Black and white painting of James H. Lacey

I did this painting from a photo I found in one of my ten thousand or so, airplane books. Just a cool looking pic and I thought it would be a good challenge for me.

P-51 Pilot

A little fun to keep me motivated on the day job. I did this sketch from a
photo I found on the internet. It was a good excuse to try some of the watercolour, wash brushes from Corel painter.

Exerpts from books that never happened.

Like the title says...I've often wanted to just publish a bunch of stupid / funny pages from book ideas of mine that are either half baked or too ambitious for my lazy butt to actually finish. I love this one because I'm a huge fan of high stakes stories around cute and fearful characters.

painting detail

I thought this was neat because you can really see the difference in detail from the foreground plane to the distant one...I tried to use a larger brush on the distant plane to keep my details lower and add some depth.

Black and white version

Thought I'd post this as well. To check my values and balance, I sometimes convert the painting to black and white....helps me see mistakes...anyway...I almost like this better than the colour....which probably means my colour sense sucks. Yay.

Ferocious Frankie. Is it done? I think it's done...

So I'm thinking this is finally finished....at first glance, it doesn't look like all that much was changed since the last version but I've done a fair bit of fleshing out. I don't know if the vertical set up was much of a success...I keep wanting to widen the canvas and paint in the foreground plane....I won't though because the whole point (besides try to get better at painting) was to try a less than common set up.

Ferocious Frankie detail.

Here's some closer detail...

A bit further on this P-51 Mustang painting

I'll keep this short...I've done a bit more...lengthened the cowl of the foreground plane....the rough prop arc guides are visible fro the two rear planes...so I'll refine that down the road...massaging the clouds...some details...yadda yadda.

oh, one more thing...the colour here is closest to the original painting..the one below had some levels adjusted....Not sure what I like yet....this one seems to have more atmosphere...so much for keeping things short....crap.

Smrt Dog Dum Dog.

Here's a sketch for a show idea of mine. what the heck I'm ever gonna do with this....I have no idea...but I've been trying to change the way I draw characters for the last while. There's so much great stuff out there and I tend to be stuck in a rut of sorts...I like the big dog, Spencer...but the Chihuahua blows. I'll fix him.

Mackenzie turns 10 !!!

Yep, it's true. My super awesome daughter is turning ten! I love you squirrel.

Valentine's card

I was playing with some digital pastels. I like the result....It's a bit cautious..but overall I think I'd like to continue with this sort of feel..and maybe down the road it would be cool to do a book in this style.

Grumman AA1B.

I Chose this plane because it's the one I used to own. Like all my paintings..this one isn't completely done. :) But I wanted to post it. Again, I'm not entirely happy with this but I feel like I'm learning. I've switched software for this one and I'm liking the results. And even though the software shouldn't matter, I find it easier to get the feel I'm looking for with this one. On the right is the full painting as it stands right now. I've got to do some work on me (the pilot) and refine the clouds...as well, I need to put the call letters on. They were there in an earlier version but I decided to darken the plane considerably and so I just went right over the Id. Too big a pain to paint around them. The second image is a bit of a detail of the airplane. In reality it's about 30 inches wide so this gives a bit of an idea of the printed size. Anyway, more to come....
in about a thousand years.

Merry Christmas !

Hey there. This was a complete blast to do :) One of those rare times that I have an image in my head and the end result feels pretty dang close! I've always wanted to do a Christmas card. Maybe this will be the beginning of a yearly tradition for little old me. Oh yeah, the two dudes on the hill are our cats. Roundy and Zoom.

Anywho, Merry Christmas folks, dudes, and dudettes. :)