Environment Mood Studies

Here's a wee update on an environment piece I posted recently. Although I was satisfied with it at the time, my friend and colleague Eduardo Pena encouraged me to take it further. While he liked the initial pic, he suggested trying new lighting scenarios and times of day with the same image. It was great advice and it inspired me to put in a little more work.

Eduardo is a very skilled artist and a very hard worker but most importantly he has a great attitude. Where I might get frustrated he sees every failure or difficulty as an opportunity to learn something. It's an admirable way to look at things, and pretty helpful in a production environment where work is discarded at an alarming rate irrelevant of any small victories you may have had in its creation :P

I have another version underway too, that I will sneak into this post at some point in the future.

Environment Painting

Here's a little piece I did for myself. Trying to loosen up my work a little and get more texture in, but I really don't want it to be arbitrary or sloppy. This one went pretty easily and I'm happy with it. The architecture is inspired by some unusual Japanese thatched homes, hence the pagoda in the background. During our brief visit to Japan there was a 5 tiered pagoda in Nara that really blew my mind. I've been wanting to put one in a painting ever since. Though this one is so distant that I couldn't put any detail on it without ruining the balance of the piece, so I might have to revisit that fixation yet! You may also notice a wee nod to great illustrator N C Wyeth snuck in there.

Thanks to Adam Anderson for the encouragement and input while I was working on it :)