In my continuing efforts to paint more, I decided to do another rough painting sketch of a gorilla this afternoon. I just couldn’t stop, however, so I took it further than I had intended. I was having fun, dammit! While I think I might compose it a little differently, maybe show a little more of the body, this may end up a Totem painting.
Blog
Parrot Sketch
Woke up earlier than I wanted to this morning on the first day of the year. As I’m usually an ‘early to bed, early to rise’ type, the cat is used to me getting up at 5AM. Creatures of habit and routine, she was pawing at my legs at 5:30, clearly not concerned that I had stayed up late last night. As I’m not one who is able to get up for a half hour and then go back to bed, it was a good excuse to do something creative first thing. With hot coffee and tunes in the headphones, I decided to do a sketch painting of this parrot. With no intention of it becoming a finished painting, it was nice to just work on it without any expectations and you can never get enough practice. I plan to do a lot more of these this year as I quite enjoyed it.
Happy New Year!
Raccoon Totem
Here’s the last painting of the year and another addition to my Totem series. At present, I’ve got about eight to ten animals waiting in the wings to be painted. I’ve had the reference photos for a number of them for quite some time and even though I don’t have an order in mind, it just seems that each gets their turn whenever it feels right. I had not expected to be painting the Raccoon Totem this year, but when choosing which would be my last painting of 2013, I went through the different folders and reference images, and it just seemed the right time to paint this one.
Whenever I try to manipulate which Totem I’ll paint, whether it’s for commercial reasons or a request from the gallery, I never feel completely good about it. I learned a while ago to just paint whichever one feels right for the time I’m ready to start a new one and my best work will come through. This time, it was the raccoon, and (say it with me)…I had a lot of fun with this one.
There appear to be new challenges with each Totem, whether it’s features or fur and for this one, the fur and hair was different. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but the wiry raccoon hair is unlike any of the animals I’ve painted before. Just as the Bison and Otter Totems required me to paint hair a little differently, the Raccoon required me to paint on more layers than I normally would, in order to get that deeper layered look I achieved with the hair in this painting. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
This was painted on both the Wacom Cintiq 24HD and Wacom Cintiq 13HD displays, using Photoshop CC. No photos or overlaid textures were used in this image, it was all done with brush work. I don’t keep track of how long it takes to paint these anymore, because I usually spend an hour or two here and there over a two or three weeks when my other deadlines allow it. As always, I relied on a few reference photos for this painting and would like to thank my friend Susan Koppel who provided me my main reference for this Totem. Susan takes wonderful pet portraits, and also donates her time to her local Humane Society in Nevada and you can’t help but want to adopt all of the pets she photographs as she makes them look their absolute best. Rather than me ramble on about her skill and talent as a photographer, check out her website and you’ll see for yourself. You can find her at susankoppel.com
Happy to end the year with a Totem painting and looking forward to painting a lot more of them in 2014.
Commission – Duke
My latest commission, this is Duke, painted in my Totem style. While I often like to post work-in-progress shots online with paintings I’m working on, the first look at this one is the final image. As it was a birthday gift for the client’s wife, and the client is also a friend, there was a slim chance that she might see it online and recognize it as her dog. Let’s face it, ruining a surprise is just bad for business. This was completed at the end of last month then sent off to my printer in Calgary. The final print was a giclée on canvas, 18″X24″ with a shadowbox frame. Shipped to Dallas, it arrived yesterday and thanks to the magic of online video, I was able to see the reaction when it was opened. That’s just icing on the cake.
I know I say this a lot about paintings, but this was a lot of fun. I had a number of reference photos to work from and the client chose my exaggerated caricature Totem style of painting over my portrait style and I really enjoyed painting Duke with his happy goof expression. It’s true that I enjoy both painting styles in which I work and I allow clients to choose which one they prefer for their image, but the Totem style is my favorite. I laughed out loud a few times while painting this image and am glad I finally get to share it.
For those who like the tech details, I painted this digitally in Photoshop CC using both a Wacom Cintiq 13HD and a Wacom Cintiq 24HD display.
The Highlights of 2013
All things considered, I’m pretty happy with the work I accomplished in 2013. I wanted to focus more on painting, so I turned down more illustration gigs than I accepted this year and about that, I have no regrets. Along with the daily editorial cartoons, I worked on a number of pet portrait commissions, added more Totem paintings to my portfolio and managed to squeeze in a couple of portraits of people, too. Regardless of subject, each painting was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and as soon as I finished one, I was itching to start another.
If I were to choose the top three personal highlights of this year, they would be two portraits and one Totem.
At the very end of 2012, my painting of Martin Sheen as Tom from the movie, The Way, had come to the attention of his son, Emilio Estevez, who wrote and directed the movie. I had tagged him on Twitter, but didn’t really expect anything from it. Much to my surprise, he contacted me the same morning asking about buying a print, then the original. He said, “…the image is gorgeous and you have captured my father in a way that few have.”
Over the next few weeks of back and forth and having the canvas produced, it was delivered to Estevez at the beginning of February and he gave it to his father as a gift. I had asked them both to sign a paper print for me as well, which I’ve now framed and have hanging in my office. I was pleasantly surprised to later receive a copy of their co-written book ‘Along the Way,’ personally signed by both of them and a ‘Thank You’ note from Estevez. The card is still tacked to my bulletin board. What can I say, I’m a fan.
While the story received some attention in a number of media outlets, that sort of thing is fleeting and in the long run, just another blip in a rapidly changing entertainment news cycle. But, what I enjoy most about the experience is that each time I come up the stairs into my office, the first thing I see is the signed painting and it frequently makes me smile. It is still one of my favorite pieces both for the enjoyment I had painting it and the story that goes with it. And I still love that movie.
In the Spring of this year, astronaut Chris Hadfield became the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. With his daily tweets and seemingly endless supply of jaw dropping photos taken from a place few have ever been, he captured the imagination and excitement of the world, including me. I was inspired to paint his portrait and was thrilled when I received a complimentary tweet from space from Hadfield himself. If that weren’t enough, I drew an editorial cartoon about his taking command and in the toon, I mentioned Flin Flon, Manitoba. This prompted an interview from that town’s local paper which again caught the attention of Hadfield and I received a second short message from the I.S.S.. Apparently all it takes to make a 43 year old man feel like a ten year old kid again is getting messages from an astronaut in space. That was just cool.
Finally my favorite painting from this year was the Coyote Totem, because it’s one that’s been waiting to be painted for 20 years, even before I knew how to paint. For reasons I don’t wish to share publicly, and couldn’t even explain if I did, this is the most personal of all of the Totems I’ve painted and the only one I’ve had printed on canvas and framed for myself. It hangs in my office on the wall to my right, where I can easily see it. I look at it often and it reminds me how fortunate I am and how I got from there to here.
I just wasn’t skilled enough to do it justice until this year, but of any image I’ve created, it’s the painting I love most. And I’m grateful that the personality showed up.
I would like to give honourable mention to my most recent portrait of Anthony Hopkins as Bill Parrish from ‘Meet Joe Black.’ This was another personal painting because I did it just for me. I started the year focused on a painting of a character and actor I admire, an image that got a lot of attention and ended the year with a painting of a character and actor I admire, an image that got very little. And yet, I loved working on both portraits equally, the work itself brought me the most joy.
That’s the lesson I learned this year and the one I’m taking into the next.
Artistic Freedom
The greatest freedom in being self-employed is that you get to choose where you want to go. It’s one of the reasons so many creatives work for themselves and yet we too often forget that simple fact.
I’ve always felt a need to catch up, especially since I operated for a long time under the assumption that I started late. While I doodled as a kid and teenager, I never really started drawing with any intent or wanting to learn to be a better artist until my late twenties. That was when the Banff Crag and Canyon newspaper needed a weekly cartoonist and nobody else applied. It didn’t matter that I didn’t draw well or know much about politics or current events. They weren’t paying much and nobody was looking to the Crag’s editorial cartoon to set the standard. I already had a full-time tourism job and no ambition to do anything art related past this one thing. Draw one small town editorial cartoon each week for some extra beer money. Let’s face it, I was 27 years old, I had never gone to art school, and I didn’t draw very well. I never expected this to go anywhere.
Fast forward to today, I’m now 43, I’ve been doing this art gig full-time for almost 8 years and am very happy drawing and colouring for a living. It has thankfully been more than a few years since I would consider it a struggle to make ends meet. I’ve tried a number of different art related tangents, discarded the ones I didn’t like or that didn’t work, sought to become better at the ones I felt passionate about, and year after year, my focus has become sharper.
One of the best things I did this year was to begin removing myself from a few imaginary races I’ve been running. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype today that an artist’s value is entirely dependent on how many people follow you on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and that the incremental rise and fall of your Klout score will determine whether or not your business survives the end of the week. I know, because for a long time, I worried about that very thing. It’s exhausting and it’s an illusion.
Social media has been great for my business, don’t get me wrong, but it just never worked for me when I was trying too hard to get it to work for me. The scramble to be noticed by Company A, to be retweeted by Company B, and to have your site address posted by Company C becomes like an addiction. When it happens once, you try to make it happen again. When it doesn’t happen, or it happens but not as well as you wanted it to, and fails to pay the street-cred dividends you expected, you wish you’d never had the initial boost to your profile in the first place. You start to question your own value when the person who was happy to hear from you last year suddenly isn’t returning your calls anymore.
Then you end up looking to other people in your industry that you view as more successful and try to copy what they’re doing. Person A is writing articles, so I guess I need to write articles. But Person B is teaching, so I guess I should be teaching. Person C is traveling all over the place doing demonstrations at trade shows, so maybe I should be doing that, too. And I don’t know what Person D is doing but everybody is talking about them so I need to find out why.
All of that scrambling leaves little time for anything creative. While it’s true that I’m drawing editorial cartoons every day to meet my deadlines, last year I didn’t paint nearly as much as I had expected to, and not even close to how much I wanted to. The one thing I enjoy most about my work, I shoved aside so that I could promote myself. But what exactly was I promoting if there wasn’t any work?
This year, I’ve realized that the growth of my business is not tied to my connection to movers and shakers, nor is it tied to blogging freelancing tips and tricks or spending hours writing yet another tutorial on how to use brushes in Photoshop. While people may value that contribution, it has rarely translated to income or led me in a direction in which I wanted to go. I found myself looking forward and thinking, why do I feel like I’m voluntarily walking into a trap? It also left me little time to paint or draw anything outside of my deadlines.
The greatest gains I’ve seen in my business, both financially and in my public profile, have been when I produce the work I enjoy creating. The connection I make with the people who enjoy and buy my work doesn’t happen when I talk about being creative, it happens when I AM creative.
Therein lies the simple plan for the next year. Pay the bills, learn to be a better artist, and chart my own course. Spend a lot more time producing artwork and a lot less time talking about it.
Out the Other Side
It’s ironic that I don’t celebrate calendar holidays, but the changing of the year always makes me reflective. While I usually aim for one short blog entry for my year in review, it would appear I’m incapable of that, so this first one is less about the work and more about what’s been rattling around in my noggin this year.
It is difficult to find the separation between my personal and professional life. Having been able to find that elusive state of doing what I love for a living, the majority of my business is work that I enjoy. When your work and life become so interconnected, happiness in one depends on the same in the other.
Clearly a midlife evaluation of priorities and direction, I’ve been on an emotional ride the last few years, one that has included dark lows and bright highs. Most of my college years were spent studying psychology, so I’ve always been a believer in talk therapy. Even the most supportive family member or friend can be too close to the source and a trained therapist will often present perspectives and open doors that had not been previously considered. With that in mind, I spent some time talking with a professional therapist over the past year and it was incredibly helpful.
A few years ago, I was diagnosed with OCD, and while sitcoms and movies like to use that as a punch line, it has a much broader meaning than fear of germs or lining up everything in the fridge, neither of those being components of my particular affliction. I don’t mention this as a ploy to garner sympathy, just to point out that it’s a piece of the puzzle that makes me who I am. As Michael J. Fox once said about his Parkinson’s disease, “Everybody has their own bag of hammers to carry around. This is just mine.”
I mention it, because the ironic benefit of my particular OCD cocktail is that it makes me organized, driven and introspective. As much as it can be likened to carrying around an annoying child in your head 24/7, one that never shuts up about shit you can’t control or change, it has also been one of the largest contributors to the success of my business and my work.
While some opt for medication to take the edge off of their anxiety disorder, and I certainly won’t judge anyone who has gone that route, I have chosen not to. I have done well to rely on my gut instinct over the years and everything in me tells me that to chemically mess with the crazy, I risk damaging the creativity. I am convinced that it all wells up from the same place.
I realize that calling it crazy isn’t politically correct, but I’ve lived with it long enough that I get to call it what I like.
Day in, day out I am worrying about things I can’t change and trying to control their outcome. If I don’t have something to worry about, I will make something up. Thankfully, I have a strong-willed wife who will apply the brakes when my mentally distracted driver starts veering all over the road. When that annoying kid in my head attempts to draw her into a no-win pointless ‘what-if’ discussion, she is fond of sighing and saying “tell your little friend I’m not playing today.”
One particular quirk that comes with this genetic misfiring of chemicals in the grey matter is that I’m acutely aware of the passage of time. While some may think they have all the time in the world, I’m under no such illusion. I know it could all end in ten years, in twenty, or tomorrow. That awareness factors into many decisions I make, especially in the past few years. Funny how your early forties will do that to you.
On our recent vacation to Vegas, it is this awareness that prompted Shonna and I to charter a biplane to take us on a tour over the Hoover Dam and to decide over lunch that we were going skydiving for the first time the very next day. While I’m all too often guilty of having to plan everything and worrying about the future, it was worry about regret that allowed me to seize the moment, which made the experiences much more rewarding. It also laid the foundation for the ones we’ll have tomorrow.
There is tremendous freedom in making choices, both personal and professional, if you imagine viewing them from the end of your life. If lying on my deathbed, would I look back on the choices I’m making today and wished I’d done them differently? This is, however, a cautionary tale. The choices we make for ourselves, when approached from that perspective, will undoubtedly alienate and disappoint some friends, family, mentors and others with whom we are connected. But, those people see our lives from their perspective. They don’t usually see that if we attempted to place the same restrictions or demands on them, they would resent it.
This is not an endorsement of shirking responsibility to your loved ones or those you care about. But just as you choose to make yourself accountable to certain people, they are accountable to you as well. Part of that accountability is allowing each other to make your own choices, good or bad, whether you agree with them or not. One look at social media on any given day, and it’s easy to see that most people don’t walk that talk, your choices and opinions only valid if they happen to be the same ones they’re making. Share or like if you agree.
Accounting for available evidence, we each only get one shot at life. While an unpopular view, I don’t believe in heaven or hell. If there is something after this life, I don’t think we can comprehend it in this existence and I certainly don’t believe we are meant to spend this life focused on it. One person’s belief in their meaning and purpose may be entirely different than that of the person next to them, and both may be right. I believe that you can live a good life and choose not to hurt other people without it being about a reward at the end. If this timeline is all we get, it makes sense to get the most out of it.
If I have been going through a midlife crisis (evaluation, introspection, change of life, etc.), then I believe 2013 is the year I started coming out the other side, and not only was the whole difficult painful experience necessary for growth, it was incredibly freeing. If the next year follows the same course, I am excited for what’s coming, and I’m looking forward to it.
Anthony Hopkins – Portrait
My latest painting of the character William ‘Bill’ Parrish, played so brilliantly by Sir Anthony Hopkins in the film, ‘Meet Joe Black.’
I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy painting characters from movies, rather than just the actors who play them. The primary reason is that I believe I can know characters, but despite what the tabloids would have us believe, I don’t know the actors who play them. When Anthony Hopkins was filming ‘The Edge’ here in Canmore, however, he had a reputation of treating everyone he met with kindness and sincerity and is remember fondly around here, so I must confess, this one was also about painting the actor, simply because I like him and his work.
Meet Joe Black is a loose remake of ‘Death Takes a Holiday.’ Anthony Hopkins plays the role of Bill Parrish, a very wealthy man of character and presence who finds himself reluctantly playing tour guide for Death, played by Brad Pitt. Knowing he is about to die and not having any real idea of how long he has to make peace with it, Hopkins expertly runs the gamut of emotions, with the character sworn to secrecy but trying to say his goodbyes, nonetheless.
The movie received mixed reviews, with criticisms that it was too long (the run time is just under 3 hours) and that it dragged in places. As it is one of my favorite films, and I frequently disagree with critics, I’ve watched this movie a few times and have never been disappointed. I believe the story lends itself to the slower pace and the movie contains a wealth of well played characters brought to life by a very talented cast.
For this portrait, I watched the film again and made notes in different places where the emotion of the character touched me most and I settled on six different possible references. In the end, it came down to two, the final scene with Parrish dressed in a tux at his birthday party, or the scene when he is finally committed to accept his fate and tells Death that he is ready. I chose the latter.
I thoroughly enjoyed this painting, listened to the musical score a few times while working on it and I was sorry to see it end, knowing I could have spent another week nitpicking every little detail and still not wanting to put it away. But to quote Bill Parrish in his final line of the film. “Well that’s life. What can I tell you?”
For those artists who always like to know the technical details, the final size for this image is 15″X20″ at 300ppi. Painted on a Wacom Cintiq 13HD and a Wacom Cintiq 24HD in PhotoshopCC. Photos were only used for reference and the painting consists entirely of brush work. No textures or photos were used in this image. As for how long it took, I didn’t keep track, but I would guess about 10-15 hours.
Cajun – A Portrait
This is another commissioned piece, a portrait of Cajun who sadly passed away earlier this year. She lived a long life and the family wanted a painting to remember her. I had plenty of reference photos to choose from, but only one or two that I felt would work well for the painting and thankfully the family agreed with the pose I chose. This painting goes to proof this week and once everything looks the way I’d like, it will be printed as a 15″X20″ canvas giclée with a black shadowbox frame. I don’t mind saying that I always get a little teary eyed when I finish these memorial paintings, which to me means I did my job.
Photoshop Brush Maintenance
The other day I found myself wanted to do a little housekeeping with my Photoshop brushes, and I figured I’d share some thoughts. I won’t be teaching anything about how to create brushes in Photoshop here as I’ve already detailed all of that in both of my DVDs, an article I wrote for Photoshop User Magazine and in a webinar or two that I recorded for Wacom. Creating Photoshop brushes is an easy topic to find online and I would encourage anyone who wants to paint digitally to learn how to create and customize your own brushes.
Brush Hoarding
With an almost limitless supply of free brush sets online, digital artists of all levels seem to have a habit of downloading anything they can find on the off chance that one day; they might have use for the Valentine’s Day Zombie Cupid Brush Set.
I’ve seen artists who not only have hundreds of brush sets at the ready, most of which they’ve looked at once, but also those who have a hundred or more brushes in the set they use every day, most of those going untouched as well. Before downloading a brush set, ask yourself if you’re really going to use it.
Stamp or Paint
There are two main brush types that I’ve come across and both have their uses. The first are stamp brushes. Usually it’s the type of brush that is meant to be tapped onto an image just like a stamp. For my editorial cartoon work, my signature is a stamp brush. As I want my brand to be consistent, it is comprised of my editorial cartoon signature (different than my actual signature), and my website address. On every cartoon I’ve done for the last few years, my signature looks exactly the same because of this stamp brush and it’s the only stamp brush I use consistently.
Paint brushes on the other hand are ones intended to be used with a brush stroke. With a little imagination and experimentation, a well-crafted stamp can be turned into a versatile and powerful paint brush.
Brush Sets
Some of the free downloads out there are really great. You can find specific sets for holidays, environments, themes, moods, and weather. I’ve spent many hours exploring brush sets over the years. As time went on, however, I found that less is more and I pretty much stick to one brush set, most of which I designed myself.
Here’s the set I started with and what it looked like after I was done editing. Some were even duplicates, although I don’t know how I managed that. Some look like duplicates but because of different settings, the brush stroke is very different, even if the stamp doesn’t reveal that. To clean them up, I just went through them one by one and asked myself how often I really used a brush. If the answer was ‘almost never’ then I deleted it.
I still have and use other brush sets from time to time. For example, I have a brush set that is just snowflakes, another that is just leaves, and yet another that is just lightning stamps. But I use them very rarely, so while those brushes are not part of my main set, they’re still worth keeping. What you see here, however are the brushes I rely on every day.
Grouping Brushes
Because I like to keep my tool and brush palettes clean and out of the way, I don’t worry too much about naming my brushes because I only view them as small thumbnails. I do, however, like to have them grouped so that I don’t have to test a brush each time I grab it to make sure it’s what I want. If they’re grouped together, I have a good idea what any brush is going to do when I choose it. Here’s how mine are grouped.
Why I Don’t Share Brushes
I’ve been asked innumerable times to provide my brush set for people and the answer is always No. It’s not that I have any magic brushes; it’s just that you will learn a lot more by creating your own than by using ones other artists have created. The main brush I use for painting, however, is one you already have if you use Photoshop. It’s a default and is my favorite painting brush, the one you see in the next image. In articles and videos, I’ve also shown how to make my hair brushes, but don’t be fooled. Having the tools is completely different than knowing how to use the tools. You only get that from experience and you only get experience by painting.
Experimentation and Discovery
While this panel may look complicated, it’s not. The best way to find out how everything works is to experiment with the different settings and paint on a blank page while doing it. I actually use much less than half of the options available to me in this panel because the way I paint doesn’t require all of the bells and whistles. My brushes are pretty simple.
Cleaning up this brush set took well over two hours because I kept experimenting with ways to make each brush better and I enjoyed playing around with the possibilities.
One brush, however, kept crashing Photoshop, and I have no idea why. Every time I tried to work with it, Photoshop CC died on me. The first time it happened, I lost about 20 minutes work because I hadn’t saved the new brush set. Happened three times before I realized it was the brush itself, and I ended up deleting it entirely and avoided any further crashes. It takes very little time to save the set after each brush change. Get in the habit of doing that when you’re working with brushes. Save the brush, save the set.
Final Note
There are so many ways to paint digitally. Some artists seek to emulate traditional media and do so with great skill. Others paint in ways that traditional artists would find completely confusing. Everybody has their own way of doing it and designing your own brushes can often spark ideas for paintings and images that you might not have considered had you simply downloaded somebody else’s tools.
Less is more, so if you have 100 brushes in your main brush set, see if you can’t whittle that down to 50. Keep the old set on your computer and save to a new set so you can always go back and retrieve any you wish you’d kept. Create new brushes, make changes to old ones, keep them organized and never be afraid to improve on the old standbys and eventually you’ll wind up with a brush set that is uniquely yours.