progressions.

I'm always interested in progressions, from one piece leading to the next and the next, and so on.

Here's the view from one corner of a cover I've had the privilege of working on the past few weeks.

From the rough to final. The request was an old, alabaster burial mask. Should be worn and basically like a statue.

Le Morte D'Arthur

Recently Justin was commissioned to create two painting for Advance Composite Materials, the leading manufacturers of Silicon Carbide Whiskers and Microwave Absorbent Ceramics, for their conference room.

He's been documenting some of the creation process over on his blog.

The first post for the first piece is up.

Be sure and check back as I believe he'll be on a daily updating schedule.

cooked apple. redux.

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I liked this idea from a few days ago and wanted to paint it.

It's also been a while since I've had the time to do just an honest to goodness watercolor.

The painting is on a stray sheet of Fabriano I found in the corner.

Happy Fall.

"La Nuit Observateur" or, The Night Watcher.

I've stumbled upon a few new painting techniques that I feel will be very valuable in the coming months.

I'm pleased with this one for a few reasons:

One, it came together over two nights work. Two, the drawing and the painting I feel gain a nice level. Three, it reminded a friend of Mononoke-hime, or Princess Mononoke and he thought it wouldn't look too out of place in that universe.

I'll take that and interpret it as a compliment.

But to tell you the truth, I spent all my energies on the top and middle and sort of neglected the trees. Oh well. It's foggy. You can engineer an answer to any failure in action, right? Yikes.

LCS interview

I was recently interviewed by the good folks over at the Little Chimp Society.

Click the link and check out my answers to their fine questions.

5 monsters, X, and moving on.

Just pulled all these together last night. Thought I'd share. The one in the top most left is as far as that one is getting. It wasn't so great an idea as much as I drew a head I liked and couldn't get the rest of it on par. But, here it is all the same.

These have been painted over last month. I started sometime in August and got all these together in about a month, month and a half.

It's fun for me to see the progression. I've learned a ton doing these last few ones. But now it's time to move on to my next personal project.

The idea for this next personal project was directly inspired by this song, "Walters."

Just a note, there's a little language at the beginning of the video but the song is what is amazing. In the coming weeks I'll begin posting progress. I hope you enjoy.

updated.

I've cleaned up a few of the links on my side bar. It's been a while coming. Here's what's new:

We've got Chris' new site/blog Brother-in-law at large.

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Aaron's photoblog, photographer extraordinaire and all around polymath.

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Mark Johnson, the Lord of the Internets and WMD's blog

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and I've fixed the link to Jared's blog.

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Also, here's my RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LightNightRains

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Almost relatedly, here's a nice little thing from my buddies Joffre and Andy over at Silver Chair, a free subscription to their "Revenant Culture" zine.


I've seen a few of these laying around the office here and they look nice. I'll be sure and be getting my free ones.

Take care!
Cory

Night Watcher

Here's another, that's for the time, I know I've said it before, so who knows for sure, but I'm sure we'll see, the last dragon piece I'll do for a little bit.

At least the last "serious" dragon piece. There's a few down the line that I'd like to do that are lighter in tone.

Here's a work in progress of a beast I like to think of as "the night watcher."

cooked apples.

In our conference room, we have a large dry erase board. It is handy for thinking out loud and jotting down notes during meetings.

Whenever I make a phone call I usually wander into the conference room and doodle on the board.

While on the phone this afternoon, I discovered a series of phases, one, two, and three. Phase three was blank so I filled it. I wasn't sure if the first two phases were anything important so I blurred them out for kicks.

sea dragon

Sea Dragon.

(detail)

Early versions.

another beast.

I don't know if I'll paint this one. I don't know if it's worth the time investment to paint.

I've got this sea dragon to get done by Monday and I almost feel like I got all the enjoyment of the thing out in this drawing.

I kind of feel like the painting would just be tedious. I don't know. We'll see.

Either way, one this is for dead certain : my fourteen year old self would be very, very proud of this drawing.

Illustration Friday: "Island"

Yet another monster piece. This time a sea dragon on a little island. The goal for this piece is to be done Monday, taking the weekend to paint.

I've been learning a ton with these past few pieces. You can see the others below :

Silence in Silene

St.George and the Dragon
The Waterbeast

PPF

"The Presidential Prizefight" is a client project we recently finished putting together over here. I had a hand in creating the background and ring, the line art for the t-shirts, and creating new art for a presidential coffee cup featuring only the most worthy contenders.

From the Portland blog, explaining the nature of this boxing game :

The interesting thing about this game is that it’s not just one person vs. the computer, it is everyone playing for Obama vs. everyone playing for McCain! The results have real-time impact on the game’s electoral map and game play. There are also fun facts throughout in order to increase your knowledge of the electoral college - how it works and why the battleground states are so important.

In case Zach didn’t already mention this, I think this is one of the first times that everyone at Portland had a hand in one project. Justin and Zach did all of the face and body animation. Cory did the background and the “Cheering Presidents Mug.” He also did the line art for the t-shirt, mugs, and stickers and Matt Mantooth created all of the products. Mantooth and Kammer worked on the design of the landing page, and of course Mark Johnson developed the game play. You would have to create an algorithm in order to figure out how many algorithms Johnson created for this game.

We just hope you have as much fun playing it as we did making it!

Play the game here.


Or, if you're just like that, here's the trailer.

Silence in Silene.

Silence in Silene.

From our friend, Wikipedia :

St. George and the Dragon.

In the fully-developed Western version, a dragon makes its nest at the spring that provides water for the city of Silene.

Consequently, the citizens must dislodge the dragon from its nest for a time, in order to collect water. To do so, each day they offer the dragon at first a sheep, and if no sheep can be found, then a maiden must go instead of the sheep. The victim is chosen by drawing lots. One day, this happens to be the princess. The monarch begs for her life with no result. She is offered to the dragon, but there appears the saint on his travels. He faces the dragon, protects himself with the sign of the cross, slays it and rescues the princess.

The grateful citizens abandon their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity.

Thanks to KWartist99 for the winning title!

detail.

Here is a detail of the finished piece. I'll post the complete painting tomorrow.

On a separate note, Erin and I finished the fourth season of The Office this evening. It really was perfect. I can't remember laughing as hard at a season. The third season was a little spoiled for me, we saw a few episodes on TV so some of the story points I already knew about. This fourth season I had no idea about anything. It was perfect.

I can't bear to watch live TV. I just can't. I get this terrible, terrible panicky feeling. It hasn't always been this way, mostly just since I became aware of my mortality. I also don't like vacations longer than a weekend. I guess three days tops. Maybe I'm hard to live with. I'm not sure. I just really like to work.

Anyway, we've tried to catch the couple of shows we like on TV but it epic fails. The best policy as far as I'm concerned in TV on DVD.

Long live box sets!

Waiting for season LOST season four... only 93 days left!

Illustration Friday: "Clutter"

I'm right at the end of painting my third monster piece.

Hopefully this is less of a cheap re-cap of this week's worth of posts and more of a ... well, no, I think it's a cheap re-cap, with an even worse line to tie it into today's I.F. topic.

Here goes : Monsters cluttering up your. Area? Landscape? Waterfalls, maybe? I'll clean them up for you.

I was invited to contribute to a "Dragons" anthology and have been getting work in order for that. More on that as information becomes available.

I've mentioned before about these three pieces are (tragically) a monument to my indecisiveness in that I started with one idea I wanted to do, missed it three times, but ended up finding enjoyment in the three new directions.

With out further ado, here's my dragons.

St. George and the Dragon.

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The Waterbeast.

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The yet untitled one. You're welcome to help name it.

This final one I got painted last night. I've got a furious weekend ahead of me. I've got to have this done by Monday morning. You may expect updates over the weekend and an unveiling of the completed piece sometime Monday.

And yeah, think up a good title? Comment it!

Cheers.

Cory

third and final

Since I missed posting yesterday I wanted to post something nice. Here's a big picture of a detail of what I'm working on tonight (and have been working on the past few nights)

I completed the drawing last night and I'll be painting it tonight.

Final.

St. George and the Dragon.

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(detail)

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The Waterbeast.

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(detail)

(detail)

Monday meeting notes.

It's been a while since I've posted my notes from our company meetings.

Without delay, here they are: