All Good Things...

I told myself I wasn't going to write a long thing eulogizing our last days at the workshop. I tried to resist. At the very least I kept it short!

I started this Monday night, and finished sometime Tuesday. By the time it posts I'll be on the road back to New Jersey.

It seems like the workshop is ending in as much of a whirlwind as it began. We're all sitting awake drawing or getting ready to get back to our lives, mostly just trying to pass the time without getting sad.

No one wants to talk about it being over.

We watched some inspiring movies and documentaries, and some awful ones, too. Some were so bad they became fun again. Waking Sleeping Beauty (at Jimena's request) and it was almost as eye-opening as the rest of this workshop has been.

I can't express enough that every single day has held some sort of new life epiphany that will be nurtured, groomed, and developed for months and years to come. Not a single day drifted past without great things happening.

I feel like we all started this workshop last month with open minds and open eyes, waiting to see how our lives and art would be changed. We end this workshop with direction, equipped to teach ourselves in ways no one else could teach us in colleges and classrooms, and will spend the rest of our lives learning effectively and improving at our crafts.

We will all go our separate ways, thousands of miles from one another, but we will only become more close over time. We shared a significant amount of time as part of one another's lives, when you consider the 24/7 nature of the workshop.

We will surely collaborate on projects that came from the time we spent together talking about our dreams and goals over three meals a day and late nights of painting at our desks in the studio... we will connect each other to people in our lives that can help us on our way, so our lives are enriched for this experience in ways that go far beyond drawing and painting skills.

So all good things come to an end. I for one will be taking this as an opportunity to consider the sweeping change that is about to take place in all of our art and in our lives as we pursue new goals with as much excitement as we had for our time here.

To Imaginism Studios, Bobby, Kei, Jason, Peter, Fez, the rest of the crew, and especially Thierry and Isa, thank you all for the insights. Every conversation was electric with knowledge and passion for realizing our dreams, you gave us more than just new skills and knowledge, you inspired change in our lives and forged connections and friendships that will pay dividends out into the world for years to come.

A Face Only a Mother Could Love

Amphibious Cotillion - 12"x12" Acrylic on Panel

Well, its no Bouguereau painting, but its a start. I'll be refining this some more when I get home. The important thing to note here is that I used a pretty new method of painting for me, and came out with a result close to what I wanted...something a little weird with a classic feeling.

I'll be doing more like this in the future, for sure. If this is my first one, I can't wait until my fifth, or my tenth painting. The complexity possible is limitless... now I feel like I can do as much with acrylic/oil as I could EVER do with digital, if not more.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing my progress over the workshop. I can't wait to show you more art, announce new projects, and do more commissions for those of you that were waiting.

Feel free to email me any time with questions, comments, concerns or requests. This has been an absolute blast. :)

Stay tuned for another post with final thoughts on the workshop as a whole in the next few days!

Acrylic Concept

Digital concept for Acrylic Painting week at the Imaginism Workshop

This is my digital rough for the acrylic painting project we're doing in our last week at the workshop. I love this disgusting little girl because she has manners. Haha.

The interesting part about this is that the entire process from idea to 'finished' digital (which admittedly isn't perfect) took easily a 1/10th of the time that my work before the workshop would take.

Acrylic Underpainting of the digital rough...still needs some work but its almost ready for color!

Brain Renovations

Wow, how much has changed and how hard we've worked, and how much clearer everything is now. Just wow.

The difficult thing about posting during this workshop is that it requires 100% of your focus and dedication, and by the time you write a post, everything has improved and changed again, and the post becomes irrelevant, and you don't even want to post it.

Don't take the lack of posts from any of us to mean we're sitting back in some non-existent Imaginism Workshop lounge drinking cocktails and reminscing about the good ol' days when we made art. HA. HA. HA.

Thierry has been giving us challenging assignments, time crunches, tough deadlines, even tougher standards for our work, and more advice than you can wrap your head around. The learning almost can't keep up with the application of the new ideas, you just have to grab everything you can and process it later.

We're off to the Imaginism Studio for our official tour so I am cutting it short. I wish I had something visual to post, but you can see our gorgeous faces over at the Imaginism Blog, there's a post there about subway sketching!