint. This is the most recent painting I have finished. It has been a really fun project to work on as I feel like I know the direction my style. It has been a long journey to find my style and although I still have a long way to go before I get confident in my skill and can sit down at the drawing table and know how I am going to get to the finished work of art. I like where I am going with the drawing style so now I need more work with the paint. I am experimenting with a process of drawing the design, painting the drawing and then using colored pencil on top of the painting to put in more detail and additional color. I think it is fun!

My other additional step here to improve the whole project as a whole is I am starting the artwork with the frame already in mind. I had purchased this frame at a thrift shop so I simply had my board at the size of the frame and started painting.

This painting is of my brother-in-law, one of my heros, Dave. He really is a rocket scientist. We have build potato guns together and so I put that on the left of the composition Because he is so smart and great at math I put a chalk board on the right with lots of math equations that I am sure Uncle Dave could tell you what each one is! The mouse on the bottom is because of his mad computer skills and the rocket on his right our left is cause he is a rocket scientist. You may notice the socks have holes and I am not going to explain that now cause you should already know all about that!

Some Graffiti art!

I've had this one done for a little while not but I need to keep posting and although I am working on another couple of pieces that I hope to get up here soon! This was something I had a lot of help on from a professional graffiter. He was a good friend while we lived in Monterey, Ca on our second tour there. I wanted to do some graffiti and suggested my name to start with. I came up with the basic design, he suggested some tweeks to make it more graffiti-esk and the we taped and painted. Great fun!

Great people, bad fotographer!

This was the original photo from which the inspiration came, he is a one in a million hero to us all!

I cropted it and made it as large as I could!

I love the shorts and foot gear he is wearing here due to the fact that... well we all know how he feels about shorts and flip-flops!

Trying to get some better detail on facial features, don't know if it helped too much, but it is a cleaner foto!

I love to use family members as models cause they cost the least, the only down side is that I don't think they like being used as models for a variety of reasons. I saw this style of caricature and thought grandpa would be an excellent subject. I am not sure if I was able to pull it off but it was a lot of fun to create. The photos are ones that do not lend themselves well to this drawing because of the lack of detail but I did the best I could. I was able to get a little help from Erin as I had first drawn Gramps with two right feet and had to move some toes around to make it more anatomically correct. She is a wonderful blessing in my life in ever possible way.

Reference

I can't say enough about good reference for detail when you want good detail. I am not a good fotographer and I don't have good equipment for taking good pictures but here is the drawing I made using the above fotos!