Winter Wonderland

This would be nicer as a printed card but time got away from me again this year. I hope there's a lot of it in 2010. Some years seem to have more in them than others.

These are the Thompson Ice Shelves with some holiday adornment. The thick ice shelves are left behind when the high tides recede. Then the ice slowly crumbles away without water underneath to support it. This is fun to watch especially during an aurora andrealis, or so Gnemo tells me. Here it is without the Christmas angels:

True Wind

Above is the newest thing I’ve done. It’s here because I thought it was time to post something fresh off of the easel. I did this for the Microvisions Show that Irene Gallo (art director at Tor Books) and Dan Dos Santos is putting together for the Society of Illustrators’ auction to benefit student scholarships. The show runs from June 4th to June 22nd at the Society of Illustrators Gallery 3. There will be an eBay link coming. Irene is certain to have a list of the artists participating in this on her blog.

This painting is a tiny 5X7" oil on gessoed pressboard. It’s the smallest I’ve ever done and it gave me a neck ache in the process of painting it. I was honored when asked to be part of this and I continue to be so. My neck, however, has changed and is much better now.

In my previous post I put up a little sketch of what I thought I'd paint but I changed my mind so I did some sketches. See below.

I liked the basic idea of this but the gesture wasn't quite right (above).


Here I think that I've improved the gesture. She feels like she's balancing now as she leans forward to help propel the airship on its way.


I started this painting somewhat late in the day, around 6 pm. This represents a little over an hour of work before the dinner bell rang. There is no drawing underneath this. I like to work directly in paint.

Chinese Gnemo

Wednesday I received several copies of Fantasy Art Magazine from Beijing, China that I did an interview for. They did an excellent job of printing my Gnemo paintings. I was pleasantly surprised to see a gatefold (fold out) for two paintings. Here are three pages from the magazine. You can, of course, see my Gnemo art on Gnemo's Art and Story but for the sake of novelty here they are with Chinese pictographs.



If you can read some of this feel free to tell me what it says. You're also welcome to make up something as long as it's clever. That's my real face there not the fake one I use for my blog. I like the way they used one of my airships as a bullet points.



I did a painting demo this week and on Friday I gave a talk and slideshow to a few hundred 4th and 5th graders -- oh, what a day that was. It exhausted me. I'm still tired. It's also possible that they infected me with their middle school germs. Cooties? More about this in my next installment.

Battleship!

Because I've done a few airship paintings people occasionally ask me to design some for them. My airships for Gnemo are based on what would be plausible for the level of technology of that world but with the expectations that that world, although obeying the same physics as ours, would still be different. For example they might have access to a strong lightweight material that is more difficult or too expensive to acquire on our planet.

However, when someone else ask me to design something they have their own rules. Sometimes the parameters are wider and sometimes they're narrower. Giant ironclad aircraft carrying battle-airships seem pretty impossible to me. I can't come up with a plausible explanation for it but then I avoid changing physical laws unless I call it magic. Because of that these airships could never fly in the world I invented. Actually, they won't fly anywhere because they weren't quite right. These were just quick sketches to see if I understood what was wanted. I didn't. (And that's why I can show them to you.) I was thinking too big.

Speaking of Gnemo, I've got a new post there. It's a bit more finished than this drawing: Gnemo's Sketchbook