IMC 2010: The Beginnings

It's that time of year again! This Friday I'll be heading off to Amherst, MA for the annual Illustration Master Class at Amherst college. It is a week-long intensive class filled with painting, critiques, painting demos, lectures, no sleep, waay too much college cafeteria food,....aaand did I mention no sleep? yep it's drawing and painting from 9am-2am everyday. Followed by some good ol' dorm-style hangouts into the wee hours of the morning. And not to mention with some of the absolute best of the best illustrators in the world teaching. I can't wait!

You may remember my posts last year about my IMC painting of the Berserker Lord. This year I want to tackle one of the Magic card descriptions given for the assignment. The description goes like this: 

War Priest of Thune (Magic Card)      

Color: White creature

Location: Battlefield

Action: This is a cleric who isn't content to sit back and heal the wounded — he/she wades into combat, using his/her own protective magic to make him/her a more powerful sacred warrior. Show a male or female, olive-skinned human cleric in full battle armor. Maybe the armor is plate with leather covering strapped over it. We want a glamor shot of him/her, confronting the camera, heavy mace in hand, as a smog rolls away from him/her unnaturally, as if receding from his/her presence.

Focus: The battle cleric

Mood: A holy badass

Notes: No real-world symbols, please.

So here's a bit of my process so far: 

First a bunch of scaled thumbnails. These are printed onto a sheet and are the same exact size the card art would be printed. I tend to be pretty loose with these. More thinking about composition than character design or details.

Next, after some good feedback from all around, I took my top three thumbnails into photoshop and did some little color/composition studies. they look like this:

I decided that I liked the bottom two color roughs because of their movement. But, after some further feedback I decided that my color rough of #1 was a bit different from it's thumbnail and actually looked quite different from what I was going for. Also the two bottom roughs are getting to be a bit too exaggerated and stylized for a Magic style cleric. Too World of Warcraft, and too action oriented for a character that should be a little bit more reserved. So back to the drawing board I went, and decided to work up a better version of my #1 rough. This is more of the feeling and look i was intending in my thumbnail stage. 

6.25"x8" Charcoal

I am also working up a charcoal version of my second color rough because I still really like the movement in it (i'll just tone down the WoW). We'll see what the instructors say on Saturday about them! 

Check back for more updates through the week!

New Illustration: Flight

Here's another new painting that I recently finished. It is for a young adult fantasy cover project. The theme was "flight."

"Muse" Finish

Well it's been a busy month of May with some new paintings (the other coming soon!), moving to a new apartment/studio, and training for a half marathon! All flopped on top of my regular 9-5. 

This painting was due just the other day for the latest Artorder challenge.

Discover A Muse

Here's a drawing for an upcoming painting that I am doing for the current challenge over at ArtOrder. It's for the "discovering a muse" challenge that's due on June 1st.

Happy Friday!

Well it's Friday again. So to celebrate, here's a sketch of some kind of Man-cat with a strange looking axe. Whoohoo!

New Drawing "Flight"

Here's a charcoal drawing I finished up recently for my next painting. It's for a mock young adult fantasy cover project. Should be a fun one!

Some Dragon-Bird Thing

I've got some new things in the works. Just started a new project at the ol' Running with paintbrushes blog. So since I don't have anything big to show right now, here's a sketch of some dragon-bird thing that may be making an appearance in my next painting.

The Witch of Fallows Heath

Well as usual it's been waaaay too long since i've added anything on here. Sheesh! Where does the time go? I just finished up this little painting as part of our project at the collective blog Running with Paintbrushes. It was a bit of a departure from my usual routine. I started the image with a loose charcoal drawing using very little reference. I mounted a printed version of the drawing as usual and then proceeded my painting without much reference. I did make a little color study in photoshop, and had a general photo for the lighting and the bird. So it was fun to go at this one without much of the tedious reference work and planning (though I do enjoy that part sometimes too). 

Rust At Last!

So it's taken me ages to finally get back to work on this, but some more important projects had to be put first. Now I'm glad to say that I've finished my "Rust" piece and i'm fairly happy with it.

I wanted to do an image that was basically black and white (over a Burnt Umber ground that was also mixed into the greys) with one other bright color. This was inspired by a few paintings I saw at the Delaware Art Museum by Howard Pyle from his pirate series. 

In case you missed the original project this was for, we had to create an image based on a quote. The quote went like this: "A Sword, a spade, and a thought should never be allowed to rust" - James Stephens

Witch Sketch

Just finished a quick sketch for our recent challenge over at Running with Paintbrushes . Since I have been hard at work on some paintings for Wizards of the Coast, and was unable to turn in my "Rust" painting on time, we thought we'd try a little lighter assignment. The task was to do a drawing of a witch however we wanted...pretty simple eh? It was a nice quick break from painting. I decided to use charcoal because it's been forever since I last used it, and I will say that I had a great time working with it! It feels so much more fluid than pencil! I might have to mess around with it more often. Anyways, here's my quick drawing...perhaps i'll paint it!