Over the course of making this blog, I've "started" several things that I thought would become some sort of series, so I kept waiting to share them until I had enough for it to feel like a substantial post. For example, my "Digital Value Studies" post was originally titled, "Digital Landscapes Part I: Value Studies", but then I never had a Part II. Now, as I'm getting ready to transition from maintaining a scattered personal blog to launching a more systematic social media campaign to promote myself in a particular way, I figure I may as well share the pieces I've left out over the past couple years.
This one is from back when I first started painting outdoors with oils, right after I graduated from college--and right when I started writing this blog. (I was going to link to some of my other oil paintings from that time, but then I looked at those posts and they're really bad, so now I'm embarrassed. At the time, posting my mistakes was a great exercise in vulnerability, but now I've progressed to a point where I just want to bury that shit in history again. Although, the posts are still there if you want to dig.) I was experimenting with impasto techniques, and I was actually intended this as an underpainting. The other layers never materialized, which is just fine because in retrospect this technique of using impasto layers just to create random texture underneath the actual painting is pretty silly. However, the "underpainting" itself looks pretty cool. (In that post I'm too embarrassed about to link to, the underpaintings looked fantastic--before I painted over them and ruined them with lousy portraits. Fortunately, they were stepping stones to better portraits; unfortunately, the nice-looking underpaintings are lost.)
These two are sort of a continuation of a theme I explored a lot in watercolor. The watercolors were done in... 2013? I think. These oil paintings must have been 2015 or 2016. At the time, I felt almost *guilty* about how easy these were to paint; the low level of investment required to make them compared to what I see as fairly high quality felt somewhat unsatisfying. This was before I finally "surrendered" to digital painting, which I felt more or less the same way about at first. Since then I've come to see a high quality-to-effort ratio as a positive thing (as any logically-thinking non-perfectionist would), and now (as in literally, right this second as I'm writing this) I'm considering dabbling back into oil painting with more of a focus on abstract work like this, while sticking to digital for my more representational artwork. The abstract expressionism of my "impasto underpainting" phase was a little too mindless for me, but something like these abstract cathedral paintings strikes a nice balance between representation and abstraction.
It's been about a year since I first started treating digital art as an end in and of itself and not just as a way of "rehearsing" for my more "serious" oil paintings. Around the same time I dropped my policy of sharing my mistakes as well as my successes, since it had gotten to a point where I felt like I couldn't experiment because I knew I'd be sharing everything on the Internet later. As such, I have a lot of unfinished or just sub-par digital paintings that I'm not sharing here, but I also have a few decent ones that fit better on this blog than on my upcoming portfolio site.
The horse at the top of this post was just a quick sketch, whereas this swordfish painting was a more prolonged, finalized undertaking. However, they're both copied pretty much directly from photographs (you can easily find my reference image for the swordfish by doing a Google image search with the url of my painting), which highlights a growing frustration I've had with representational art over the course of creating this blog...
I've done some really nice portraits of my friends and family in oil. I've done some decent celebrity portraits digitally. But portraits of friends are of less interest to strangers; my understanding is that, for this reason, portraits are notoriously difficult to sell--except as individual commissions (i.e. you send me a photograph and I paint you from it), and I'm not really interested in that. It seems very hollow. Celebrity portraits have a wider appeal (portrait artists often use them to lure in commissions as well as selling them as prints), but they tend to be kitschy at best.
And neither of those tap into what attracted me to art in the first place: as a kid, art was fun. It allowed me to tap into my overactive imagination and bring it into some tangible form. It allowed me to synthesize new ideas from components of existing ideas to truly create something new, not just a representation of something that already exists. Obviously all art does this to some extent, blah blah blah, but the directions I've been trying to take my art over the course of this blog have for the most part not tapped into that side of things enough for my taste. I'll talk more about this in my next (and final) post.
There are plenty of artists on Patreon who make an entire living getting commissions and tips for painting (usually erotic) fan art. That kind of career path doesn't interest me, but I'm getting to a point where I'm comfortable enough with myself to make a little fan art every now and then. Above I've painted a hypothetical scene from the strategy game Fire Emblem: Awakening, in which the bashful dancer Olivia fights with a sword for the first time. She's obviously not dressed for battle, and understandably feels a bit awkward hacking zombies apart, but finds herself to be surprisingly good at it. (In the game, she requires some investment, but she is indeed very good at hacking zombies apart. The quote used in this image is one of her battle quotes.)
Like I said, fan art isn't my long-term aspiration, but painting a scene like this certainly taps into that creative synthesis I mentioned above: Here I'm taking an existing character and placing her into an original scene that makes sense with her personality as presented through both dialog and gameplay. As a bonus, art like this has the potential to increase my fan base by exposing me to people searching specifically for images of their favorite fictional characters. (One of the realizations that helped nudge me in this direction was that when I scroll through my Facebook news feed, I see a lot more of my friends sharing things like "Disney sidekicks reimagined as Ninja Turtles" than any sort of highbrow studio art.)
Of course, if fan art allows me to synthesize new situations from existing parts, the next logical step down that road is to design completely original, free-standing concepts. I'll touch on this in my next--and final--post for this blog, and explore it in the years to come on other platforms.