I’m a huge fan of Nightmare. I have a boatload of collectors memorabilia in the studio and boxed away. Most never opened. I don’t usually do fan art but after the nudge of a respected friend I took some time over the holidays to put my thoughts to paint.

I finally got around to adding the gallery app to the site. It’s a straight forward app built using Django obviously, but specifically it’s using the lastest version of imagekit and Amazon S3 for storage…

I’ve made the switch over to painter12 for most of my illustration work. I do switch back to photoshop for tasks that Painter can’t handle. I had purchased Painter11 a few years ago but didn’t use it. It was painfully slow. The new version is a substantial upgrade…

I’m excited to announce that “Cheesehead”, the painting of Aaron Rodgers was accepted into the Macworld | iWorld Digital Art Gallery at the 2012 Macworld Expo, January 26-28th.

I have had requests for larger prints than 8×10 of “Pudding Pops”; Bill Cosby. The other night I fired up Painter 12 and repainted him in high resolution.

This is a painting done in Painter 12 and Photoshop as a personal project that I worked on over the Thanksgiving holiday. I drug my feet on this for ages until my friend Rogie gave me a virtual kick in the ass to get it finished.

Trying to catch up on posts. Never have the time to devote to it.
“Abby’s Song”, as I have dubbed this drawing was a commission for a friend and his wife. This piece was done in graphite on bristol board using mostly 0.05 mechanical pencils with varying leads from 4B to 4H.

Continuing with the NFL project, this is number five and my halfway point. Aaron Rodgers.

Cranking along on this project with a painting of Frank Gore. This is number four of ten and I’m about to finish number five which I’ll probably post after the weekend. Happy Friday!

Maurice Jones Drew of the Jaguars is number three in this series. I’m way into number four and delayed showing this one because I was working on the screencast that a bunch of people have requested I do. Special thanks to my brother, Tucker, for his help in editing the screencast.

I already mentioned about the Faces of the NFL project and the secrecy associated with it.
This is painting number two in the series (of ten). Drew Brees. It’s been a challenge to try and keep the paintings a loose as possible while still staying within my style. (A client request)

I’m working on a client project and can’t say too much about it for obvious reasons. I can however show some progress as I go along. This is number one in the series; Tom Brady. It’s been a challenge to try and keep the paintings a loose as possible while still staying within my style. (A client request)

Go ahead. Say it! PUDDING POPS!!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I moved the site over to Virb last month and didn’t want to post until the designs are done and I can make this space look nice but too much awesome is going on.

Most people know me as a “Devigner” (developer + designer) or “Hybrid” doing design and development with Django. One of the things I wanted to do this year was exit my comfort zone and push my personal limits. I haven’t really done any digital painting before and was never really comfortable with my Wacom Intuos4.

Value study painted in Photoshop for a course I’m doing in the evenings with the excellent Paul Moyse

This is a fun illustration I’ve been working on since Friday night. I saw Zed Shaw was looking for some art for the cover of his book “Learning Python the Hard Way” and thought I’d give it a shot. Special thanks to Idan Gazit and Bryan Veloso for keeping me in check during the early sketch phases. You guys rock!

I’m planning out a painting for my son of a chimpanzee. He’s fascinated by monkeys. This is one of the studies from the sketchbook.

This is just a quick doodle I was working on in my Moleskine last weekend. I blocked in the color for the horns with colored pencil and then abandoned it. I probably won’t take this much further but may do as a finished piece in gouache/watercolor at a later date.

Friday (June 11th), I made a public announcement on Twitter
and Facebook about some news that has dramatically changed my life for the better and a lot of friends immediately asked me for more context. I started to write this narrative in great detail and then decided to just keep it a little more simple. Sorry if it’s still too long of a read!

If memory serves me well, around age eight or nine I was told by my parents that I had been adopted at birth. My childhood was good. I cannot complain in that department but there has always been something missing. I think there’s a blood bond that needs to be reconnected. As far back as I can remember, I wondered about my birth mother. Things like, where I got my artistic abilities and more importantly, did she think about me. Was she that nice woman running the register in the checkout line?

Since relocating my family to Charlotte, North Carolina, in August of ’09 I haven’t had much time (or desire) to go out and shoot. There has been too much going on and workload has blocked the enthusiasm for photography. Yesterday morning the bug to shoot got the best of me and I immediately grabbed my tripod and camera and jumped in the Jeep. Oddly, I did not go straight to this property which is only three miles from my home. Instead, I drove a 25 mile loop only to end up here.

Since posting this picture of my son Brodey on Flickr many months ago, I have received a lot of emails asking how I did the post work. Many people think it’s HDR, some say it’s got the Dave Hill feel to it.

I will go through my recipe in detail. It’s not a hard process. It’s something I’ve refined to work for me and over time, it’s become second nature. I have even used it on landscapes with great success. A lot of this works better with higher contrast images and good lighting (not that I’m great at lighting).