A friend asked me to help him design a dragon for the bottom of his longboard.  It was fun to try and figure out how to fill such an unusually shaped space.

I started out painting a grayscale dragon in Photoshop making sure to keep the dragon and background layers separate to make masking easier later on.

(Please note that I do have kind, wise, wonderful friends who care about my sanity and advised me not to worry about painting all the scales. But, as is usually the case with the recipients of good advice…I listened and did just the opposite)

Once I had all the detail I wanted I added color using gradient maps which is something I’ve never tried before. I color sampled from a couple images of copper coins and was able to get pretty good initial color in a relatively short time.

After several (and I mean SEVERAL) layers of this I went back to direct painting and finished it up! Which took forever. But it was probably faster than it would have been without gradient maps.! I’ll definitely experiment with them again in the future.  Here’s the rectangular version:

For my sister’s birthday I Sharpied some shoes with some of her favorite things.  It was a lot of fun but it took FOREVER! 

We have The Hobbit and Doctor Who:

Star Wars:

Portal and Star Trek:

And of course Harry Potter!

Mischief Managed!

I even decorated the tongues.  I figured they wouldn’t be much use as tongues if they didn’t say something!  The left shoe says “It’s a dangerous business walking out your front door”  (anyone who knows my sister will know why it says that).  The right shoe says “Sala’s shoes!  Thief, you have been warned.”

I was also really pleased with the box I made for them:

And the gift tags:

If anyone is looking to draw with Sharpie on their own canvas shoes (Converse, Vans, Keds, Toms etc.), I discovered a good trick for shading with markers.  I usually just use cross hatching, but there were a few places this didn’t give me the feel I wanted.  So I took the cap off and let the marker dry out for a while.  When it dries out the Sharpie will make a lighter mark.  Then you can layer the lighter tone to make a gradient.  It’s probably not very good for the markers, but it’s great for art!

And when you’re finished be sure to seal the shoe with a water resistant spray.  I used Crep Protect:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Crep-Protect-Spray/dp/B013YRRFJ4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1470608163&sr=8-1&keywords=crep+shoe+spray

It didn’t discolor the shoes or make the Sharpie bleed.  But it does need need to be reapplied periodically.

I started this portrait of Marie shortly after she was born.  I meant to do just a little speed sketch of this photo:

…but true to form I got a “little” carried away with the details.  Here’s a close up so you can appreciate them:

It was an awful lot of fun playing with so many lines!  Next time I’ll make the texture a little more obvious so you don’t have to zoom in so far to see them 🙂

I never met Duncan, but his charm came through in the photos and videos I watched to prepare for this painting. He was obviously a delightful boy. 

I knew exactly what I wanted the end product to look like right away and it gave me the confidence to experiment with surface texture which I have never really done before.  Painting this portrait was a wonderful experience and I’m happy with the way it turned out.

I’m also very pleased with the rubber bands Eric and I rigged up to transport it in while the face was still wet.

Much to my bafflement, my son Daniel has never really been interested in drawing.  He’d rather do math problems, study historical maps or read a book.  But lately his passion for geography and ever active imagination has led him to draw maps of places from his make believe games…and of course monsters that inhabit those lands.  Naturally I wanted to encourage him, so we combined our artwork to create this little picture of Catchie (Daniel’s adventurous alter-ego) and his pet, the flying fire fish!

It’s very liberating to paint just for practice with no ambitious masterpiece in mind.  Here’s a little head study I did a couple nights ago.  It was extremely satisfying just painting for painting’s sake, I need to work on little pictures like this more often!

I’m pretty sure that when Rebecca was born all of the regular baby-delivering storks were booked, so whoever is in charge of such things decided to send her via owl instead.  It would explain the nocturnal habits she has exhibited from the moment of her arrival.  She also seems to have a particular affinity for the birds.  On family trips to the zoo, sleepy owls inevitably wake up at her approach and turn their heads to say hello.  Coincidence?  Maybe.  But I thought it deserved a painting :)  And while I was at it I threw in some stars since her favorite song is (appropriately) “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

So here’s a twinkling star for my adventurous little night owl.

Daniel loves telling stories.  Lately he’s been telling stories featuring himself as a character named “Catchie.”  He told me this Catchie story a couple of days ago, I could tell it was going to be good so I transcribed it quickly while he talked.  Enjoy!

Everything is cool in Catchie, but the Giant of Dune made some things boring. You know what the Giant of Dune was made out of? Billions and billions and billions of night metal.

The Giant of Dune made the night metal and gave it to the king. But then he decided to steal it. So that was his first bad choice. (That wasn’t THE first bad choice. There were lots of bad choices being made by the Scary of Scares. He was making them his whole life…well, I’m not really sure I skipped that part of the movie it was pretty scary…)

The first bad choice that the Giant of Dune made was to steal the night metal with the potion inside.

Whoever gets the metal it will get on them and they will get badder and badder. And that’s how the Giant of Dune grew up.

He put the metal on everyone who tried to get the Giant of Dune. Because everyone wanted to get the Giant of Dune. Catchie did too, but he was too fast so he couldn’t put the metal on him.

When the people got touched by the night metal they started making bad choices and turned into monsters and got badder and badder.

The Giant of Dune could only be fought if the whirlwind went away. But the Giant of Dune was out in the night, watching the whirlwind to see if anyone got the whirlwind and if they did they would die, he would get them with his three-double gun. (But if he tried to do that Catchie’s laser would boost into a gun and the gun would boost and boost and boost into a three-double gun and it shoots fire bolts)

The world got dark and dark and dark and darker and darker and the whirlwind came and the giant of Dune was in the night and that was the first time he shook the world. And he put magic in the whirlwind and made the trees and they grew dark and became the darkness trees. The whirlwind became the darkness trees.

In the middle of darkness you fall. Fall down in the night and you will hit your head on the ground and you will die. Catchie was in the night before, but luckily he could fly so he didn’t bonk his head like the monsters did so they all would die.

Catchie tried to destroy the Giant of Dune by building a giant robot. Then he broke the robot on the Giant of Dune. But it didn’t work. Then he built a dragon that had blade wings and power and a blade tail with claws and claws on his feet and a fire ball that could turn into a poison ball when it was in the middle of the air and when it did, it hit the Giant of Dune SO hard. As hard as if a house broke and it hit you. That’s how hard. And the Giant of Dune died.

Then Catchie got the metal from the dead Giant of Dune and then he put it on the monsters and it built a giant machine and Catchie built some of it. And the bad guys had to be eaten by the machine. And not very many bad guys wanted to, but they all did at last… because Catchie throwed them in. And they all turned back into creatures (humans).

Do you know how Catchie destroyed the darkness trees? By putting the potions on the trees and that’s how he destroyed them. Then he built a new one and that’s the start of the next movie.

The End

Rebecca was peaceful and content at night… as long as someone was holding her.  If we laid her in her crib she started to cry and would not stop.  So I held her night after night and well into the mornings.  While I held her, I painted this picture, baby on one arm, Wacom stylus in the other hand.   I did this for a few weeks until she learned that night time was for sleeping then I put the painting aside and got some sleep for myself. 

About a year later I rediscovered this abandoned painting and began working on it off and on until I finally managed to finish it for her 18 month birthday!

The time has gone so fast.  I had no idea what happiness Rebecca would bring to our family when I first began this painting.  Since then I’ve been delighted to discover her silly, vivacious, enthusiastic, passionate, and absolutely radiant personality.    I’m so glad she came to our family.  I love you Rebecca!

…And just for fun here are some of the audio books and shows I watched while working on this painting!  Every time I see a certain area of my picture details from the corresponding book will pop into my head.  For example whenever I look at the faces I think of Darwin categorizing barnacle species and I will for years because I painted it into my picture.  (Though I sincerely hope my face doesn’t make you think of barnacles!) Here’s how I see my painting…

(Yes this picture DID take a long time, but not as long as it might seem based on this picture.  I didn’t work on this picture the WHOLE time I listened to these books, or watched Star Trek)

Family members are my favorite subjects, I’m considering branching out to extended family soon (and don’t say I didn’t warn you since I expect you all to be following this blog much more religiously than I update it 😛 )  Here are 5 Daniels I’ve done recently.

First: Daniel and the Styracosaurus it started out as a study of James Gurney’s picture on page 68 of Dinotopia: The World Beneath, but I took it a little farther than I intended.  The likeness is vague at best and looks different from every angle, but I learned my lesson and won’t be attempting a half inch tall face on a ridiculously bumpy re-used canvas again.  Oh well, he loves it and that’s what matters 🙂

And some sketches, steampunk, stylized, “paleontologist,” and Robin Hood.