Meganeura Painting Final

Giants Stalking Giants - 2011

Acrylics on canvas paper - blurring in gimp

The giant dragonfly Meganeura monyi sits blissfully unaware on a branch, as the giant scorpion Pulmonoscorpius kirktonensis creeps ever so slowly towards it's victim.  Fossils show the scorpion to be 70cm (2.3ft) long, and the dragonfly's wingspan surpassed 75cm (2.5ft)!  The Carboniferous provided these prehistoric insects and arachnids with an atmosphere of increased oxygen levels, which many scientists believe led to the increased size of these critters.  

Wouldn't mind one of these beauts as a pet...

Posted in ART Evolved's Carboniferous Gallery here.

Carboniferous Art - Work in Progress

Carboniferous WIP

Meganeura monyi and Pulmonoscorpius kirktonensis

This WIP is being made for ART Evolved's Carboniferous Gallery which goes online July 1st.  Be sure to send in your art to artevolved@gmail.com.

I'll post the finished piece with more info on the amazing arthropods at the end of the month.

Also sent around twitter as my #10oclockart.

One More Win...

Bring the Cup Home Boys!

Go Canucks Go!

Archeopteryx Painting

 

Quick pencil sketch for composition.

Archeopteryx Pair 

2011, acrylic on canvas paper, 9 x 12 in.

This painting was created as a gift for my friends Craig and Rhonwyn's wedding!  With this year being the 150th anniversary of Archeopterxy's discovery, this early birds were the perfect subject.  I have recently been experimenting with a more impressionist style using a more limited colour pallet.  While I am really happy with the painting, I have still managed to use the primary colours - red, blue, yellow.    Hmm, anyone have any suggestions on how to limit my pallet more effectively? 

Parasaurolophus in Love

Parasaurolophus in Love ©2011 

Medium: Acrylic Paints

Now that the Hadrosaur Gallery has gone up on ART Evolved, I can reveill the complete parasaurolophus piece!  Be sure to visit the gallery for a metric ton of gorgeous duckbill art!

The point of this reconstruction was to keep my colour pallet to only one to two colours.  As the emotion of this piece is love, I went with the traditional red tones for the critters.  One of the biggest  challenges I have in painting is that I tend to paint with bold, almost primary colours.  A prime example is my Pterosaur family in their garish blue, orange and yellow. 

I have recently bought James Gurney's book, Colour and Light, in an effort to teach myself better colour choice.  I look forward to pouring through it when I can find the time, and hopefully you will see an evolution in my art.

Thanks for checking this piece out and if you have any critiques, please let me know in the comments section below.

Sneak Peak into a new Painting

I must apologize really for being absent from my own blog for so long.  Life, as they say, gets in the way.  Between work and tutoring, getting back into Basil for a one-night-only Fawlty Towers performance, and preproduction of Cinderella (which I'll be directing), I haven't found a lot of time for art.

So with ART Evolved's Hadrosaur Gallery opening only days away, I wanted to give a sneak peak of a new painting I've been working on for the Time Capsule. 

Detail of Parasaurolophus painting

If you can't tell what this is, it is meant to be a very red Parasaurolophus.  I will post the full painting here at the end of the month to coincide with the gallery.

Happy Easter everyone!

Pop-Cutlure Gallery Submissions

Ghostbuster vs Zombie Dinosaur (2010)

Godzilla Contemplates Vancouver (2010)

A Return to Blogging about Art

Ode to a Tyrannosaur (2010)

a portrait of Traumador the Tyrannosaur

Well, it's been a while!  Hi!  I have a blog!  After two months of inactivity, I shall now remember I have a blog and begin posting again.  (Blog apathy passing...)

The above painting was a gift to Craig, the author of The Tyrannosaur Chronicles.  It captures his title character between the depths of deep time and the heights of outer space, a truly living fossil.

Inspiration comes from all around and I got an intense paleontological dose on my recent trip to Calgary and Drumheller, home of dinosaurs and full of old friends...

Inspiration indeed!

Reef Painting WIP (1)

The combination of a burning image from diving in Cebu and a gaping space above my fireplace has brought about a new painting.

There is a moment when drifting towards the edge of the reef, floating slowly towards the abyss, where the colourful reef plunges straight down towards darkness.  I remember the moment precisely, floating towards and then past the edge, thinking "I must paint this."  Has this happened to you?

So, with a wish to create something a bit less prehistoric, I began this sketch.  It incorporates aspects of the few photos I took while diving in the Philippines.

My plan is to paint the background coral reef, full of colour, then add all the multitudes of fish, arthropods, bivalves, mollusks, and cute nudibranchs (sea slugs) I saw! 

I also want to add a Hawksbill sea turtle, along with a silhouetted reef shark (even though I never saw one while diving!  Cheating?)

Last Saturday was a marathon painting day.  I am beginning to realize my art style: that I tend to work in spurts of intense creativity...

So here is where we are with this Coral Reef painting.  Kinda looks like an empty aquarium, ready for some citizens.

Basic background? Check!  Ready for fish? Double Check! 
Destroyed by oil spill?  NEVER! :(

Barosaurus Finished

Barosaurus and Allosaurus ©2009

Created during liveblogging for ART Evolved's Sauropod Gallery.  See it's creation here.

I returned to this piece after six months and decided to play with the contrast and lighting...  I think I'll say it's finished and be done with it.  For some reason, I love some aspects (puddles, rain wash) and hate others (rain effect, simple forest, colours).  A fun experiment!

New Portfolio and Updates!

Update: 
In keeping with the blog redesign and the online transition of Bond: Unprofessional Doodler (just fooling around) to Bond: Amateur Artist (on the track towards professionalism), I have created a new professional-looking portfolio!  Click here to check it out!

The portfolio is hosted (free!) through deviantArt, and I am quite pleased with the results.  Having had an account with dA for a few years, I found it very easy to organize and transfer images.  If anyone is interested, my deviantArt profile is here.

Art Update:
I am currently working on a few things:

• a coral reef painting - a large piece to hang above the fireplace, full of colourful coral, fish, and invertebrates!  I have had this image in my head since scuba diving in the Philippines, of slowly drifting towards the edge of a reef and peering down the wall into the dark depths...  The painting is still in the initial stages; the reef has been sketched and the background ocean blue has been painted.  Stay tuned for updates, as I am quite excited about this one...
• an ichthyosaur piece for ART Evolved - one month until the very exciting Ichthyosaur Gallery, and I haven't even started a piece yet.  My plan is to sketch simple outlines and then digitally colour it using the same photoshop technique I used on the spinosaur.  I just need to decide on a subject - which genera of ichthyosaur?!  Perhaps I will get inspired before the AE liveblogging session in a few days!  Remember, you too can join in the liveblogging!
• a playbill poster for Players 99 - Back in 1999, the acting group I belong to (SMP Dramatic Society) put on a cabaret show, and the SMP producers have asked me to create a poster for the archives.  I preformed Monty Python's Bookshop Sketch and sang a Cherry Poppin' Daddies swing dancing song, while a couple swang danced. Uh, swung danced?  Danced swingingly???

 Anyway, have a Happy Easter!  I hope you all had loads of chocolate.  Mmmmm, chocolate....

Redesigned Bond's Blog and a Spinosaurus

Spinosaurus strolling at Dusk

Welcome to the newly redesigned Bond's Blog!  As I dabble in tweaking the html, I'm sure the design will shift here and there.  But I am much happier with this new look.

To celebrate this fresh start, here is a new Spinosaur piece I created for the upcoming Prehistoric Times magazine.  It represents an artistic jump in my abilities as I began experimenting in digitally colouring!

The above piece was created using a mix of trad and digital techniques: it began as a pencil sketch, then scanned into the computer where I tweaked the contrast to change the pencil into strong "ink" lines.  Using layers in photoshop, I built up the colours and shades and details, until he ended up looking like the final product.  To finish him, I placed the coloured spinosaur into a photograph of a beautiful beach (that I took in the Philippines while traveling in late 2008.)

Zoom in to see the full effect of this digital colouring.  It's not perfect, as the black "ink" layer gets lost in places, and the general shading still needs work.  (Also, if you think about it, his left foot disappears conveniently behind his right! Yikes!)

Anyway, it's a new style for me that I'd like to continue and try to perfect.  How do you digitally colour your drawings?

A Special Event of Phenominal Preportions

Medals:  USA  39  -  Germany 29  -  Canada 25  -  Norway 22 -  Austria 16  -  Russia 15
GOLD:  Canada 13  -  Germany  10  -  USA  9  -  Norway  8 ...
 
Today was the Greatest Olympic Day yet!  3 Gold Medals!!!  Canada is now third in medal standing and leading in Gold Medals!

With Craig staying with me in Vancouver (and spending all our time enjoying the Olympics!), we are finally able to sit down and do something arty and creative.  So we've decided to do something radical and potentially damaging to our friendship.

Craig work with computer graphics, while I work with pencil and paper.  We thought that it would be interesting to work together and see if we can create something together - a joint dinosaur project using both of our skills!

For this, we're taking on the most famous of dinos - Tyrannosaurus rex!  The progress of this Epic Event is being documented on Craig's blog Weapon of Mass Imagination. 

The process works like this:  Craig creates a tyrannosaur in CG, and I create a tyrannosaur on paper in pencil, and then we digitally lay one over the other to see the difference between the recreations.  The point is to use both our interpretations, along with reference material from the internet and books (specifically Tomas Holtz's) to create an uber Rex.  The final product will be in CG, as we are able to walk through each body part and discuss and tweak it much more easily that on paper.

Step 1: Our two images, side-by-side (left-mine, right-Craig)

I am extremely interested in where this project will lead.  This is the first time Craig and I have worked together side-by-side on the same thing.  We both have our strong opinions, and have already come to blows over honestly stupid details, such as adding muscle grooves and ear-placement.

Anyway, check our progress out here and let us know how we are doing!  Here come the King!

Finishing the Stegosaur

Continuing the progress on my Stegosaur, it became apparent that the background I painted just wasn't cutting it.  The decision was made to keep the painted dinosaur with all it's millions of scales and put him into one of my photographs (a beach in Donsol, in the Philippines). 

Add a few pterosaurs (Kepodactylus insperatus), and we have a lovely Stegosaurus stenops in a recreation from the Morrison Formation!

Evening Stroll on the Beach

(Click to see every scale!)

There was a reason behind creating this moody Stegosaur piece:  for submission to Prehistoric Times magazine!  Along with Mr. Stego, I'm also submitting my Anomalocaris painting and cartoon, with the hope that at least one of these getting published.

Anomalocaris and the Burgess Shale

Anomalocaris Regret

Either way, look to the next issue (#92) of Prehistoric Times for some great art, and just maybe you'll see one of these guys here!

A Quick Stegosaurus

Photo reference:  Stegosaurus stenops at Discovery Place, Charlotte, NC - taken by midwinter.

Materials: pencil on glossy paper, acrylics, brushes, water...

Progress:  Fair, but this WIP still unfinished.

I plan to add more detail to skin and scales, and contemplate a subtle sunset...
(Click on any of the pics to enlarge them.) 

UPDATE Dec 3rd:

Here I have begun adding scales to the stegosaur. 
So far, only the hind leg and part of the tail has been scaled...

Happy Origin Day!

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin publishing his masterpiece The Origin of Species! 

One of these days, I'll have to actually finish reading the whole thing through...




(left) The triptych painting of The Evolution of Darwin: Boy, Traveler, Thinker I painted for this year's Darwin Day Celebration.


... I leave you with a picture (below) I took of the man back in 2006 at the London Natural History Museum, before he was moved.

Darwin and Huxley having lunch with their adoring public!

This was before they moved Darwin to the top of the steps in the Main Hall, replacing Richard Owens.

I wonder where Owens ended up?

Sauropod Liveblogging 4: Dino Colours

So the dinosaurs get a base colour. I had to physically remove the red from my brush for the allosaur (who just has to be red! Why? I don't know!) Trying to get away from the norm...

I am listening to right now: Craig's voice on skype. He's begun his liveblogging, so check him out here.

Sauropod Liveblogging 3: Colours

Began the sky and the base colour for the forest. Think the ground will be am annoyance. Time to move onto the dinosaurs. And get food (already 2pm here in Vancouver!)

Music I am listening to right now: Beautiful Freak by The Eels, Tribute by Tenacious D

Sauropod Liveblogging 2: Background

It is quite hard to see on the pic (you can enlarge any of my pics for more details!), but I have added a bit of a background. Think I'm going to go with a skewed horizon, hopefully giving a frantic feel to the piece. Not sure it is working at all. Perhaps it is just killing the "circular" flow Glendon mentioned in a previous comment... Thought?

It's raining in Vancouver, and it might soon be raining in the Jurassic... Time to put paint to paper.

Music I am listening to right now: She's Not There by Santana, Acting Like a Fool by Matt Costa.

Sauropod Liveblogging 1: Pencils

And so we begin... with basic pencils on "canvas" paper. This is the point now where I need input on the anatomy of the animals. Did I get the proportions right?

See you back in an hour. Next is to finalize some sort of background...

Music I am listening to right now: Cuts Like a Knife by Brian Adams, Shot Through the Heart by Bon Jovi. Hmm. Big Rock theme here...