From out the clutches of vulturous time

Once again, it has been quite a while.  Many things have happened since my last update; I turned 30, the world turned 2012... that's about it.  Nothing proceeds.  Stagnation reigns.  Pernicious lifehate drives me from one alcoholic stupor to the next,  Sometimes I paint.






A series of 5 that sucks in parts.  I like some of it.



A brief experiment with painting ink on wood, and a misguided exercise in wishful thinking.  I need to try painting on different wood surfaces, I like the background.


This one is weird.  The sketch was better.




At this point I got addicted to vignettes.  I'm still working with this circle thing,  Also arches.  These altars turned out alright.




Also I've been looking at a lot of old christian iconography.  I had another one of these but I ruined it.


More circles, plus the first time I've ever painted conifers.  It was fun, and I need to try this more.


Circles circles circles.


This is going to be used as album art this year, I believe.  At this point I got addicted to doing halos like this, and I expect to see many more in the near future.


Yep.


This is actually my favorite thing in a long time.  Radical direction change about half way through turned out quite well.  It impelled me to rekindle my old illustration project idea, which I am slowly working on now.

Yeah, so that's it.  Scant on description, sorry.  Life has a funny was of perpetually falling apart.  Walking into the sea looks more and more appealing every day.

It's only castles burning

It's officially been a long time since I posted anything new here.  I've been medium busy, medium drunk.  More drunk.  I haven't had it in me to paint much lately.  Pathetic.  Here's the last two odd month's worth of garbage.


Wandering Parnassus- Experimenting with this swamp effect.  Successful.  Also more of these half-timbered tudor style buildings.  Those are my favorite.


Blood on the Snow- I had this pot of white ink sitting around for ages.  I finally decided to try something with it, and promptly became enamored with the way it can layer.  I went off on a bit of a snow kick after this point.


The Wolf Throne- This is my favorite of these snow things.  I like the rangy legs of the wolf.  One of my favorite canids is the Maned Wolf, I think that shows a it whenever I paint a wolf of any kind.  Good proportions on those beasts.


The Harvest- I consider this a failure.  The proportions on everything here just hit my eye all wrong.


August Company- Next.


Unquiet Spirit- This is an idea I need to mess with a bit more.  This was a 9x12" page ruined by my inability to properly conceive an image before I start splattering the place with ink.  I just blacked the whole thing out and tried putting white over it.  It works.  I've got a few other pages that could use the cover-the-whole-fucking-thing-with-black treatment.


The Wolf Throne- I enlarged this in a fit of uninspired boredom.


The Struggler-  I was starting to get bored just doing snow over and over again.  It shows, because this just sucks.


Sword Bearer- I realized that I had never painted a moose.  Problem solved.  More swamp.  General success.


All Guardian Spirits, Revolt- An incomplete scan, because the thing is too big for the scanner bed.  I've got a few of these big watercolor blocks, but I very rarely put anything on them that I don't end up hacking to pieces with a sword.  This is alright.


The Wild Hunt- This would be better of there wasn't ONE thing that I see which is unfixable and a ghastly disproportion.  I won't point it out.


The March of the Doe Cult-  This was unwittingly painted on the cardboard backing of a watercolor block.  They don't intend that this cardboard be painted on, so this almost disintegrated.  Luckily it did not, because I enjoy it.


Death Throes- More on the block.  The complete thing looks a little better, because it's got more negative space. 


The Tower and the Hydra-  I picked up a small 6x6" block and I enjoy the hell out of it.  It's an odd dimension, I've never really worked in a square.  I've found that the size and shape of whatever I'm working on has a lot to do with how much I enjoy painting on it.


The Tower and the First Reckoning-  Second in the tower triptych.  This place has got all kinds of problems, obviously.


The Tower and the Onslaught from the Forces of the Earth-  I was going to do a whole shitload of these.  I still might.  I started getting mentally fixed on it though, which smashed my ability to be creative.  I've started to get a better grasp on the traps I lay for myself.  I spin out volumes in my head, I rely on an idea, I stop developing it and start expecting it to do all the work.  The end result is always the same, either the idea fades and I'm left with a bunch of half-complete garbage, or I keep banging away at something until I realize it's become a stagnant impulse that could go on forever.  So I cut this off at three.

So there's my meager two months.  It's black dog days for me, perpetually haunted by old ghosts.  The bottle kills them pretty well.  The creature's always been good for that.  It doesn't solve any of my problems, but it sure does make them shut the fuck up for awhile so I can get some sleep.

BEHOLD!

It's been a month, and I've managed to get back into form, after a few false starts, some grim failures, and some lessons learned.  This will be a long one, so enjoy.


I don't rightly remember starting or finishing this.  I was sleeping a lot during this period, and every so often I think I'd wake up and jot something down.  Eventually this was done.  It's ink, as I hadn't dusted off the watercolors yet.


This is watercolor.  A self portrait, because I was accused of never doing any.  Just a sketch, really, if I ever get vain enough to draw myself again I'll do a better job with this idea.


This was the first thing I'd done in ages that I actually liked.  I need to do more like this.  I don't have this one anymore.  An old friend showed up out of nowhere one night, and we got to talking.  He liked it, so I hacked it out of my sketchbook with my trusty old viking knife and gave it to him.  It was supposed to be the first in a series of things involving this naked horseman, but that didn't pan out.  I got out the watercolor for the first time in months and found my abilities rendered unto the void.  I painted 2 or 3 pages and ended up tearing them apart because it looked like the muddied scrawlings of a mule-kicked simpleton.  This ran me aground for a few more days.  Then I started getting ideas again.


A little bit of a religious kick started me back off on the right foot.  Olde time religion is something I love, and to me that always means flint knives and standing stones.


This was run-up to the next one.  After my catastrophic return to watercolor, I decided to stick to ink for awhile.  It was a good decision, I've got plenty of techniques to refine with it, and I'm working here in a much larger format.  Anyhow, another olde time religion painting.


If the term "Religious crocodile sacrifice opus" has never been applied to any work before, let it be applied here first.  I'm quite happy with this one.  In-process, it went painfully wrong toward the end.  Those light rays can be tricky.  But thanks to the total opacity of black ink, no one will ever know.


I decided to to a quadtych incorporating skeletal remains in landscapes.  I'd thought to do this awhile ago, but not until working on a larger scale was I able to get enough space for detail.  I also used a different ink mixture for the wash on these, and will be doing a whole hell of a lot more of that in future.


The trees on these first two came out much better than I'd anticipated.  The teeth on this one need work, but I'm loathe to touch it up for fear of ruining something I'm basically happy with.


This begs detail shots, because those goddam buildings took ages and are gorgeous.  Half-timbered Tudor houses are now my favorite kind of buildings to paint.  Aside from the background, this is entirely done with black india ink at different levels of dilution.  Versatile business, that stuff.


More Tudor houses, a giant's skull with a Saxon sword jammed through it, trees.  Yep.  I like all of those things.


Someone from the frozen north requested warpaint.  This inspired me to get some business done on the Ulf Kingraper saga I've been kicking around for a bit.  I'm going to start it with stories of the future barbarian warlord's youth, here seen with some goblins who he is forcing to rob a caravan.  A new method here, applying ink to light pencil sketches, then filling in lines later for definition.


And most recently this.  Large portions of Ulf's adolescence was spent befriending this baby mammoth and killing unicorns.  This story is bound to take ages to finish, but I've got nothing but ages to spare.

There we have it.  The last month has been interesting.  A couple weeks ago an old friend emerged from the woodwork.  Just strolled on up while I was at work, after 2 years of total silence.  The man doesn't even have an email address.  He's been in China, studying international relations at Tsinghua, which is Zhongguo's equivalent to Harvard.  We talked about old days and updated eachother on the present whereabouts of the old pack.  Scattered to the four winds, we are, but we still manage to keep pace.  Good times.

feh

It has been some time indeed.  It seems my stagnation extends even to pointlessly updating this repetitive waste of time.  Ah, I don't mean it, baby, I'm just depressed.  Anyway, BEHOLD!


I got an idea one night to do some arboreal octopi.  Really, I just wanted to somehow incorporate tentacles in some way, and this gave me an excuse to also try a newer method with the trees and whatnot.  I like this idea.  I especially enjoy how lazy those goddam cephalopods must be.


So this starts the eight low gods.  They are all emblazoned with the mark of the king of the forest, the octogram, so starting with an antlered octopus lounging in a tree seemed a natural thing.  As of right now, I'm putting this ink thing on hold a bit, but once I start up again I hope to see a lot more of these bastards.


The second of the low gods, a four legged owl.  Self explanatory.


I like how the proportions of this hare turned out.  Of the eight, this one might me my favorite.


The bear, yelling like crazy.  I'm never satisfied with the way I draw bears.


The wolf, looking hungry.  I'm obviously losing interest in describing these.


Now, I had to do a deer, but there was very little I could do in the way of embellishments.  I mean, it already has antlers.  So instead, I just made it looking especially regal.


Ahhh, the ape.  I like this one.  The tongue was an experiment what turned out exactly as I imagined.  Good work, me.


And this one is garbage.  By this time, I just wanted to be finished with the eight low gods.  And then I was!  Great!


These three constitute the High Gods of the mountain.  The Warlock, the Beast, and the Hermit.  Here we have the hermit, sitting around.  Hermits do a lot of that.  I should know.


The beast, railing to the heavens.  I like the idea that these three are constantly either fighting for or naturally shifting to and from the top position, thus dictating the general mood of the forest below.  When they shift, the fiery brand of the mantle shifts as well.  Right now, it's clearly causing this monster a great deal of what is either pleasure or discomfort.  That much is unclear.


And the warlock.  My favorite.


That's up to date.  Lately, I have done nothing.  I hadn't even picked up a pencil in weeks, until last night.  And even then, it's like pulling teeth.  I hope I stop being such a miserable piece of shit soon.