New World of Warcraft cards

It's been a busy year. Here are some new painting I produced for World of Warcraft card game. Fun characters in fantasy environments. I create a drawing first then scan it in to paint on top. The main focus of the drawing is to see the overall shape design and the breakdown of light and shadow shapes. It's not about making something look realistic but how do the shadow shapes create an interesting design. One of the most important decisions is choosing the direction of the light on the subject. Once you choose the direction of the light, the real magic happens as you design how the light falls off the form to create interesting shadow shapes.
art love

Jeff

New art from MCF: Escape from Ravenhearst

Here are some paintings from my newest game called MCF:Escape from Ravenhearst. It's the 3rd installment in the Ravenhearst drama. A point and click adventure game on the PC and Mac platform. MCF is short for Mystery Case Files. 

www.mysterycasefiles.com

Kitties of the Living Dead

Just in time for Halloween. One of my new Cat paintings. Kitties of the living dead coming to a theater near you.

Gallery Show at John Brown University

My most recent art show is hanging in the gallery at John Brown University http://www.jbu.edu/art/gallery/. It's a collection of 52 paintings, drawings and sculptures. The show is titled "Faith and Fantasy" which highlights pieces from the last 25 years of my career.
Art love,
Jeff

The love of the sketchbook

A few years ago I did an article in 2d artist magazine about the importance of carrying a sketchbook. Here is the complete article.

Art love and happy drawing,

Jeff

My sketchbook is my “portable playground” of ideas and images. It is a book I carry around with me everyday, wherever I go. This wasn’t always the case, however…

In the first 10 years of my professional career, I struggled with the desire to draw, much less carrying around a sketchbook to do that drawing in. I hated that part of the art process. It was only a means to get me to the painting stage, which was what I really thought I enjoyed the most.

At that time, when I would meet artists who carried around these amazing sketchbooks with pages and pages of gorgeous drawings, I just couldn’t relate to how an artist could flow with that much imagination and produce such quality drawings without using photo references. Where did the desire even come from or the drive to want to draw? How do you even think that way?

To develop that habit seemed, to me, an unreachable goal, achievable only by the super talented. Only others much more gifted than I could output that kind of beauty. And yet, I began to realise that there was a time in my life when I flowed like that… those early years in the elementary school playground when drawing was not a precursor to painting, but a fun task in its own right.

Today I love my sketchbook and the whole drawing process almost more than the painting process. My sketchbook has become the heart of who I am as an artist. It’s my place to play. What changed and how did I get there? The biggest change was in my thinking. I slowly developed the habit of sketching in the little bits of spare time I had in any given day (the bits of time I usually wasted).

Then an artist friend got me started by having me make random shapes on a page without thinking in advance about what I would draw. The next step was to take the shapes and turn them into something that my imagination thought they looked like. It’s like looking into a wood grain or cloud pattern and seeing faces or creatures.

This is what I call a reactive process. You react to what you see, then push the drawing in that direction. The results were so revealing and exciting that this exercise made my imagination come to life (Fig.01 and Fig.02 are examples of this method). I also started to see shapes as design and pattern, so that when I started a drawing I set out to make beautiful shapes. It allowed me to not over-think the drawing, but just to start enjoying the development of the image. As a matter of fact, I found that if the shapes were interesting to look at, then the structural flaws of the drawing were not as distracting. The drawings took on a life of their own, instead of my pencil fighting them. I now prefer to draw more out of my imagination as I study life. Even as I draw from real life, I begin to stylise the shapes to make them more interesting. Each artist has their own shape language, or style of drawing shapes, which makes their drawings unique.

I have many sketchbooks going on at any one time. My main sketchbook I carry around everyday in my backpack; I draw on the commuter train or at any opportunity I get during the day. One of my other sketchbooks is themed with just fantasy fish drawings (Fig.03, Fig.04, Fig.05, and Fig.06 are examples from my fish sketchbook).

There are many forms of drawing and sketching that I produce in the sketchbooks: from compositional studies to gestures, ideas, notes, random thoughts and shapes. I also do a lot of study sketches for my paintings, to work out values or composition. The media I most enjoy are pencils, black pens with grey markers on top and black conté crayons. I use a click pencil with a refillable HB lead so that I don’t have to sharpen it. If I want a thick-to-thin line, I sharpen a 2B pencil with a knife to a chisel point. The wedge shape gives me a cool calligraphic line.

Fig.07, Fig.08 and Fig.09 show the progression from studies to drawing, through to the complete painting. This piece started as a drawing exercise with the theme of “Bullseye, My Favourite Pet from Mars”.

Fig.10 and Fig.11 are examples of the sketches and studies from my cat painting series. The studies are more about cat behaviour and my concepts of that than structural studies showing perfect cat anatomy. I love to stylise their forms into interesting shapes, and my four cats make great models – when I can get them to sit still!

Fig.12 is a study of the forms of trees, mountains and rivers for my oil landscape paintings. Again, I love to stylise the shapes to push more drama and movement into the environment. My focus in doing this is to break up the forms into patterns of light and shadow.

Fig.13, Fig.14 and Fig.15 are examples of character studies and drawings.

Fig.16, Fig.17, Fig.18 and Fig.19 show the process from under-painting to finished painting. “Dash for the Coral” is an acrylic painting and “Scary Fish” is a Photoshop painting, but you can see that my process is the same, whether I am working digitally or traditionally.

I can honestly say that I can now enjoy creating a drawing that will just remain a drawing, and never turn into a painting. The funny thing is that many of the drawings I am doing now, I get very excited about turning into paintings!

New drawings

Here are a few new drawings of cats and fish. I've been busy preparing for a gallery show in Sept.

A retrospective of 52 paintings and drawings.

Art love,

Jeff

Into the Pixel award

The swamp skull painting that I created for Mystery Case Files 13th Skull game won an award in the "Into the Pixel" show for the video game industry. There were 3 of us from Big Fish Games that took 3 of the 17 awards. This is a big honor from the video game industry. You can view the winners here www.intothepixel.com/artwork/2011_contest_winners.asp

More paintings from Mystery Case Files 13th Skull

Mystery Case Files 13th Skull is a point and click adventure hidden object game. As art director at Big Fish Games, I work with a wonderful team of artists to produce games that the whole family can play. It's like playing an interactive novel. 13th Skull is a pirate story set in the Louisiana swamp. Since I grew up in Baton Rouge, the subject matter was like stepping back into my childhood minus the fishing pole in my hand. These are a few of the paintings I created for the game. I'll post more later.

art love,

Jeff

New Artwork in Spectrum 18

My first cat painting made it into Spectrum 18 as well as the cover artwork for my latest game called Mystery Case Files 13th Skull.

Incatneato is painted in oil on canvas. 13th Skull is a digital painting.

Moving forward

This piece was done for a friend of mine. It's about being a turtle. Turtles don't go backwards but always forward. They are persistant and not in a hurry. The shape of the sculpture is an arrow which symbolizes moving forward and heaven bound. The base was made out of sculpy with inset mosaic tiles, copper metal and handmade glass beads. The center tile is from Mexico. I used leather stamping tools to get some of the details. After firing the clay I painted it with acrylic paint.

May we all be more a little more like turtles.

art love,

Jeff

New Drawings

Here are a few new pieces. The new cat drawing is called Tuna Dreams. It's about dreaming about what you love. I'm currently working on this painting in oils. Someone asked me where do you get your ideas. I carry a sketchbook around everyday in my backpack and jot down random ideas from my daily experience. It's amazing what you will see are think in a single day that is great content for a painting or piece of art. Most of my drawings just start as interesting shapes that emerge into something. I try not to think about it too much and just let God inspire me as I move my pencil around the paper. The focus for me is to try to make beautiful shapes and lines. Creativity is never the same. I don't completely understand but each fish or cat I draw looks different from the last. No two look the same. It's part of one body of work. For those of you drawing today, Happy drawing!

Art love,

Jeff