Ideas and Thoughts
small quick posts
-
oil pastel boat
oil pastel pinterest study; i bought a pack of much firmer pastels and did the whole under drawing with those, and then layered the thick opaque pastels on top, and it really worked well!
-
wyrmsketch
metallic and shimmer watercolours plus fountain pen
-
Oil pastel dragon riding team
really love the colour palette i achieved here! not sure the drawing was strong enough to support it though, and the canvas was definitely too small for me at the level of precision in comfortable with right now. in the end i called this off before feeling 100% satisfied, but that’s simply the nature of exploratory work and no harm done. as i said, still very proud of this colour scheme!
-
Three Pine Grosbeaks
my latest oil pastel experiment is this painting of three pine grosbeaks, referencing a CC0 photograph shared as part of an observation on inaturalist.
this one was created on illustration board, with a full under painting in watercolor first, which you can see in the third image. The illustration board texture has a wonderful grain and could be a very satisfying surface for oil pastel, but it tends to warp pretty dramatically when painted on with water-based media. you can see any image on the right how much it has bowed out while wet; what you can’t see is that it has an inverse warp in it once dried. clamping it down to draw on it released some but not all of it. unfortunately this means it’s just not a good solution for anything with a watercolor under painting.
inaturalist has been a really exciting thing for me to explore, and once I discovered that you can search observations by image license I got really excited. if you’re also looking for reference, especially of specific animals, it might be a great place to start.
-
oil pastel sweat bee
I painted this one on sanded paper, the much admired pastelmat type, and found it desperately unintuitive. The grippy surface could be nice, but it’s completely unabsorbant, and i found myself unable to layer the way I’m used to on rag papers, or honestly even on wood. that said, you really can blend infinitely on this stuff, so if that’s your jam you might get more out of it than i did!
Subject-wise this is based on my own photograph from a recent roadtrip, and it was a delight to get to zoom in on something I shot myself and try translating it into oil pastel! I’ve been playing more and more with macro lenses and extreme depth of field, and have been meaning for a while to experiment with translating that effect into paint of some kind of another.
That said, abstracting, blurring, and softening things is both really easy to do with oil pastel and really tricky to add nuance to. I can see some places in here where the effect is really landing, and others where things feel almost into only two planes, rather than the three or more I’d like to have had throughout. So, much to learn down this path, but I’m excited to keep going with it!
-
macro fishbowl asters
i have been having a lot of fun making some intentionally messy photos with clip-on macro lenses on my cellphone camera, and trying more and more to get the blown out, bokeh’d background to be a more intentional element. this one feels like it’s showing me some potential!
Latest Proper Posts
longer reads and bigger looks
-
Sun through the Forest in oil pastel
Presenting: this huge oil pastel painting I created this past August! It’s nearly two feet tall, painted in a variety of brands of oil pastel on stonehenge cotton rag paper, with an underpainting in watercolour. I created it based on photos i’d taken while on a roadtrip around the great lakes through Canada and the…
Concept Art
my portfolio of visual development for video and tabletop games
-
Environment Design for Unannounced Solarpunk Game
Environment design exploring the possibility of using asset store models to populate the level without losing the worldbuilding and colour design. Created as a thorough guide for the level designer, including labelled assets and isolated colour palette information. We started with thumbnails painted from level blockout exploration to choose a location to build up: The…
-
Blue Sky Environment Concept for unannounced solarpunk game from Peculiar Path
-
Four Solarpunk Character Designs
-
Four Kingdoms of Creature Adventurer Character Designs
-
Proof of Concept Artwork created for Solarpunk project with Peculiar Path Games
-
Retro Sci-Fi Vignettes for WisCon
-
Character Design – Low Poly Medieval NPCs
-
Low Poly Environment Designs – Bakery
-
Light Fingers Player Character Design Process
Teaching
writing about teaching art, history and games
-
What I’ve Learned About Teaching Art
I’ve had the privilege of teaching art in a variety of environments – from still life oil painting at the college level, to combining art with science and history in a museum setting, to guiding highschool students through creating a comics anthology. Through these very different settings, I’ve found a list of constants that, when…
-
Gaming at the Museum – Combining Gaming with Crafts, Museum Collections and Storytelling
-
Gaming at the Museum – Writing Campaigns following Rostam’s Seven Trials
-
Gaming at the Museum – Building a Setting from the Shahnameh
-
Gaming at the Museum – Playing Dungeon World with 9-12y/os – Part 2
-
Gaming at the Museum – Playing Dungeon World with 9-12y/os – Part 1
-
Gaming at the Museum – Introduction!
Pocket Dungeons
system agnostic tabletop rpg adventures – with accessories!
-
The Ghost Houses of Phylinecra – Pocket Dungeon Zine & Pocket Pack
The Ghost Houses of Phylinecra is a system-agnostic, story-heavy dungeon crawl about a community recovering after disaster, and how a goddess might try to understand mortal grief. The village of Phylinecra was a tight-knit community of artists and creatives, until it suffered a devastating flood. In the aftermath, as the survivors try to salvage their…
Comics
webcomics and zines, many free to read in full
-
The Listening Station
This short four-coloured risograph comic is a tribute to finding new music back when we had to go into a record store to do so. Set in the world of Lomy in the Abyss, which you can read on WealdComics.com
-
By Crom! – Life Advice from Conan the Barbarian
By Crom! is a joke-a-panel autobio webcomic featuring life advice from the ever-practical, mighty-thewed Conan the Barbarian. It ran online from 2012-2014 and was collected into a book in 2016 thanks to amazing support on Kickstarter! As it ran, the art style changed significantly. Below you can read the original run of the webcomic for…
-
The Great Eeldragons of Penx Short Comic
My comic for 1001 Knights, The Great Eeldragons of Penx. Swipe through to read the whole short comic.
Photography
taking and writing about photography
-
Your Cellphone Camera’s Digital Processing Settings and You
I am mad about cellphone cameras hiding the processing they do to my photos, and I am glad about software I found that lets me control it and opt in and out.