This one is called Little Dancing Boy. I’m proud of this one on account of the fact that Lola ate the first attempt. Hahaha!

I don’t know whether or not any of you have noticed but lately my art has been changing. I’m not as concerned about how ‘realistic’ a painting is anymore. I’m much more interested in expressing myself creatively and sharing the way I feel about life and beauty. I want my paintings to flow with emotion and color. I want to drink deeply of the beauty that surrounds me and then create my own unique beauty that hopefully others will drink deeply of. I want my paintings to have a life of there own, not just look ‘real’. I kind of feel like I’m on an artistic journey. That sounds all dramatic, I know, but I love journeys and I constantly want to better myself and that includes (but isn’t at all limited to) my art.

The thing I love about doing fantasy art is the freedom it affords me to play with color. I can give someone blue hair and purple skin and it’s fine cuz it’s a fantasy painting. I also like to imagine the stories of characters that I’m creating. This one is called Daughter of the Sky. She’s a person who comes from a world where the sky and everything in it are considered sacred. She wears feathers in her hair out of respect for the creatures that live in the sky and she has a gust of wind tattooed on her face. I imagine that her people live on high cliffs in order to be as close to the sky as they can manage. It’s just fun to play with the imagination sometimes.
The other thing about color in a fantasy piece, or in any piece for that matter is that it can be used to help tell the story. In this one I tried to only use colors that you might see in the sky. I was playing around with the idea of the sky being so important in her world. I also wanted it to feel a little strange and even foreign because those things that are normally warm colors are cool and vice versa. Not only that, I just thought it would be fun to draw a purple and blue person.