30JUN2025

Hello again! This past week has went by so fast. I’ve made some progress on the painting of the Wheel of Time book 2 cover. I have some pictures attached to this post of where I’m at. Progress has been going a little slowly on this piece- I’m still in the underdrawing phase, and I’ve been only working on the characters so far. I’m including Min, Rand, and Moiraine, and in the background there’s going to be some flags and things. On the back cover, there will be quite a few people who I haven’t even started drawing yet- they’re going to be swearing their fealty/loyalty to Rand, and I’m considering how to paint them. They definitely won’t be painted with the same level of attention as the main characters on the front cover. I’m going to have to leave room for text on the back cover as well, so it’s going to be challenging when I get there to decide how exactly I’m going to be handling the crowd on the back.

I also started doing a little graphic design stuff last week. I started with an infographic about different coffee roasts- coffee is a huge passion of mine (I’m a little snobby about it), and I had a pretty good time making the infographic. I think it’ll be a good addition to my portfolio when it’s done. It’s almost there currently, but I need to edit the text because I’m not 100% sure that its working as well as it could right now. There’s not a ton of info on the graphic, but I think it gets the necessary info across. It includes common flavor profiles, roast temperatures, and levels of acidity and bitterness currently. I’m not incredibly happy with the arrangement of the text boxes either, but I think it’s working well enough currently.

In all, it was a productive week, but I’m hoping that this week will be even more productive. Outside of the art, it was a fantastic week. I threw a surprise party for my girlfriend, my sister got engaged, and I went tubing on the river over the weekend. I may look like a lobster right now, but the tubing was definitely worth it. It was a very long lazy-river style of tubing, and we were out on the water for about 6 hours. Truly a great time.

Anyway, here’s the pictures I was talking about. Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!

23JUN2025

Hello! Long time, no talk. Long time, never talk? This is my first blog post. Thanks so much for checking it out! Maybe if I keep this going for a while, I could say “thanks so much for scrolling all the way down here.” We’ll see, I guess. I’m intending to keep posting these every Monday from now until… whenever. I’m also intending to really pick up the art creation and start doing some design work. If I end up making things that are good, I’ll make another tab on here to show them off.

Today, I started working on an old illustration piece that I began last year. I’m coming off of a break from painting digitally, and decided to pick it back up. Rather than going through a bunch of ideation, I chose to pick up an old idea. I’m working on a book cover for book two of The Wheel of Time (a fantastic, if sometimes slow, fantasy novel series made by Robert Jordan, and finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death), titled “The Great Hunt.” I have a collection of the old edition hardcovers of this whole series. After the Amazon show came out, they made a whole bunch of new covers that are quite boring. This is really the book of the series that stole my attention. I listened to the series on audiobook over the course of my first year freelancing, and I remember working on final drawing for the portrait of Chairman Benny Thompson (this one) while listening to the part of the book that I decided to illustrate for this cover. This illustration has been cooking for a while. I haven’t stopped thinking about it, but I did take about a year-long break from working on it. It’s been nice to get back into it, and to blow the dust off of the Wacom Tablet. I’ll be posting updates about all of this next week.

Here’s some pictures of what I’ve been working on! This includes a couple preliminary sketches, where I’m currently at in my drawing (the blue lines are guides for where the cover will be split between front, spine, cover, and the front and back flaps), and the reference picture I’m working from. It also includes the old cover (which isn’t my favorite book cover ever, but it’s fun and looks great: originally illustrated/painted by Darrell K. Sweet), and the new cover (I do really like the actual painting, but overall I am unimpressed by the design and framing of this cover: the painting was done by Kekai Kotaki).