Ladscape painting

The assignment was to paint a landscape that had some sort of emotion or meaning behind it which was not just "nature is amazingly beautiful and grand." So I decided to paint what early morning road trips are like in Minnesota. There are always rows and rows of pine trees silhouetted against the sky, and I always liked that image. Plus I think I really wanted to go back home, so this was kind of a homesick painting as well.

Early Travel Oil on canvas, 28" x 36" September 2009

And here's detail to show my brushwork:

 I am really fond of painterly brushstrokes. I just really love the way the medium of oil paints works. This is however a little more brushy than I normally do.

So here's a secret: this painting started off just being about nearly morning in fall or spring. You see those light spot? Those were meant to be sunlight, not snow. But it looks so much like snow, and everyone thinks its snow, that this painting is now about early morning in the winter.

I am fairly convinced that other people know what my art is about better than I do.

24 Hour Comic

24 hour comic, for those of you who don't know is an event where a comic artist creates a twenty-four page comic from conception to conclusion. Generally I get everything pencilled, and leave some pages to ink later. My comic this year was:

 This came from a combination of me researching fairy tales for my honors thesis, and  watching WAY too many mystery shows (like Bones, or Life -- if you haven't watched Life, go do so on Hulu now -- it's AMAZING).

The jumping off point, which became the first page is:

 If you want a copy, let me know. The Alfred University Militant Illustrator's Association sells them for one dollar every Friday on campus. So if anyone not at Alfred wants one I'm willing to work something out. (Warning -- it's just on printer paper so it's not super high quality)

Spring 2009

Here's some more paintings last year.

The diptych on feet didn't neccessarily turn out the way I expected. I like the painting of the shoes, but the feet didn't turn out as well. Possibly because I didn't use a model while painting, but instead sketched my friends feet from life, and then used the coloring of my foot.

I do like the shoe painting just on it's own:

Old Work.

In an attempt to stay somewhat chronological here is what I consider my best painting from last semester:

 (Oil paint on paper, 21" x 30" Spring 2009)

The project was to take different parts of a giant still life, metally put them together and then paint the composition. I blame this project for my obsession with painting both still lives and crumpled paper.

If you are at all interested super early artwork is here, it includes stuff from highschool and some early college. There are a couple new paintings there as well. This is pretty indicative of the art you'll find there:

 

Lots of pen and colored pencil. And some really poorly photographed paintings. The comic page is from a comic I started called "Fade to Color" which I may eventually revisit, but at the moment I have a couple projects that I've been working on pretty consistently. One is not my writing so, if I post here I will blank out all the text, and the other is in the (very slow) process of being written.