Combat Take off

I started in on a 30x40 oil painting called Combat Takeoff.

I thought I might work on these things on video, but I truly do not enjoy that at all. I can do it for some stuff, but when I am really trying to work something through it makes me feel like I’m using half my brain for art making and half of it for performing, and as a result both things are half as good as they could be otherwise.

Initial Charcoal sketch for “Combat Takeoff”.

I had planned to hold off a bit on this because I hadn’t done a drawing of an A-10 from beneath, and that meant I wasn’t really ready to get into painting the plane yet. But I want to make some of the choices spontaneously, and I’ll never do that if I spend weeks mapping out every single millimeter of the canvas.

The first days lay-in of clouds and sky.

All I’ve done here is slap some paint down with some galkyd lite to speed up the drying process. I’m still not sure about the broken tree and the hay bale, but I do like the giant cloud in the back left a lot. I don’t know what, if anything I’ll put on the little girl’s sweatshirt when the time comes. I added a heart initially, but it seemed too leading to me. I don’t want these to be the kinds of paintings that make people feel bad for the kids in the pictures. The kids are supposed to be innocent and the weapons of war in the images are supposed to be what they are as well; they are not supposed to just be bad.

I am hopeful that one day soon I’ll be able to get out to the military honor park and do some plain air work on a cannon and a helicopter so that I don’t just do A-10s for every single painting, but I have always admired that plane for it’s aesthetics and for the mission it serves.

New Series of paintings dealing with children and war.

I am starting a new series of paintings about children and war. Currently all that means is that it will have something to do with war (or with weapons of war) and how it impacts children. I’m not sure where this will take me, but the ideas have been in my head for a long time now, and I finally feel ready to start getting the images out and onto canvas.

This is the first image in the series. It’s titled “Fall”, and as soon as I can get some leaves on trees around here to change color, then I’ll be able to get some better references for the horizon line. This is an early draft. The soccer ball is just a sphere with some dots on it, and the A-10 is a bit wonky too. I think I want it pushed back a bit and I’ll figure out the best way to do that later, but this is the overall statement, and I’ll get busy iterating on it soon.

My goal is to do 5 paintings in this series and then exhibit them/enter them into contests sometime early next year. Most of them will likely be this 12x16 size in oil, but as I move along and continue to explore the ideas they may get bigger or evolve into different mediums.

This second image is an early charcoal sketch for the second painting of a child running in a hayfield while an A-10 flies in the background.

I don’t think all of the paintings will have A-10s in them, but I lived on England Air Force Base (it was in Louisiana) when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade and that base was home to the Flying Tigers and that brief period of time seeing those planes has affected my imagination ever since.

Crossing the Creek

This is a 16x20 pastel painting of my daughter and wife crossing a creek in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

Wealtheow

I got Wealtheow inked and I’ll color her digitally for the book. I do think that I’ll finish my favorites of all these illustrations in oils and then put them up for sale on the website when I get the time to do so. Currently the only painting for sale is a watercolor waterfall, but I am not going to be a guy who just paints one thing a million times if I can help it.

Here’s where she’s at right now.

Hibiscus Waterfall

I did a waterfall with a hibiscus flower in the foreground. It’s a 9x12 watercolor on arches paper. It is 150 dollars plus shipping. Contact me directly to arrange payment etc. All paintings for sale will be posted to the “paintings for sale section” of the website.

Hibiscus Waterfall. 9x12 watercolor and gouache.

Another Beowulf page.

Here is the page where a soldier tracks a wounded Grendel to the swamp where he dives down below the surface to snuggle with his mother at night.

I will ink the sky a bit more to make the sun glow as it creeps up from behind that small mountain in the background. I’ll color this eventually. I will most likely do it digitally and leave this original as black and white.

Another Pastel Painting.

Today I finished working on a pastel painting I did to replace a print of a digital painting that was in a frame that broke a couple weeks ago. I think it turned out fine. If I was going to do it over again, I would add some abstract shapes to the background probably instead of doing a flat color. Even as I type this I’m finding it difficult not to pull the thing out of the frame so that I can scribble a bunch of pastels all over the background already there.

But no! I will leave it alone and move on.

Maddie heads to lunch.

Ecstatic Tree at the Falls

There was a tree that caught my attention over spring break. It sort of looked like it was surprised or scared. So I am painting it with a waterfall/mountainous background in oil.

This was the initial drawing.

Ecstatic tree at the falls.

At first I thought I’d just do the tree, but there were a lot of other really cool images from our time in the mountains that I wasn’t sure how I’d find a way to use. The big rock that the main tree obscures slightly on the right was a huge rock in the shape of a heart where we ate lunch one day next to a mountain stream. There were a lot of water falls, none of them very big, so this one is just an invented one.

I began blocking it in this morning as well to try and get as much of the white of the canvas covered up so that I can get in there and start defining the lights and darks when I get back to it.

Ecstatic tree at the falls in the block in stage.

I’ve been less and less happy with my environmental design lately, and I think focusing on some paintings and drawings like this will just serve to make the figures I paint and draw in the future stronger. I do like the outdoors and trying to do more paintings from nature will give me an excuse to get outside with my easel and paint some things as I see them. The winter forced me to do a lot of inventing and painting from photos (this painting is from photo reference, so I am not saying I’ll get away from it completely). So I hope that as this year progresses, I’ll continue to make improvements in my visual library so that when winter shows up again, I can invent better than I did this past year.

Bears at the Falls

I started a watercolor today. This was kind of a palette cleanser after the past couple weeks of pastel work I did in order to prepare for the art night at my kids’ school. I enjoyed it for sure, and made a few things I’ll hang onto. But it didn’t infect me enough to make me toss aside drawing and painting.

We spent some time hiking in the great smokey mountains for spring break this year and saw a couple black bears. I really like waterfalls, and one of my hopes is spend some time painting them plain air. For now I have to be okay with using my own photos as reference.

The bears were an addition, and we were there before the rhododendrons were blooming, so I added some color to imply they were already blooming in this painting. I am a little bummed we weren’t there to see them in their full glory, but we did get to see the green creeping out of the trees a little more each day and that was a pretty awesome thing to experience.

I’m not sure what else I’ll do with this one. I feel like I could do some moss covered trees in the foreground or something to push the bears and the water fall back a bit more as well as to get some more contrast. One of my main goals with this nature painting is to do a better job of finding the light drama in the world so I can recreate it in my illustrations down the line.

Bears at the Falls

More more more.

I did a few more pastel paintings today to keep on fooling around with ideas for things to show the kids this Wednesday. It’s been pretty enjoyable playing with the oil pastels. I can’t draw with them the way I normally draw with other tools which has forced me to make shapes that are more loose than I’d likely choose with other media.

I don’t think I’m a pastel convert, but I do think I’ll do some more work with these— especially when I’m not in the mood to get out brushes, or when I don’t have the time. They are a very cool tool to have as an option, and since I have my easel all ready to go for some plain air work (I’ve been denied outside painting because it’s too cold to really enjoy it, even if it is warm enough to use water without having to mix it with alcohol as James Gurney shows in one of his million videos on painting.), I am thinking about bringing these out with me to do some work when it’s not so hot that the pastels will melt. There’s always something to complain about; my life is sooo hard. Waaaaaa!

So anyway. Here’s a baby chick smelling a flower I painted this morning. It’s Easter Sunday and I although I’ve never seen this happen before, I wanted to see it; so I painted it. Problem solved.

I don’t care too much for the flowers in this one, but once the color was down I just committed and am going to move on. It was really hard not to get in there and start fiddling with stuff once I got to this point. But I think this turned out the way I needed it to.

Decapitated Daisy

Still plugging away at these pastel paintings in order to come up with some decent ideas that are teachable to kids.

This daisy seems easy enough to teach. So I’ll have this one ready to go, and try to figure out something to go along with it.

Flower Hour?

Trying to make sure I have some simple ideas for this art thing ready to go for any kids that don’t already have a plan. I did a Hibiscus today. 5 petals. Make it whatever colors you want. I wish I had blended less, but it’s too late for that now. Guess I’ll cry myself to sleep.

Monster Hour 2

I did another pastel “monster” this morning. I’m working out some stuff with the pastels to make sure that I’m ready for the art lesson at my kids’ school in a couple weeks. I had these 8 dollar pastels sitting around collecting dust so this has given me an excuse to use them.

My plan is to have a couple simple ideas for the kids to look at as examples for what they can do with animals, and then I’ll do some kind of flower or plant. I’d do a landscape or seascape or skyscape, but the way I work requires a much bigger piece of paper for something like that, and I doubt many of the kids will want to paint nature without any animals in it anyway.

I'm not an extremely experienced pastel painter, but there are a lot of skills that translate from one medium to another and because of that I’m pretty excited about the fun ways I can use these things that I had not thought about before.

If you want to watch me draw and paint a “Monster Frog” from blank piece of paper to the finished image, that process is up on my YouTube channel. Watch it here or click over and watch it there. Thanks a lot.

Monster Hour

I did a live stream of a monster mushroom guy I drew and then painted with pastels this morning onto The Art of Fathering YouTube channel.

You can check it out here Monster Hour Mushroom Guy if you want to see me work in real time.

Snailiarty Eats Too Many Mints

This is a cartoon I made with my daughters’ help after finishing the book. This was one of the most fun projects I’ve done in my life.

This is Art.

I haven’t written much in the past few years, and partially that is a result of having little time to do it. But the more honest reason is that I had little interest in making time to do it. Becoming a father, and one who stays home with his kids, wasn’t something I had ever seen modeled before, so there was a lot of learning I had to do. And as anyone who has kids knows, there is something to be learned every single day because these little people are full of surprises.

I’m not surprised that I’m coming back to writing because it’s been such a huge part of my life for so long; I suppose this happening now is the result of all the writing pressure that’s built over the past eight years, and I’m hopeful that the result is a much more positive exploration than what writing was for me in the past. My writing outside of this blog will likely be similar in theme to what I wrote in the past, but this is a space where I hope to write essays that I can one day share with my daughters, a apace where I can talk about what I am doing with my art, and a place where I can say what I want to say freely because it is my own place and no-one has to stick around to listen unless they choose to do so.

I am at a place in my life where I can get away with writing and making art for myself without needing an audience to sustain it, and I am going to take advantage of it for as long as I can. I plan to have a YouTube channel to accompany this blog that will show my works in progress and probably an animated short from time to time. My first priority will always be my family, but this work should be sustainable because I’ll work at my own pace and answer to no one but myself.

I’ve spent the majority of my working time for the past years painting, drawing, and animating. I think I would’ve pursued these interests earlier in my life if I’d had more access to information about visual art, but I got to it when I did, so I’m not complaining.

There are so many resources on the internet that have benefitted me over the years, many of them free and some of them I’ve paid for. Both have been valuable in my art education, and I will create a list of all the people and resources that I’ve found helpful. I didn’t go to art school, but I did get art lessons from artists who’ve shared knowledge in books and videos. I do not believe anyone ever masters art completely since each new project you do presents its own unique challenges. But you can be more prepared and solve those problems in ways that you are happier with than you might have been with fewer skills and less knowledge.

I hope this will be a place for me to generate ideas that help me pursue additional projects for myself and projects done in conjunction with friends (old and new), and also a place where I can direct people who are curious about what it is that I do and how I go about doing it.

Whether you’re here on accident or because you sought me out, I am glad you’re here. Here’s a short cartoon I made long, long ago.

This is a video short I made a while back.