A misty morning (and her tears shattered like splintered glass)

This is my latest painting that I just finished now! I started that one a while back, way in late October I think, just after finishing "Concerto" (the mermaid one), but I kept starting new projects and putting this one aside (because of the Wacom contest, then some commissions, and also because I didn't feel the strength to finish it yet). I finally managed to complete it and I'm pretty glad I did. The idea for this one was to make a portrait, a close-up of a face with as much details as I could, for skin texture in particular. The see-through veil was a patience-tester as well, but it came out nicely!

Zombie T-shirt!

Here's another commission I did for Salvacion. They wanted a design for T-shirts, whith a pretty simple, yet fun idea, of a conquistador zombie. I presented two variations of this concept, one with the zombie holding a flag with the band's logo on it, and another one with a bloody halberd (sort of an axe blade mounted on a long stick), and they asked me to do both as they loved both and couldn't really decide which to choose, so here they

This is an ink drawing. The flag and halberd were done separately, then the montage and coloring were done with Photoshop.

Going to Hell!

Here's a commissioned artwork I've made for a heavy metal band from North Carolina named Salvación. This is for their first album: "Going to Hell". You can check their Myspace here. It was a fun little piece of artwork to create. The car was a bit of a challenge as I've never done one and normally I'm more into organic elements, while a car's design and texture is all but natural, but it came out pretty well and I was happy with it. It's a Firebird 1973.

Kill me please... pretty baby

This is not an actual request, just the title of my latest painting. So it's been some time since I've last submitted a new painting. I was a bit disapointed about not making it to the semi-finalists for the Wacom contest last month, I trully believed my entry should have get at least in the semi, but obviously the judges thought differently. I wasn't really impressed either by their choices, but they clearly wanted something more ludic and colorful and happy-happy, while I did something more insightful and profound.

I had another painting in progress before, but I put it aside to work on my entry for the contest, and after that, well I was in the mood for something with less details, something a bit different and fun, so I did this:

The girl is all made digitally and the ink splatters on the background are real ink splatters I made on paper and that I scanned. That was fun to do, I like to splash paint on a canvas -that's my little Pollock side :)

But what was even more fun was splashing all that ink on my girl friend :D

Yes 'cause you see, I always work with photo references, so for this one I bought a white dress especially to spoil it with ink, and my poor model had a hard time getting that ink out of her pores. Yep, sure sucks to be my girl friend! At least I enjoyed it!

I have more projects coming, so see ya soon!

Wacom Contest: Take two!

Hi there!

Ok, so Wacom and DeviantArt are helding a second contest and I just had to give it a try again. The first contest was in May, the theme was "Good vs Evil" and you can find my entry here.

I didn't win but I made it to 50 semi-finalists, which isn't so bad considering there was over 9500 submissions! Anyways, this is not what I want to talk about! Of course I want to talk about my entry for the second contest, which is about "Dreams", that you find HERE.

You can also read my "artist's comments" on my entry page on the link above if you're interested to know about the painting's meaning. And if you want to see the reference pictures I used for this painting, work in progress and details, head this way!

Oh yeah! And for those of you who have a DA account, I need your support! You can vote for my entry by "favoring" it between December 16 and December 22! The entry with the most votes for that period of time will be the Community Choice Winner!

Cheers!

:-)

Concerto

Well here is my latest painting. This is me at my most... masochistic. Sometimes I feel I'm really putting way too much detail into this, details that can't be seen here, even on the full size version. But the advantage of it is that the image can be printed on a large scale and it's then that one can really see the aweful amount of details, and I must say that if only the final result counts -which is the case- well I'm pretty happy with this one!

Again, completely digital, made with Photoshop and my fateful Wacom tablet. This is based on a photo I took something like two years ago. Back then, I knew I'd use that photograph as a reference for a future painting, even though I had no idea what it would be. I just loved the composition, the colors and of course the textures. I tried to recreate all that -and almost went crazy doing so- but it came out nicely I think. Hope you like it as well. Detail can be seen here:

http://illusorydreams.com/concertodetail.html

Early Christmas!

Hi there! Long time no see. Well I haven't been painting very much during the summer, but now I'm back in business. So here's my latest work. It was made for the Iron Maiden fan club Christmas card competition that they have every year. It's opened to anybody, and the winner gets his artwork used to illustrate the fan club Christmas card, and some other goodies. I won this contest in 2001 and I've participated a couple more times after that, but I've never won again. This year, I really wanted to do a kick-ass painting, so I started working on it early, before they even announced the contest on their web site. Well, they're having the same contest every year anyway, so I just thought that I'd have more time to work on it and I could do something real nice, BUT! But but -how ironic- this year they decided to have a theme -beside the Christmas theme of course- and as I didn't know that of course, for as far as I know, it's the first time they have a theme, well my illustration has nothing to do with the theme! So now I know I won't win, but heck, what can I do know?

Well I've done a little tutorial/ work in progress thingy, so if anyone's interested, here it is. Hope it will be helpful to at least somebody, so I won't have done this in vain.

And here's my winning entry for the 2001 Xmas contest. It's a small 9 x 10 1/4 oil painting done on cardboard. This is around the time I started working with oil :-)