Completed table.

Added two kinds of flock, all over the place. It really tied it together. Did the bridge with chips of door skin to look like slats, and mosaic tiles to stand in for masonry, sand in the recesses- then washed it with a watery mix of whatever acrylic was on my pallet to desaturate the color. Then I mixed up a batch of bar-top with teal acrylic to fill in the brackish water pools. BAM! The board is done, and in 8-10 hours of drying, it will be ready to play on. 

Close up of the bridge, the brackish water and some flock. I like the reflection on the water in this one, but hate that I  can see places I missed with flock. Oh well, save it for the next table.

One more close up to compare with the earlier WIP from the last post.

Game board design/ fabrication WIP's

So, taking the most successful design from the previous post, the next step is making the full sized board. The board is 3'x 3' and will be used for game testing and display. It is pretty rough at this point but it is getting there  I am not completely happy with some of my transitions, but my budget was very limited for this project- I used mostly found objects and old paint to get this to where it is now. 

The first step is quickly constructing the quay-side terrain out of old pieces of 1' thick polystyrene  Its pretty poor construction material, but it gets the job done and keeps the board light. Its glued to a piece of door skin to keep it rigid.

The second step was getting a bunch of garden rocks to fill in several places to boost the texture and help break up the surface.

More surface texture... sand. An old diorama trick. It fills in the gaps between rocks and the surface. It looks good painted, too.

After sealing the entire thing a fast coat of spray paint lays in the first pass of color. his is very quick as tightening up happens later with a brush.

Second pass of paint. Glazes and then dry brushing. Glazes bring all of the colors together, and makes the garish colors a bit more subdued. Dry brushing helps to pop out some of the surface details like the rocks and the sand.

3rd pass with color. Total working time so far is about 6 hours. Just picking out specific rocks to break up the value range and help feature key areas. This is fast, as final table flocking will overlap any inconsistencies and mistakes. At this point the colors all harmonize and the board is looking close to complete. the next steps will be final highlighting, inking, flocking and finishing off the bridge, which will get slices of door skin to show off wood grain. Finally I will pour resin in the muddy areas to represent water pooling up in the riverbed.

Quick detail shot. I am really looking forward to the finishing touches to complete this piece. If I get extra time I will glue black felt around the edges to clean them up. I am shooting for the whole thing to come in around 8-10 hours, depending on cleaning up the sides. 

I'll get the final pictures up as soon as its done this weekend.

Game board designs

These are some game board designs I just did for a project I am working on. The top can be converted to be a set design, with an optional thrust section for actors to perform in the round. All done in Photoshop.

Portrait on a shield

This was a shield I painted for a Christmas gift exchange with old friends from the SJSU A/I graduating class of 2012. It is a white elephant style deal, and I drew Paul Yula! The theme was crow (corvus in latin), so I went for the literal approach, and stuck his head on one.

Here is a detail. Its acrylic on aluminum. I am currently trying to get better pictures, these ones reflected too much flash, washing out the blacks. I printed out font from PS and made a stencil for the lettering. If I remember correctly the shield was about 19'' on each edge.

Better shot for color, but horrible in general. I just did not get great shots of this project before I sent it off. I miss painting in acrylic! This was a lot of fun to do, and a nice break from the norm...

1st project WIP for a class led by the legendary Barron Storey

 The project is meant to teach us to communicate through our work. We use a process for generating images called "bits". This has us creating many smaller works of art and compiling them into one composition later, allowing us the chance to focus on every item individually. He stresses that we use different media and push our comfort level. I gave it a strong effort, even moving with a concept I hated, but keeping it as it was the first thing that sprang to mind.

These are icons I made to glue into the collage on the final piece.

This is my 2nd rough draft. I chose to use this composition and move to a final. This is 14.5x 9'' on illustration board.

This is my final after about 4 hours, including all prep and drying time. It was amazingly fun to get outside and really work large again! I have not been able to do this in a few years. When my wife came home she looked at it and exclaimed "it looks like Owen". I agree.

Here is the piece at this point. It was not reading the way I wanted to so I started gluing down cheese cloth to obscure the less important elements- pushing focus to my primary and secondary focal points. that was still not strong enough so I connected them with a line of string, attempting to force a path for the viewer's eye. I may need to lay down some more cloth before Tuesday. I want to sit on it for a bit before I move again, though.

It is 33.5x 16'', print, acrylic, collage, and a ton of other random mixed media on wood panel, at this point.