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Clark Allen, a demo from my sketching class last year.
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Yellow headed bird. Watercolor on hot press paper.

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Profile in gouache
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Fun with gouache.
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Stream in Angeles Crest Forest. Watercolor.

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Color Concepts 1 day Workshop and Sketching from Life 10 week course.

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If you're in the LA area and want to refine your color and drawing skills, you're welcome to join me for a couple of upcoming events.

On Saturday April 26th I'll be giving an all day workshop on color theory for subjects of all kinds including landscape, figurative and entertainment design. Here's what we'll cover:

• The fundamentals of color theory for painters and digital artists.
  
• The emotional impact of various color combinations to create mood and environment.
• Principles for organizing the complexities of color into pleasing harmonies.
• Color exploration exercises.
• Painting from a costumed model.

Also coming soon is my 10 week sketching from life course. It will be held each Monday night from 7 to 10 pm starting on May 12th. For this class we'll study the head, figure, drapery, costume, animals and still life as well as a weekend field trip to study landscape painting. Charcoal, watercolor and ink will be demonstrated though students will be welcome to use the medium of their choice.

To enroll contact the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art at 877 LA-Atelier. Their site is www.laafa.org.

Hope to see you soon.

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Bridesmaid
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Back lit trees. Watercolor and gouache on hot press illustration board; done at home in the studio. To see my on location stuff you can click the landscape sketchbook link.
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I've made an honest effort to read the literary classics. I even made it a third of the way through Ulysses. But the genre I always end up coming back to is science fiction. Especially "hard sf"; science fiction that allows any leap of the authors imagination within the boundaries of plausible science. What great fun to read about distant corners of the universe, the far future or explorations of the here and now that are not just flights of fancy. They could in some way really happen.
Here are some writers who do it particularly well:

• Larry Niven (Mote in God's Eye is a must)
• Greg Bear ( The Forge of God and especially it's sequel Anvil of Stars are excellent)
• David Brin
• Gregory Benford
• Dave Wolverton (I can hardly believe that On My Way to Paradise was the first novel he wrote)
• Orson Scott Card (not necessarily "hard" but you'll never hear me complain)
• Stanislaw Lem ( you may have read Solaris, but try Fiasco)
  
• John Brunner ( A Maze of Stars takes an interesting look at where we are and what we're up to a hundred thousand years in the future)
• Vernor Vinge ( A Fire Upon the Deep may be the best space opera you'll ever read)
• Michael Swanwick (Stations of the Tide)

I could go on and on but how about you? I'd love it if you'd leave a comment with your favorite Sf authors and books.
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I get a kick out of reading some such then splashing some paint around to make a scene inspired by what I read. The above are a few examples.

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We've begun our head painting class. Though we mostly use oils, I'm encouraging students to do much smaller, quicker studies like this one for practice outside of class.

Practice, practice.

This is watercolor with opaque white. To see the setup and colors I use for these, go to the landscape sketchbook link and scroll down to the very first post.

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.This one brings back good memories of sitting out on the shore sketching birds.
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Clark Allen 1925-2008

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Clark Allen passed away last week. He was a delightful man and a favorite subject for local artists, especially me. I started drawing and painting Clark in '92 when I first moved to LA and have been working with him off and on ever since. I have stacks of drawings and paintings of him that I will scan and post here from time to time.

He lived a more colorful life than many of us can hope for, (I thought his stories were tall tales until I visited his home and we looked through his old photo albums) and it was my pleasure to get to know him. He will be missed.
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Nicole. 40 minute charcoal drawing on newsprint.
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I put together this demo page for this Saturday's composition workshop. We'll call it a sneak preview.

So many watercolor books show you how to create amazing techniques filled with "a free spirit" but contain little information about pictorial composition. A well designed composition will look good in any medium, even if you mess up the technique.
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Composition 1 day workshop and 10 week head painting course

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If you're in the LA area and want to refine your composition and painting skills, you're welcome to join me for a couple of upcoming events.

Next Saturday Jan 26th I'll be giving a workshop on pictorial composition for subjects of all kinds including landscape, figurative and entertainment design. Here's what we'll cover:

• Lectures on the fundamentals of effective picture making.
• Discussions on the creation of mood and environment.
• Principles for organizing complex scenes into pleasing arrangements.
• Strategies for solving compositional problems quickly and effectively.
• Composition exploration exercises.
• Painting from a costumed model.

Also coming soon is my 10 week head painting course. It will be held each Monday night from 7 to 10 pm starting on February 4th.

To enroll contact the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art at 877 LA-Atelier. Their site is www.laafa.org.

Hope to see you soon.

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Dad's orange last week; this week, Mom's flowers.
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Orange. Watercolor.

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My dad is an avid gardener and grower of fruit and nut trees. Here in California the oranges ripen around Christmas time. Well, this one small tree, after a great deal of tlc produced one single orange which I memorialized in this sketch.

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Happy Holidays!! Best wishes to all of you.

This is something I painted for "Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron". Copyright DreamWorks Animation SKG.

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Some photoshop production work this week.

After creating several traditionally animated films at the DreamWorks Glendale campus, Shark Tale was our first effort at cg animation. Our goal was to create underwater environments rich with color and light. These are three of my paintings for the "whalewash" location.

Acknowledgements to the outstanding Art directors and artists who set the stage: Sam Michlap, Seth Engstrom, Armand Baltazar, Teng Heng, Zhaoping Wei and many others.

Copyright DreamWorks Animation SKG.

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Mark Snyder. Compressed charcoal on rives lightweight paper.

We've been drawing Mark in head drawing class. As you can see, he has great features to study from.
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These are a few of many "color keys" I did for Shrek the Halls. Their purpose is to establish the mood and lighting of each location in the show.
Copyright Dreamworks animation SKG.
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Happy Thanksgiving from me and the "Shrek the Halls" crew. Shrek the Halls is a half hour TV special about Shrek's first Christmas with his family. It's an absolute gem and I think people will watch it with their kids year after year just like the Grinch or Charlie Brown's Christmas. It will be on the abc network on Nov. 28 and again on Dec. 11. Check your listings for local times. We developed the show here in Glendale and I followed it through production at our Bay area campus in Redwood city.
Here's an image of Shrek out chopping wood as the seasons change and head toward the Holidays. It's painted in photoshop. The image is copyrighted by DreamWorks animation SKG.

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.Mark, demonstration with charcoal.

A note about the process here. I show these elaborate line drawings that end up getting completely covered over by the tonal work. This is done intentionally as an exercise for students. Invariably, beginners carefully render parts of the anatomy but are far less careful about relating those parts to each other. (You've seen those drawings that look like a bumpy sack of walnuts.) In class we start with careful construction drawings that force students to properly fit each part of the anatomy into the whole head. Having done plenty of the bumpy, poorly constructed heads myself, I forced myself to use this method and got much improved results. That being said, for my current tonal drawings I do the line drawing quickly and lightly. Not nearly as refined as you see here but with the idea in mind. I hope these drawings make clear how the construction lines can help wrap the light and shadow around the whole head for a solid three dimensional effect.

You can see more demos if you scroll down to August of 2006.
Happy drawing!

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I've just started teaching my head drawing class so here's a new charcoal drawing for this week. I'll also be posting a few demos in upcoming weeks among other things.
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HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

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This is something I did for my head painting class way back when I was studying at Art Center in Pasadena. I remember this one fondly because after several completely disastrous paintings, I finally started to understand how to control color and value.
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This is a place I visited last Christmas, north of the Great Salt Lake. As always, more travel sketches can be seen at the land sketch link.
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Nightscape
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Another watercolor demo for my sketching class to reference. This one doesn't use any gouache, just some masking fluid to protect the white paper for the flower.
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.This is my demo from this weeks class. Posted as a reference for the students but I hope the rest of you like it too.
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Susan, watercolor sketch.
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Upcoming classes and workshops

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If you're in the LA area and would like to join me for a class or workshop, we have three events coming up.
My next 10 week course is head drawing, starting on Monday, October 22, 7-10 pm.
I'm doing an all day color workshop with lectures, slide shows and painting from a costumed model on Saturday, Oct 27, 10am-6pm.
And Soonest, I'm giving a talk we're calling "From Student to Professional and Beyond" on Monday, Oct 15, 7-9:30 pm. It's for any student or professional artist seeking improvement and will cover the skills, tools, workspace, attitudes and habits of of the successful working artist. I've been working hard on this presentation so I'm gunna go out on a limb and guarantee there'll be at least one thing in it that will make it worth your time and effort. Contact the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art at (877) MY-LAAFA, www.laafa.org. Hope to see you soon.

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Fun with gouache.
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Adrienne. Watercolor on arches cold pressed paper.
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.Stag beetle
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Plaster cast. Watercolor on arches cold press paper.
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Warthan Canyon tree on highway 198 in central California. Watercolor.

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My time at PDI/Dreamworks in Redwood City has come to a close. It's back to LA for my wife and I. We loved the area and the studio, especially the PDI art department. You'll never meet a more solid group of artists. These are the people who designed the Shrek world and Madagascar and I got alot out of my time with them.
This gouache sketch was done from the back parking lot of the studio building at sunset. To see more sketches from around the studio at lunch breaks and such, click the Land Sketch link.
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I continue to sketch the waterfowl here in the bay area. I'll post more of those later. This one was done in the studio.
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Here's another acrylic painting from a life drawing session. This was done during the same time and circumstances mentioned in the the last post.
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