Gryphon Hunting

So after some time away I am back! (Special thanks to Cory Godbey for holding down the fort for me while I went and got married and explored some sea caves in the Caribbean and was almost nearly kidnapped and eaten by bats.)  

But I am back and I am painting again. And for Christmas Eve this year I'd like to share a few preliminaries for my next painting with you. 

Rough Design GO!

This painting is a private commission and will be done 4'x6' oil on canvas.  I've been having a lot of fun working larger and am looking forward to tackling something this size.  

Working large makes this early design stage really important for me.  Once I blow the drawing up and transfer it to the canvas I start to lose track of things fast.  Proportions start to slide off and perspective warps. 

So I like to nail down a really solid design here.  The little bits like leaves and individual bricks don't matter, but faces and poses and characters relations to one another is extremely important. 

Color Comp GO!

 Figuring out the light source and shadows is really important. Ultimately its story though. And we need to figure out what is the story is here most of all. 

Is it more interesting to have an ultimate-samurai-warrior-navy-seal-who looks like George Washington in a bear suit?  

Or a lost pizza delivery guy? 

Or a band of adventurers of dubious character who are trying for the big one?  

I don't know.  So we spend some time sketching to figure it out. 

Next Week: George Washington in a bear suit and a transfer to a very large canvas.

Sketchbook 2013 Shipping Out!

Last week I shipped out all the 2013 sketchbook orders!  We sold out of the DELUXE editions on day one, and now it's time to roll the dice and see who got what!

There is no rhyme or reason to these sketches, I just sit down and sketch for about 3 days and see what turns up. As the drawings are finished the sketchbooks are placed in order and then whatever number you are when you order, that is the one you get.

Sometimes you get wizards...

...And sometimes you get crocs.

And maybe more wizards.

And maybe a few Ents.

There were also a lot of mostly harmless dragons.

And a lot of angry dwarves.  

And some lucky person gets #43, which was probably my favorite of the bunch:

It was a good batch and I hope everyone likes them. Until next year...  

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To see the sketches from previous years:

Sketchbook 2010

Sketchbook 2011

Sketchbook 2012

Some Sketches for You

The new sketchbooks are shipping out right now! This past weekend (after some time to recover from a phenomenal time at Spectrum Live in Kansas City) I took some time and did some drawings in the first 30 orders.

The topics for these sketches ranged from men in strange hats...

 to ancient dragons...

to orcs with limited table manners...

To crocodiles who mean well...

And even into reliquaries of great power...

And finally, (as always) to princesses.  

Thank you guys for the support and the renewed interest in these. I love working on them and I'm looking forward to getting started on the 2013 one soon. We will be doing something a little different and a little bigger for 2013.  Stay Tuned...

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To see sketches from previous sketchbook releases check out:

2011 Sketchbook Sketches Post

2012 Sketchbook Sketches Post

To order one check them out at:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/JustinGerard

Let's Draw Real-Life Dragons

Drawing from life is hard. 

And drawing from life that insists on being alive and wandering off or slithering away is even harder. 

But it can be highly rewarding as well. There is a wealth of information that you glean from direct observation that you just can't get any other way. Like that someone taught that miniature monkey over there how to make obscene gestures and he has been making them at me for the past ten minutes.
But also more useful things like how reptiles breath, how they interact with one another, how they act when they are startled, or how they sit with jaws open to cool off (and not in the hopes that I will carelessly step there.)

These drawings were done at a reserve called Alligator Adventure, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. This reserve is home to one of the largest crocodiles in the world, "Utan." (pictured above)
Utan is 20 feet long and weighs 1 ton.  He is in his own spacious exhibit, because he ate everything else.

He is a genuine monster, a horror from another age. In other places in the world his kind allegedly still kill more humans than any other predatory animal on the planet.

I doubt this chicken wire would really do much if he really decided he wanted to eat me, it looks like it's a screen door he might accidentally trip through on his way to the loo. But as you can see, I'm not worried at all. This is because I am wearing my sweet camo hat, which renders me pretty much invisible to him.

Here we got the head done, and then Utan decided he'd like a swim.  This was inconvenient, but you don't argue with 20 foot crocodiles.

So I moved on to the smaller lizards:

These juvenile alligators, like the juveniles of other species, could not sit still for more than 30 seconds. Drawing them proved fruitless.

Here we were able to catch a tail, and that is all.

Still there were fascinating tidbits that now get filed away for future projects on enormous, man-eating reptiles. How the water moves around them as they submerge is particularly fascinating.  

This alligator didn't like the way I was looking at him. That, or he didn't like my sweet camo hat. Either way, he eventually had enough and made a break for it.  But not before I snapped a photo which I would later use to cheat and fill in all the missing details.  Justin: 1, Alligator: 0

This guy knew that I knew that he knew that I knew that he was there and that he was NOT a log. I watched him slide into the water for crying out loud.  But that didn't stop him from slowly drifting up to the edge and pretending to be a log.  We all knew the game, and he knew that sooner or later, I would have to cross the water to get back to my car. And in my haste I'd forget that he wasn't a log.  And he'd even that score up a little.

But I knew a little secret called, "using the bridge."
Final Score: Justin: 2, alligator: 0

New Work for DragonCon 2012

So I have been busy working on some new imagery for DragonCon 2012.  I will have a booth there (as will fellow Muddy, Dan Dos Santos.)  If you will be attending stop by and say hello.

It will be my first year at the convention, and I want to make a good impression.
So I canned my original idea of Ninjas vs. Bears as being out of place for this event, and I went with something more traditional.  (I am not ruling out Ninjas vs. Bears for next year's Spectrum Live though.)

These are my studies for a more DragonCon-themed image.  This one continues the thread of; if I was a player in some fantasy story, I'd probably be the guy who made the really dumb mistake and got us all in a lot of trouble.
In this case, our hero is thinking, 'maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all,' as he tries to quietly draw his sword. The dragon has its head up, suddenly alert.

Next week: Watercolor and Final.

Back from Spectrum

Today's post will be brief as I am still recovering from the awesomeness that was Spectrum Live 2012.

I can't remember the last time I have had so much fun. Apart from how great it is to get together with old friends and see what everyone has been up to this whole time, it was great to meet so many new artists that came out for this event.  

It was also really great to see so many of the European artists make it out.  There is just so much talent in Europe but it seems like we rarely ever get to cross paths with them, which is a shame.   

Jean-Baptiste Monge, Paul Bonner and Petar Meseldzija all came.  

Monge did a watercolor demo that I showed up for a half hour early because, well... it's J.B. Monge. 

Bonner brought some really wonderful prints, a new sketchbook and a few of his flabbergastingly detailed originals.  (I offered him my car as a trade at one point.)

And Petar brought some of the most gorgeous oil paintings I have ever seen.  

Every time I go to these events I get extremely depressed at how amazing all the other artist's work is and wondering what I have been doing all these years. But I also leave extremely inspired and eager to try new approaches and start on new images. I am really looking forward to getting started on some new work.

Switzerland

Photos from a recent tour of Switzerland:

We biked the whole country armed with nothing but a compass and our manly wits...

...And remarkably, we only got lost 467 times over the course of 9 days of biking.

What is more remarkable is that it really is possible to see all of Switzerland by bike.  Their bike trails are (almost all) very well marked, and offer great scenic routes between all the major cities and places of interest.  And many of these routes are on back trails or cart paths through forests or fields of flowers.  

It was one of the best trips I have taken. Especially the Interlaken area.  Lauterbrunnen (pictured above) may well be the most beautiful place I have ever been on earth.  Five stars. Would go back.

A few odd sketches from the trip:

Gimmelwold

Bern

Zurich

Studies

Some preliminary work for an upcoming project...

Tiny Wizard Drawings

 Rough Sketches

Digital (CS5) and Traditional Pencil

Study of Sugar Glider 

Pencil

Tight Drawing 

Pencil

The Forest Troll Part IV: Color Comp and Drawing

The color comp is done as fast as possible. I don't want to get bogged down in the details here. This is all about the mood and atmosphere.

Color Comp

The main goals of the color comp are:

#1 Nail down the lighting.
(Sources, direction, strength. etc.)

#2 Nail down the value relations.
For instance, the tree behind the dwarves: is it more attractive as darker than the background or lighter? By exploring and solving this in the color comp I will be more confident when I tackle it in the final image.

 #3 Nail down the color theory.
This image will be confined to a warmer spectrum, one that you might find at midday in an old growth forest with patches of sunlight breaking through the canopy. I wanted to make most of the tones fall in a rather narrow color gamut, and then choose a bright color outside this gamut as an accent. In this case, it was mostly golds and browns accented with a bright green.
In the color comp I just want to make sure this theme will work for my image. I go through this on almost all of my pieces because my brain is incapable of solving value/color mixtures on the fly, so I need a cheat sheet. The color comp helps me idiot-proof my image so I don't bungle it in the final.

Tight Drawing

The Forest Troll Part III: Troll Studies

As some of you may remember I did several studies for our Forest Troll's bloodhound boars in a previous post.  Check them out here.

Next: Color Comp and Composite Drawing