Sunset landscape painting, California hills

Here's another recent landscape painting (done in oils on an 11" by 14" panel).

It's a painting of warm sunset light out in the East Bay hills. I love the way light creates space, and unifies the colors of everything in the scene. Light is really the subject here, and the familiar landscape forms are just here to be transformed by it.

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Mt. Diablo landscape painting

Here's a landscape painting titled "Autumn on Mt. Diablo ".
It's a view on Shell Ridge, in the Mt. Diablo foothills. It's fairly small, just 11" by 14", and done with oils on panel.

In this painting, I'm setting up the background colors so that they go from sort of a purplish/green right behind the foreground to more of a warm, muted orange on the distant hills. It's a simple color gradient that changes with depth and that's designed to contrast with the yellow/orange palette of the foreground.

As an artist, it's exciting to build these kind of color structures into a painting. They're an underlying architecture that gives overall harmony to the painting, unifying the scene and making it coherent.

(Click to enlarge)

Painting of California live oaks

I've been working on smaller landscape paintings for the last few months. Here's a recent one; some oak trees out in the hills towards Mt. Diablo, in the East Bay's watershed.

It's 11" by 14", and painted in oils on panel.


(click to enlarge)

(updated with a better reproduction)

Sunset in Briones Park

Here's a little (10" by 20") oil painting I just finished, titled "Sunset in Briones Park". The view is actually from the watershed a bit to the west, looking into the park. I'd sneak onto that watershed property and do landscape painting pretty regularly, but now I've bought a trail pass, and am completely legit.

(click to enlarge)

updated with a better reproduction

Room with sand and water

Here's a room full of water and boulders and rocks and sand, inspired, I guess, by Maurice Sendak. But with an encroaching desert in place of a forest.

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Reclining nude, unfortunate angle

When a bunch of artists all get together and chip in for the model, there's a lot of jockeying for the best spot.

Sometimes you get stuck with an unpromising angle on the model, and you just have to make do. This was what happened to me here, and while I think it came out OK, it mostly serves to remind me to get to the drawing studio early....

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Cobalt Blue Vase and Roses Still Life

Here's a still life painting of a vibrantly cobalt-blue pitcher with an arrangement of roses and other vegetation.

In retrospect, a patriotically themed color pallete! (for an American, anyway). Well, except for the green and grayish-purple, but let's not be pedantic about it.


(Click to enlarge)

Gesture drawings from the model

Up until now, I've pretty much only put up figure drawings that are finished and resolved. But those are just a small minority of the kinds of drawings that I (and most other artists who draw the model) do.

Usually, I start a drawing session with lots and lots of short, gestural drawings like these ones.
They're quick, 2 minute sketches that are trying to capture the shape and movement of the model, without getting hung up on details.

Like alla-prima painting, gesture drawings have a breath and vitality to them that more worked over pieces can lose.

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Aloe Plant Still Life Painting

This aloe plant belonged to my house-mate Liz Erringer when we all lived together in a big house in Berkeley back in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

It was a wonderful house, an archetypal brown shingle, dark and paneled with redwood. There were six of us, all in that transition between college and marriage. It wasn't obvious at the time, but in retrospect it was a liminal period, the end of the first act of our lives, and the beginning of the second. Now, we've all married, moved on and most have kids.

My studio was a building in the back yard, and I'd periodically borrow interesting objects to paint.  I'd admired Liz's out-of-control aloe plant for while, and she graciously allowed me to keep it for a few weeks and essentially paint it's portrait.

I forget who bought this painting (Michelle?), but I wish I still had it.


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Standing model with stool

Here's a drawing of a standing naked young lady, half propped up with a stool for stability.

If you've ever posed for a long (say 2 or 3 hour) drawing session, you'd know how hard it is just to hold still, let alone to do so while standing. And speaking as an artist, that's one of the most valuable abilities in a model.

When I was 17 years old, brimming with hormones and starting art school, my first life-drawing model was this really sexy woman. Initially, I was agog at the fact that she'd taken all of her clothes off in front of me. But after an hour or two, (even at 17!) that wore off and I remember getting annoyed that she couldn't hold the pose for more than a few minutes without drifting.

Later, posing for various girlfriends I discovered just how much work not-moving actually is.

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Unwrapped cucumber texture

This cucumber had such a beautiful texture that I carefully removed the skin, cutting it so that it would lay flat, and scanned it in.
It's a cylindrically mapped cucumber texture, to go with the one of my head! And since I can't help myself, I photoshopped it so that it tiles horizontally.

The surface is so detailed! You can zoom in and see a wonderfully complex landscape, full of color and pattern.


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Here's a detail, you can see where it creased a bit as a I unwrapped it.

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Model with beehive hat

Here's another drawing where I've taken some liberties with the nude model. (no, not those kind of liberties)

I figure that you've seen lots of drawings of naked ladies in the studio. But here's one with a beehive hat sitting in a field of boulders.

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Platformer

Just playing around, combining life drawing with a game design cliché; make it across the platforms and rescue the princess.

Honestly, if Peach was more like that, I'd have an easier time understanding Mario's motivation.

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Bizarre search phrases

I've been collecting the more bizarre search phrases that show up in my logs for this blog.

Now my name's Ocean, so that right there will give a lot of false positives. I did a bunch of work on Spore, The Sims and SimCity, so people searching for those games often find their way here.

Then mix in random drawings of naked people, landscape paintings, paintings of flowers and models, add some computer graphics work, and the search phrases that land people here become borderline surreal. So a list of my favorites from the last few weeks:

First the ones involving nudity and misspelling (I guess I should be grateful for the traffic...)

1. naked girl tied to chair (Um. Sorry to disappoint you)
2. nude wowmen blogspot
3. central american nude women
4. cool creature nude (yes, somebody somewhere is searching for sporn)
5. nude maui lagoons
6. nude woman.blogspot.com
7. blogspot trucker nude (huh?)
8. nude nacked lady (nacked? I kind of like the sound of that)
9. oceans nude (well, not at the moment)
10. adam savage nude (don't want to know)

Then the ones that are merely strange

1. creating an ocean in blender (I know, Blender the 3D tool, but I still think it's a great image)
2. oceans in trouble Sept 2009 (uh oh)
3. how did the mayans get the red hats (I'm sad to say that I have no idea)
4. real live bunny man
5. ways that ocean is different (let me count the ways)
6. spores on skin (you probably should seek medical attention)
7. oceans on other planets
8. ufo came from ocean (you'd think I'd have noticed)
9. pregnant and unhappy (Oh, I'm sorry)
10. mayan sculptures of creatures
11. devotion 2 ocean (Aww! Thanks!)
12. nice ocean you got here

Of course adding them here just makes it more likely people searching on them will land here again, but I figure it's worth it for the comic value.

Bonus points if you can figure out why Google thought some of the more bizarre ones applied!

New sculpture (nude woman)

It's good for the craft to periodically start over, taking what you've learned and trying again (and again, and again...)

So in that spirit, here's a new version of a figure that I've been sculpting. It started out as an ecorche (basically a refresher in muscular anatomy) but eventually turned into a traditional figurative study.

Sculpting in 3D has some interesting quirks that physical sculpting doesn't. Aside from the obvious stuff, you have to properly design the mesh topology so that the edges flow cleanly around the figure. (especially if you plan on animating it)
Even though it's not something sculptors ordinarily care about, I kind of enjoy it. It's like working on a puzzle, and is satisfying to get right.



(click to enlarge)