2018 Finger Paintings!

[D Akey]

Excellent work. I like the portrait too. Seems actually like a portrait more than a sketch. And of course the aerial stuff is great. Doing a real job. Are you feeling more comfortable and familiar with the platform or is it about the same for you mechanically. All the paintings have been consistently good from the beginning.

[liora]

Chad, your work is amazing. Have you had art training or are you self-taught? What's been your path to getting where you are now? Thanks!

[sabena]

Fantastic portrait very good

[Chad Weatherford]

Excellent work. I like the portrait too. Seems actually like a portrait more than a sketch. And of course the aerial stuff is great. Doing a real job. Are you feeling more comfortable and familiar with the platform or is it about the same for you mechanically. All the paintings have been consistently good from the beginning.

Sorry I'm so slow on here lately. Been slammed lately.

Thanks again for your detailed rundown on the canvas settings etc earlier! ..actually picked up a few more tricks by experimenting with the canvas settings and different tools.

I appreciate all the support. I'm pretty comfortable with the platform, but not always satisfied exporting paintings straight out of ArtRage. That's why I usually do a Photoshop pass to Rez things up a bit and then bring it back to artrage to finish.

[Chad Weatherford]

Chad, your work is amazing. Have you had art training or are you self-taught? What's been your path to getting where you are now? Thanks!

Thank you! I have had training. I oil painted with my grandma and drew since a young age. Continued on the path prescribed to me by my parents I suppose, and went to university to study Illustration. I didn't really excel in the program and after graduation I was indecisive and floundered with odd jobs and finally settled into graphic design for a time. Almost 20 years agoI stumbled on Ryan Church and Eric Tiemens work for the Star Wars prequels and knew I had to be a concept designer, so I got real serious about it. My wife was real supportive and I quit my job essentially to go back to school and pursue a masters program in concept art. I busted tail to level up, got a job at an animation studio (the first studio to hire me) and eventually that led to me being honoured with an Emmy award as a character designer on a Dreamworks show called Dinotrux. I would like to eventually transition to be more of a plein air painter and self governed artist but we'll see!

All the above is a real trimmed up version of the story and it was far less linear. At any rate regarding the skill level it's just been a slow progression and I get frustrated that I'm not a better artist, so I keep plugging away with the hope that I'll get to the point where every stroke will be pure magic and knowledge. Haha of course that will quite possibly never happen but it keeps driving me forward.

With respect to training, given the gift of hindsight I would have made the most of my time before I had too many commitments to self train properly, as the cost of university is crippling.

Not sure if all that was the info you were looking for, but thank you so much for the question!

[Chad Weatherford]

Fantastic portrait very good

Thank you Sabena!

[Chad Weatherford]

Another commuter sketch....

[Chad Weatherford]

And another...wish I had more time to do the scarf!

[Chad Weatherford]

Morning sketch of the Burrard Inlet from Sentinel Hill in West Vancouver...

[D Akey]

Ugh. Wrote a whole thing that is somehow no longer here.

I'm glad you got some value out of the comments on using the canvas. Is that what you tried out for the seated girl? I see a number of things happening with the tooth.

Re: the scarf and not being done with it: Not having it taken farther has us focusing on other areas than the scarf. If you did one with the scarf being more worked on it would have been great, just a different focus for the viewer. As the viewer it's a matter of what you serve up and we take it from there. As it is it's not so much about a detail, but more an opportunity to look at the overall composition and color use and strokes and all that.

The painting gives an impression, but it's not like an illustration making a point, as with Pino's great paintings of women. He sort of pinches the focus in on what he considers the selling point = the girls' beauty and that pretty much dictates everything else. So I'm not missing anything with having more subtlety where the artist isn't standing at the painting with a pointer saying "Direct your attention to her beautiful face and hair" or whatever. It's more like something to savor this way. Both ways are nice. But there is something pleasurable to be able to savor and wander around a painting at leisure.