Ready, Set, Paint!

First, the upcoming events:

IlluxCon! I look forward to this event all year. I will once again be in the evening showcase, and I will once again be giving a talk on Thursday, Oct 23, at 3 pm! It will be a follow-up to last year’s presentation and if you’re near Reading, PA at the end of October, it’s worth your while to come check it out. You’ll see the best illustration in the industry all in one place, and all the artists of those pieces will be there in person to talk to you. 

Main Show:

Oct 22-26, 2025

The Goggleworks Center for the Arts

201 Washington St 

Reading, PA 19601

Evening Showcase: (I’ve got a booth here!)

Oct 24-25, 2025

8 pm-midnight

The Reading Doubletree Hotel

701 Penn St 

Reading, PA 19601

East Bay Open Studios! If you’re a behind-the-scenes person and you’re in the Bay Area, EBOS is the place to be. Come visit me in my actual painting studio and see works in progress, some pieces I don't show publicly, and all the artistic mess. I always have a great time meeting visitors and showing them around the place. Chances are good you signed up for my mailing list at an open studio event and I’d love to see you again! 

Dec 6-7, 2025

11 am-5 pm

2908 Chapman St

Oakland, CA 94601

The studio is up a flight of stairs with no elevator access.

Alright readers, welcome back to the studio!

Let’s recap: Last month I had thrown out my process and I was exploring a new painting philosophy with some daily watercolor experiments. Initial results were promising: “I [...] decided there and then that I was going to have some faith in myself, and resolved to stop trying to shoehorn myself into a planning-heavy painting process that mostly makes me miserable. The watercolors in this post were the unknowing start of that, and you’ll see more next month.”

I didn’t talk about it, but when I wrote that entry, I was also planning for IlluxCon. IX is a chance for fantasy and scifi artists to show off their best work to each other, to collectors, and to industry pros and art directors looking to increase their stable of freelance illustrators. It is notable for maintaining a focus on traditional (as opposed to digital) work. I need to show up in Pennsylvania next month with enough original paintings to fill a booth. 

I started seriously thinking about this in mid-July, right after my 10x10 show wrapped up. With 12 weeks in front of me, I was hoping to get one, hopefully two paintings done in time for IX. I felt it was ambitious but doable. Then I promptly spent the next month in a crisis of confidence and that cut into the timeline somewhat.

Last month’s watercolors started as a way to make the problem a lot smaller. “Just finish the image. Make it look like you meant it.” That was the whole challenge. Every morning I had to make some marks, and then I had to make more marks to make it all look intentional. No planning, no narrative, no studies. Just finishing. 

And after doing that for a week or two, I felt a lot better. I proved to myself that I could make good decisions when I got out of my own way long enough to trust my aesthetic gut. That was cause for all kinds of timid optimism. It’s sort of like when you find a hummingbird nest and you’re very excited but also it’s so small and so delicate that you’re afraid if you breathe wrong it’ll fall apart.

Optimism decreed that it was time to move beyond simple, unplanned watercolors toward something more resolved in oil paint. The wisdom of bitter experience suggested that I start small and simple with something I’d probably succeed at, rather than, just to pick a random and totally hypothetical example, a highly detailed, multi-figure narrative composition involving five different light sources. 

So I went back through my sketchbooks and found something that made me happy. It was this little guy.

That’s it. That’s the whole sketch. In person, it’s less than an inch high, but it was enough. I decided I’d solved all the really important problems (does it look like a snake? yes. is it adorable? also yes) and I could work out all the trivial details (background, lighting, color, value structure) on the fly.

So I transferred the sketch onto some illustration board and gave it a first pass. 

Yep, still adorable. I roughed in a background on the general working principles of “there’s gotta be a sky somewhere” and “the grass is green until I say otherwise” and put a bunch of shapes in a bunch of places to solve some compositional problems. 

Then I went back in to add some extra form and detail.

At this point, I was pretty happy with most of my choices and I was ready to move into the final stages of painting, otherwise known as “make it look like I meant it.” The back of the head isn’t fully resolved here and I wasn’t happy with the shading and texture of the scales on the snake, so I asked my mentor for a few suggestions to help get this over the line. He had some great ideas.

Finished!!!

TADA! A whole painting. I’m very proud of it. Deliriously happy, in fact. Because it worked! I started with a tiny little doodle and ended up with a whole finished painting and I managed to skip the whole middle part where I overthink all my decisions. As one friend observed, I turned my brain off.

In retrospect, the last 14 months have been marked by protracted uncertainty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing -- art-wise or business-wise -- but I knew I was supposed to be doing it harder and better and faster. And then I got out of my own way and whipped out this little guy, and suddenly I had a way to make art. I knew I’d been stressed but I didn’t realize how much it was wearing on me until I finished this painting, and all of a sudden, my diet improved, my sleep got better, and my exercise routine leveled up. 

All because of a cute little snake and some bubbles. 

Having finished one painting, I needed to figure out what to do next. I went for a walk to consider all the lessons I’d just learned about the dangers of overthinking and the need to...dang I hate this sort of language...trust my heart instead of my head. 

I decided that if overthinking was the enemy, I was going to make sure I was in no position to do it. The next day, with approximately eight weeks to go until IX, I went to the local art supply store and bought not one, not two, but TEN illustration boards. All for IX. Why? Because ten is a nice round number and if I’m going to get these done by the end of October, I have no time to second-guess myself. I have to be painting every day. I immediately covered them all in acrylic paint. Did I have a plan? Absolutely not. 

I’m neck deep in old sketch books and oil paints now, developing on top of all of these surfaces. And yes, I’ll be bringing them to IX. Here’s a sneak peek at one of my pieces currently in progress:

So, to sum up, I’m writing a talk, re-engineering my painting process from the ground up, discovering my artistic voice, and increasing my painting volume by a factor of ten. I haven’t been this excited for anything professionally since... probably ever. If you’re still reading, thank you for coming along on this journey with me. I hope your Fall is as thrilling as mine as shaping up to be and I’d be thrilled to see you at IX if it’s in the cards for you. If this sparked something in you, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me an email or leave a comment and tell me what you’re up to.

See you in October!