This is not the final painting as some of you may think. In painting there is a stage in between sketching the sketch in pencil on the canvas and actually painting in color. The reason for an underpainting in one color thinnned with gamsol is to lay out the value structure so that it is easier to get the right darkness or lightness and the right shade of the colors. The underpainting is to a painting as a sketch is to a darawing. I got this far by ditching the square-by-square grid system halfway through and sketching in the rest freehand so that I could get that initial sketch stage over with faster, while still having a decent sketch. Now that i have the underpainting done all I have to do is paint it with the actual oil paint in colors, which is painted over this after it has dried.

I have made some progress...on the upper left hand corner it is not as dark at the top as the middle at the top, that is bothering me....the rest I think is fine, except I am not sure he wanted so many clouds...I could not have just one, it would not look natural.

I finished this painting in about a day actually. i got tired of it being in my basement and I hate prolonged projects that iw ork on a littel here or there. i like to get something done all at once or quickly then move on to a new project. Here the picture is about 3/4 done.

 TOTALLY IGNORE THE STUFF BELOW THIS BECAUSE THERE"S ANOTHER PICTURE I AM GOING TO PUT BACK AFTER THIS ONE GETS OLD. AS YOU CAN SEE I HAVE ADDED SOME THINGS TO THE PAINTING!

This was based on my perfume I had that had each of four elements air fire water earth, and I had a project in drawing class I did this for and I think the object of the project was to blow something up to a large size. These perfume vials were probably an inch tall and the faces personifying the element were added by my own creative inspiration. I think I got A or 100% on every art thing I ever did until I went to Fort hayes in 11th grade for commercial art where I got my first B in art!

 IGNORE THE STUFF BELOW THIS FOR NOW. THIS IS THE FINISHED PAINTING...BUT I STILL MAY FIX THE HAMMOCK I THINK AS A FINISHING TOUCH.

This I did in 9th grade or before. It was done in a CCAD Saturday morning art class. It is a watercolor, and I spent extensive time on it, especially compared to what most other people spent on theirs. I made more use of my breaks in a lot of art classes, sometimes being antisocial because people weren't very nice and sometimes because they weren't really serious about art and I was. Looking at some of my old art, I am not really surprised I find myself into the gothic subculture. They alwys set up weird still lifes and you could pick which thing you wanted to focus in on and in what way. This may have been my first technically good watercolor, which is a tough medium for me generally but I was a lot more experimental in earlier days.

I do not think I did this in Saturday morning art classes but I could be wrong. I think I did it in a middle school art class in about 6th grade. It is acrylic I think, and it was on some kind of weird board-like material. I remember this painting being the one that taught me the lesson that instead of painting the sky after the subject in front of it, I should from now on lay it on first. my art teacher told me that. I remember agreeing hesitantly that she was right although I did not want her to be. Painting sky around pine is no easy task when you have to go around the pine needles. You can also see my inexperience in the random paint thickness and thinness where I painted too thin or too thick. I was a drawer long before I was a painter. The impressionism was never intentional. My early paintings all look impressionistic failing at realism. And if you are wondering, yes I have always been good at crititique-ing my own, and others' artwork.

The drawn self portrait is from 9th drade drawing class and the lion paintings were done for 9th grade painting class where we had to use...analogous, and some other term, of color. You had to use colors opposite each other on the color wheel that were complimentary. I did not like the concept at all because I hated excercises and favored realism. I enjoyed choosing my subject. All of my work was done from photographs early on, and not real life...I had not been taught "real-life is always better than simply sopying photos" yet. No one was that serious. Art teachers challenge their students at an appropriate level. The watercolor with the girl and the boa was done from a model in CCAD art class. That early on we only had models sometimes. Having a model come in was special. The other work that is cartoons, well I have to say that I was always drawing cartoons that were done in a disney style early on. I drew as in disney movies, not saturday morning cartoons. I drew mostly princesses when i was little, but also I always had halloween-themed work...I was always drawn to anything mystical or magical, I LOVED things that were like that. Most of my life I have been discouraged from drawing from imagination and I always have aimed for as much accuracy and realism in everything as I can manage, but accuracy and realism depends on reality and the subject. Start with disney cartoons, and end up with your own disney cartooning style. People noticed I had talent because of that probably. I gotta give props to Disney.:)