These are my sketches from my recent trip to Dallas/Fort Worth for my traveling meet up in the University of Hartford’s low residency MFA in Illustration Program. My goal was to fill the sketchbook while I was there. I had a good time drawing the Hokey Game and the Rodeo.
After sleeping for about 12 hours I have decided to give this little experiment a rest. Over the past 3 weeks I have been dedicating myself to attempting to sharpen my artistic skills by doing a series of daily routines. I tried to take the momentum that I had coming off of a recent trip to Los Angeles, and even more recent trip to New York City; taking all the raw inspiration and drive I had amassed and turning it into artwork.
The overall goal seems to be success I feel that in the last few weeks I have made some drastic alterations to the way I create and perceive art. Looking back on the art I have made in the past I can look at it with a fresh perspective and see many of the shortcomings. One thing I learned I do not do well is time management or at least allocating proper time to complete a project.
But anyway I just wanted to thank everyone for their support during this little experiment with ASS POWER. And if anyone is thinking about attempting such an adventure I would recommend trying and maintain contact with live human beings, it doesn’t take too long for delirium to set in.
So I wanted to try something new today so I did up these small little concept paintings in gouache just to see how it would work. I wanted to try and get a really strange feel to these, so I tried not to use to much reference and just go from ideas out of my head. Both these images are concepts for the inner workings of the galactic center, which will play into a story I am working on in my space ladies series. Both of these took around 2 1/2 to 3 hours a each. 
Today I went with a carpentry theme, I kept the pallet pretty much on the warm side ochers and siennas. This was done in gouache and took 2 hours. It may be the last still life for the next few days, I really want to try some more fun personal stuff to mix things up.
I have really run out of still life ideas due to sleep deprivation, so I went old school. As much as I hate painting still life's these have been good for me, I've learned a lot about light, color, and shadow. This was done in gouache on canvas and it took about 2 1/4 hours.
Didn't think I was going to get this one done in time, Here is todays still life, and its kind of silly. I wanted to again set up the still life to replicate the light that would take place in a final illustration. For the characters I used a small mannequin and just moved it to different locations, to see how the light and shadows changed. This will be interesting to se how this helps the final Illustration, unfortunately it may be several weeks before I can work on the final illustration.
