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.