portrait

I felt like painting a portrait and experimenting more in Painter...although I should be using real paint instead of digital all the time. I'll get to it soon enough. I've always had problems when working in Painter that when I take it into Photoshop the contrast is a lot darker. I'm sure it is an easy fix but I'm just too lazy to go in and fix it. If anyone knows how to do this PLEASE e-mail me. I don't know if the settings in Photoshop are just too dark or if Painter is too light. It tends to make my darks really dark. I've noticed too that when posting anything on here it's always much lighter than my original. Hope everyone has a good new year!!

Merry Christmas- a nice little card

Merry Christmas Everyone. Not your typical Holiday Greeting card but, what can I say, I'm not typical. Hope you weren't on the naughty list.

finally done with that!

Sometimes it is just necessary to design female warriors with white hair. This is Athena, the greek warrior goddess who amazingly sprung from the forehead of her father, Zeus, fully grown and ready to take on the world. Go girl! Yes weird, I know, but I didn't write it. I don't do a lot of these kinds of characters so this was fun to work on. Most of my work is more on the stylized side as you can see. I enjoy designing layouts for things like this too. Not sure if it's the best layout but it shows what I needed to show. I'll try to post more stuff. I'm getting lazy, I know. Christmas is almost here and it's still in the 50's here in Cincinnati. Damn global warming! How can I get into the Christmas spirit when I only need a jacket to go outside. Lots and lots of watermelon candy canes, maybe!

I'm back

I think he is going the wrong way. Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been in Florida. I don't even have the tan to prove it. I did get a spray tan though that didn't even last a week and I have a ton of sketches from when we missed our flight and had to sit in the airport for most of the day. Overall I think I'm going to start vacationing on a different part of the earth.
This weekend I'm going to Hollywood for a the Gnomon Workshop to see Craig Mullins, Dan Milligan, David Krentz, and other sickly talented dudes do their thing. So Exciting! I don't even know why I unpacked my bags.

Cool Mr Blueshoes

Gotta love the vintage look.

antique

I love anything antique and anything victorian. She's kind of elegant but haunting at the same time. I think I might do a series of this stuff. I also think that I need to start exploring more styles though. I don't know that my work is well-rounded enough. Anyway, comments are always nice.

color!

I felt like just doing some small color compositions of whatever came to mind. Nothing planned just started out with blobs of color in photoshop and this is what I ended up with. some were real bad but these were the ones that are okay. Also some random character that I thought was worth posting. I've been working on some freelance stuff so I haven't had much time to do anything more serious than this. I'm thinking about maybe getting rid of all clocks and watches in my house. Maybe I can fool my brain into thinking there is more time in a day. Even an extra hour just to curl up on the couch and watch tv would be heavenly.

even more Hopfrog

Still more from Hopfrog. This is where the King and his council practically force Hopfrog to drink wine. The king loves his practical jokes and takes pleasure in making him drink. Hopfrog is reluctant to drink the wine because it makes him somewhat crazy. This is sort of just a study so I haven't put the hand in there. I'm going to continue with it and I'll post some progress soon.

sketchy fun

Just a few sketches I did over the weekend. A robot, a quick sketch of downtown before it started to rain, and some characters for a game company. My scanner has been stubborn lately and won't scan things in at the settings I would like. This is my excuse for the bad quality. I've been working on a lot of new stuff so I will post all of it as soon as I can and after I figure out this scanner.

more Poe stuff.

Oh my poor neglected blog.Another study for Edgar Alan Poe's Hopfrog story. More to come soon.

Speedpainting

My speedpainting that ended up being about 3 hours. So much for the speed part but I'm learning. It was done in painter 9 which I'm still getting used to. While I love the traditional look you can get with Painter, Photoshop just seems to be more efficient for me at the moment. There are just so many options in Painter that I spend most of my time exploring the never-ending possiblities of each brush and not actually painting. The more I do the easier it will get. Anyway, this one still probably isn't finished and it really has no meaning behind it. I just felt like painting for painting's sake.

These are some character designs for a story by Edgar Alan Poe called Hopfrog. They were done some time ago but I'm still working on developing the rest of the story. Not enough hours in the day. The jester is Hop Frog, a tormented dwarf and practical jokester who, along with Tripetta is ordered to entertain the King and his entourage and plan a masquerade .

More zoo studies from the Cincinnati Zoo. Yesterday was the perfect day to go to the zoo. Most of the time it is so hot you can't stand it but yesterday there was a nice breeze and most of the animals were a little more active. You don't learn a whole lot when you go there and draw them sleeping all the time.

animals

Here are some animal studies. More soon. I wonder if anyone is even looking at this stuff?

I've already been bad and haven't been updating this as much as I want. Here are some really quick trees. They are weeping willows.(my version) They dip their tops in the water and the water drips and this is why they are called weeping willows. I don't think they look weeping enough so I'm going to work a little more on developing them to make them a bit more sad and weeping. The color prolly isn't helping that effect either. Other than this I went to the zoo yesterday so as soon as I get that scanned in I'll post it.

Some strange sea life. These quick studies were fun to paint.

I have a blog!

So today I've been occupying much of my time gawking at everyone else's blogs until like 5 minutes ago when I realized that I don't have one. Sorry for the title of my blog. I couldn't think of anything else. I'm going to try to get some new things on here soon but you're going to have to be patient. Till then you can look at some of my work here. www.jbricking.com
Out to take my dog Kaya for a walk. She's my new husky that I rescued from the shelter. Already chewed up one of my sketchbooks and a paintbrush. Ya think she's trying to say something? I'll post some pics of her soon. Oh and also my work is in a book that I just got today! Ballistic Publishing's d'artiste: Concept Art. Forgot what page but you should check out the book. Insane amount of eye candy. Buy It! Here's the image