Its my off topic picture! This was done in maybe 10-15 minutes with some crayons. Its a bit rough and scribbly looking, but I like how it came out. Nice happy impressionionistic picture of sun shining through trees. I think this was based on an magazine ad for allergy medication.

Same out of control 'sketch' of Xanty, but sepia tinted. I think I like this one even better, even if its smaller and a little bit blurrier than the untinted version.

This was supposed to be just a quick little sketch to solidify in my mind a character design for Xanty, a n anthro-armadillo. Well, I've since changed the design, but the sketch got a little out of hand. I decide to put a little texture on, and then it just snowballed into this texture mad version. The original is slightly bigger.
Note my inability to draw objects. That's a staple gun he's got. I had a reason for a staple gun, really I did.

Pose is based off a photograph on the cover of "Beggars and Thieves: the Lives of Urban Street Criminals".
This is just like the other version of Our Brother Keepers, but cropped to the size of a paperback bookcover and with lettering. That was the entire purpose of the painting really, to focus my thoughts on a story I have kicking around in my head. The mood of the tale was giving me problems, and this came to my mind, this vision of what made the whoel thing come together thematically.
So I made a bookcover for the jacket. I hope to start actually writing the story soon, now that I've sorted it out mentally.
E-mail me if you'd like more details on the story.

Two of two. Acrylic paint on tin foil. This is based on an old inked piece of Chri's Goodwin's called "Grief" that he allowed me to use.
It's the same piece as appears in silvertigernagled.jpg, but shot straight on so the flash from the camera will show off that it in fact painted on a reflective surface. Everything showing up as that paintfully bright white is actually the foil shwoing through the surface. Its not quite this shiny in real life. The flash from the camera just accentuated the contrast. It also made the paint colors appear much darker than they really are.
I really like the fact that even with the paint on it, it is still reflective on the line work, and that some light shines through on the background as well. Exactly where the light shines off it changes with every little bit you move your head. I love the effect. It's now framed and going down to be hung up at my store.
Would I do another painting on foil? Maybe, maybe not. It gave me such a headache, literally. The eye strain from painting a reflective surface literally gave me a headache.

Original line work used is copyright Chris Goodwin, used here with permission.

One of two. Acrylic point on tin foil. Chris Goodwin was nice enough to let me use an old sketch of his for this piece. It was an inked piece of his called "Grief" from back in 1997. To reproduce it here, I reversed the image in photoshop, then printed it out, and taped it to the piece of foil. They I redrew over the lines with a very hard pencil with the foil ona surface that had some give in it to get the linework to show up as raised lines.

Then I painted in the colors with the acrylics. What's showing up black here is actually the foil underneath. The second photo shows it with the shine. The body was done in two flat colors, an ivory white and a pale slate blue. I considered doing a more standard orange color, but the somber image seemed to call for cold colors.
The background was done by using the foil itself as the painting pallette and mixing the colors right on the background with a very stiff brush. I used a bright blue and a burgandy paint as base, and then ran the brush through it and mixed it in spots all over the background, not actually trying to coat the surface, so that's why you have the very uneven swirls.

Original line art copyright Chris Goodwin, used with permission.

Here's the whole front of the store with the door Shakira's design is on, on the left. This is really just to give some clue as to the scale of the image. It's only 5-6 inches high on your screen, but its taller than I am in real life! This really is almost the entire front of the store, so getting the PERFECT sign was really important. I'm unbelievably happy with it.

Go see Shakira's gallery on VCL: http://vcl.ctrl-c.liu.se/vcl/Artists/Shakira-Searle/

Image copyright Shakira Searle. actual painting done by H.C. O'Neill and J.E. Hanses.

Another photo of the lovely design Shade did for me. I really love the way back painted glas looks as its so luminescent. It's a paint to photograph though with the reflections. (see the van reflected.) The shading is a little more visible from this angle. I bought about four times the amount of paint I actually needed for this project since I thought I'd need a lot more to get the colors sufficiently well saturated. I could have done a bit better job with the lettering, but otherwise, I'm incredably pleased with it! grunt work of painting by H.C. O'Neill (Fenris Lorsrai) original design copyright Kristin Rakochy (Shade. http://vcl.ctrl-c.liu.se/vcl/Artists/Shade/)

I ran a contest for artists to make a window design for the front door of my bookshop. This is actually the "runner up" of sorts, but I liked it so much, I found a different home for it on a side window! However the original design was for a slightly different shaped window, one that was a lot narrower. So fill out the space, I mirrored part of the background to either side to widen it. The original design's width was from the edge of the book to the fox's tail (the tip was actually missing!). Shade (http://vcl.ctrl-c.liu.se/vcl/Artists/Shade/) did this design, but I did the actual back painting on glass. I took the original pic she designed and in Photoshop, converted it to greyscale, than twiddled with the levels and such until I got a black and white version that I could cut out and use as a stencil. The whole project to tranfer it from the original design to actually being on the glass took about 15 hours of work. It's a little hard to see the shadeing in the picture because of the reflections off the glass from the outside (note the refelcted Citgo logo). I'm considering adding another layer of paint on the inside to even out the texture inside. It's a little streaky looking from the inside, but looks a bit like stained glass. Very, very cool. Grunt work of painting by H.C. O'Neill (Fenris Lorsrai) original design copyright Kristin Rakochy (Shade).

Computer overpainting done in Photoshop. It's my darling guinea pig, Cinder, who I managed to catch lying down to take a nap. Usually she flips out when she hears the camera and immediatly stops doing whatever cute thing she was doing that I wanted a picture of. The overpainting was done over the original photo, and then had the background removed. (you didn't really want to see wood chips and a water bottle)
Cinder's actually an Abysinnean, but she's kind of light on rosettes since I think the father was probably a smooth coat. Rosettes didn't come out as well as I liked, but I'm very happy with the eyes and the shading to the black portions of her fur. She's got a very nice expression that says "why have you interupted my nap and what is that thing you're pointing at me?"

A photograph of the glass piece I did as an experiment, all nicely framed and signed for a Rage Apocalypse tournament in Ohio.
The picture was done by painting front and back on a piece of glass while it was laying on top of a sketch. The background was done freehand. The irregular shape is because it was done on a broken sharp of glass from an aquarium. I like to recycle and reuse stuff for artwork. It was kryloned to keep the paint from rubbing off accidentally, and then framed in this little frame behind yet another piece of glass. Most of the depth of the piece got lost in the photograph. I believe the frame is 5 X 7. It's not very large.

More computer overpainting. This one ended up significantly different than the photo I started with.
For one, the wolf had normal paws, and I made hands. I also made it a lot broader across the shoulders by sectioning off the picture at mid spine and moving it over, and then filling in the middle to give the impression of a crouched were instead of a trotting wolf. And there were no blood spatters or footprints originally.

The picture used for overpainting appears on page 67 of "Wolves" by Candace Savage put out by the Sierra Club. Photo taken by Wayne Lankinen of Valan Photos.

Computer overpainting in Photoshop. Done with a mouse. The original phot used for the overpainting wasn't so bloody and the wolf on the right had it's tail tucked up under it's belly. Didn't seem properly agressive considering the gore, so it was moved.

It might look slightly familiar since the wolf on the left is my avatar head on the forums.

The original pictures used for the overpainting is on page 88 of "Wolves" by Candace Savage, put out by the Sierra Club. Photo taken by Peter J. McLeod.

Hey, haven't I seen this pose before? Yes, yes you have. It's the same pose used on glass. This is a colored pencil version of the pencil sketched used for glass. It's just fancing a different way because the glas piece was then flipped over.
It's a little experiment with different media. Easiest to tell how the media behaves if you do the exact same picture several times, in different materials.
One foot is screwy, but I'm otherwise happy.