A couple of new commissions!

Just popping in really quick. I've had my first coloured-pencil-from-photo commission in a long time, and another one has just lined up for the end of October. And then the lovely folks down at Excell Warmbloods have had me do a graphite portrait of their stallion Eastern Ruler, who is a gorgeous bay Warmblood (I am a sucker for big, red-bay horses!).

Here they are!

It's not often I put up original paintings for sale!

99% of the paintings I do are usually commissioned or very small, but recently I got some inspiration and picked up a canvas and did a painting to go along with my showjumping series!

This piece is 20x24 inches oil paint on stretched canvas and is for sale for $450, e-mail customcommissionsms@gmail.com for inquiries.

I will take a better picture tomorrow when I have natural light to work with, the light in my studio space  gives it a yellow wash and makes it hard to take a good in-focus picture. But here it is for now! It can't actually GO anywhere until next week as I just finished it today and thus will be wet for another week but if you'd like to buy it feel free to e-mail before then.

Scanned artwork!

I have the other one coming soon, but here's the scanned version of yesterday's artwork of CN international winner Olivier Philippaerts. The portrait is on pretty small paper but it turned out pretty decently! Moving onto portrait #2 today.

And a scanned version of the showjumper head I did before.

And more graphite!

I drew a show jumper yesterday. A few weeks ago, I took an adventure to Spruce Meadows in Calgary to watch the Spruce Meadows CN International $1 million show jumping competition. I have recently acquired a decent camera and took the opportunity to take a bunch of photos as I am in LOVE with show jumping (and have ridden show jumpers in the past) and it was my first time attending an international competition in show jumping.

Well the trip inspired me to start a show jumping series, and I have actually sent out some e-mails to some Grand Prix riders and I'm discussing potentially doing some portraits for a couple of them.

For now, I started on the series with the winner of the competition, Olivier Philippaerts, using a photo of him that I took myself.

Here's #1! I need to scan it yet as the lighting and the angle are bad in the photo, but it gives a good idea and I've thrown this photo on my website for now.

Another to add to the series.

I am having waaaay too much fun with this project. I mean the other pieces were fun and all, but for some reason (potentially the color scheme...) this is by far the funnest and my favorite. Which is cool, because every one I go further on on this series gets more entertaining in the best possible way.

So here's an update. My poor customer has been getting absolutely hammered with e-mail updates all day on this piece!

Current oil painting project

So as some of you know, I've been quite busy with a number of oil paintings recently. Two are corporate series and are going through copyright transfer right now, but if the businesses are okay with it, I will be posting the entire series at the end of it. Another is a personal series.

I just want to throw a few pieces in a series up here to give a view of what I've been working on in one of these areas.

It's official!

Tonight, it's going up on the website and social media. But the readers get it here first!

CCMS is now offering speed drawing/painting videos of customer's artwork.

For $10.00 I will film the artwork being made, go through a digital editing process, and then put a video together featuring the finished product and the making of, along with original music and a few artist's notes on the work.

The video will be featured on my YouTube channel, and the link will be provided with the artwork to make for easy sharing on the internet.

The customer will also receive a DVD with the video.

Here's an example (sans artist's comments)





Also, I am taking requests for tutorials to put on the website, so if anyone has any suggestions or anything they want to see, please let me know!