A snowy picture for snowy dreams.
I miss the snow and have certainly been a bit delinquent in my snow-themed drawings this winter.
Anyway, I wanted to paint a sorta snowy juncture point, and this mountainpass kinda emerged.
Beyond that, there's no deeper meaning here, just love the snow (though I gotta go with rain as my #1) and love using cool colors, especially purple.
And this was the initial version we posted on Twitter.
Not normal,
Reuxben
A futuristic, fantastical rock formation for today.
I wanted to paint something using purple and yellow plus yellow and green, two two-color color combos I love.
These imaginary landscapes usually come together from just slashing down colors and rotating the random shapes until something chaotically emerges.
I also used this opportunity to test out some new Dave Greco Brushes I got recently, and these are a serious joy to use.
The yellow sky with a moon was also an exciting experiment that seems to lend that sci-fi-y vibe with ease, meanwhile the purple rocks could just as easily suggest a more fantasy feel as well.
Not normal,
Reuxben
I love the rain.
And I love the solitude of rain.
Especially rainy nights.
So I thought I'd make a salute to those lovely, lonely rainy days.
With a little ghostly dooder for good measure.
Not normal,
Reuxben
A lonely monument.
You know, sometimes I save these before the idea is fully fleshed out, in the "splash colors and shapes on the canvas and see what emerges" phase. So I believe I saved this one when it was looking like I was painting a green ocean or something.
In any case, I did this one a while ago, but had always wanted to revisit it since it felt like it could look really neat if given some more time to bake.
I particularly took the time to develop the clouds and do some more experimental lighting, and I even cut a version with runic light beams.
The other big objective here was to do more convincing green grass in a purple context, since our last attempt felt just a little too fantastical.
Anyway, this is the original version I posted to the daily sites, Twitter and Instagram.
And this is a neat black and white version of our final.
Not normal,
Reuxben
I really don't like painting hot temperature stuff, but decided to give it a go with this desert mountain affair.
Since I wasn't invested in the outcome I felt freer to try out some new tricks, and I'm satisfied with how it came out.
But I still would prefer returning to cooler subject matter.
Not normal,
Reuxben
A rando forest with a rando-er sprite!
I just wanted to draw some giant-scaled mushrooms, I guess...
Like the whole over-reliance on oceans trope, this falls into the other pitfall I feel I have--forests.
But I did like plugging in the little sprite character and how its lighting affected the nearby areas.
I dunno...
Not normal,
Reuxben
Some happy little clouds.
It was raining out so I wanted to paint a rainy scene, but it never came together so I compromised with this cloudy scene.
I was recently listening to this song, "I, the Swan" by The Sound of Animals Fighting, which has the catchiest groove to it as well as excellently employed vocals, and this made me want to make the clouds look swan-like, or at least bird-like.
Initially I just wanted to paint radical, swirling clouds like Grzegorz Rutkowski's new Iconic Masters Ryuusei art, and only after I blocked in the rough forms did I start getting birdsy vibes, which led to that swannish decision point.
After putting this piece away, that feeling of wanting to use my landscapes for greater purposes kept nagging at me. I often draw backgroundless figures or figuresless backgrounds, but rarely do I mix the two from the outset. So after finishing this, I came up with a figure to complement the imagery of a couple backgrounds (including this one), but I have yet to design both elements together from the outset, at least in recent memory, so that's still on the to-do list. I'll post the figure version at some point...
Much later (today is 2/5/18) I put a little mock Magic card together inspired by this card. The Great Designer Search 3 was still on my mind, I guess, but I've wanted to make little custom cards from my art for a while now.
Not normal,
Reuxben
Ok, this was a weirdly weird one. It started as a picture of an elf.
But to hit deadline, I needed something faster because I knew I wouldn't be able to finish the portrait in time.
So I ended up just painting a cloudy night sky with lots of stars with the classic foregrounded silhouette in front of a colorful background shtick.
But if you look closely, you can see the remnant of the elf ghosted into the coloring a bit
I guess an interesting note is that this is another landscape where I started painting straight up and then at random intervals would just totally warp and shift the canvas to generate new ideas and keep me on my toes, so this is the product of a lot of chance.
Not normal,
Reuxben
Maybe in my desperation not to paint oceans and lakes, I am now falling into a trap of painting forests...
Anyway, here is a little forest I painted in a desperate effort not to paint an ocean or lake.
I snuck in a little Totoro/Gengar-type named Ghoulio Iglesias.
It was meant to look like an ordinary old forest until you look just a little closer...mighta been thinking of this old number.
Not normal,
Reuxben
This is a take on that old "doorway to another world" trope.
It's kind of a reference to the very first rare I ever opened in Japan. I was studying abroad for the summer and saw a pack of JP Magic out in the wild! I couldn't read any Japanese back then, so I had no idea what this card did.
Anyway, it was only partially inspired by that, though. I really wanted to draw a mountain, high above the clouds, with the lower ground peeking out from beneath them. It did start out as a snowy mountain, hence the file name, but things shift around as we free-form these sketches.
Once we settled onto an ok mountain, it felt like we needed something to anchor the image, like a goal, so I added a Stonehenge-like thing, carved some cryptic runes, and then slid a sliver of an upcoming piece beneath it that we're not quite ready to unveil yet.
Directly calling back to my sense of awe at seeing the larger version of
Yeong-Hao Han's Millstone, I included a tiny figure that was ascending this hitherto scale-free scene.
I wasn't sure I was actually finished with this piece, but it's far enough along to remove from the docket and post here, meanwhile we're still toiling away at a couple concurrent illustrations.
Not normal,
Reuxben
