This was an illustration commission for the website of a friend of mine. it is sort of an existential take on traditional organized belief.
The essence,as I understand it, is that the two outer faces with which we interact with the world are just masks of fear and anger that shield our inner self. Which is at peace.
 And that there is a divine connection (represented by an arc of light here) that connects to all the other "true" selves.

Autumn Dryad

I tried something a little different with this one. I stretched paper over a board and sealed it with acrylic gel medium. Then I did a drawing from a sketch directly onto the paper. I sealed it again. And then I painted a gouache under painting until I was satisfied with composition and value, then the idea was to glaze oils into it. I ended up painting with oils more than anything and I probably overworked it. However, I do like the piece overall. I'll most likely do a winter themed one in a month or so.

So:

Mixed media on Paper on Panel
12x18
2012

I made a digital painting for my girlfriend's birthday. It came out kind of great, especially with my limited experience in the medium. I need to explore this style a bit more perhaps.

I posted this about a year ago. It was a gift to my friend that I saw hanging up on his wall. When i looked at it I was pretty embarrassed by how bad it was. So I grabbed it off his wall and brought it back home and gave it a few more hours. Its still wasn't up to par with what I envisioned so I took it into photoshop and tried to give it that Illustration punch digitally. While still not quite where I wanted, it has made a massive leap in the last three weeks. So I decided to throw it up here. 

This assignment was to take a fellow classmate and paint them as an imaginary character in a fantastic setting. I used my friend Danny Ryba who was also working on a painting with myself as the model. We eventually decided to do a Knight sort of guy facing off with a Necromancer. Then we decided that it would be pretty cool (hopefully) to combine our paintings and make a sort of panoramic scene where a battle is moments away from the breaking point. 

First I'm going to post my side of the painting before completion of the overall panoramic and then post the finished one when it is ready.

So this is Danny as the Knight Commander:

Now unusually for me this is completely digital. I would eventually like to combine my traditional and digital stuff effectively but for now I am more pleased with this than my usually digital stuff.

Here's a cover I painted for A Game of Thrones in that same directed study class. The second one is color corrected and with text and the other is just a photo of the painting. I don't know if this is good enough for my portfolio but I thought it was still important to post it anyway.

I recently painted this book cover for The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. It was not an actual commission, however, just an assignment in my last class of my college career. It turned out fairly well for my first attempt at a night time sort of city environment. As usual the actual painting looks much better than the photograph even with the color corrections I've made. Some day I'll have to figure out the secret to properly photographing oil paintings. (Probably involves a nicer camera or something...)

Anyway: The Name of the Wind, 16X20, oil on masonite.
The first is a better photo and more accurate to the painting quality but not necessarily the color. The second is a much worse photo but has the text as I would imagine it looking on the cover of the book. The text is also blatantly stolen from a version of the book that has already been published. But it looks awesome so I couldn't resist.

On May 8th next week I'll be walking and graduated from college with a BFA in drawing and painting/ This is both exciting and terrifying to me but I'm looking forward to the time to dedicate to building up my portfolio and hopefully scraping around the edges of professional quality. Then who knows?

Oh I also did a cover for A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin in that same class. I will post it another time.