Rainbow Trout

I've been working on a series of trout in the net paintings, not for anything special but just because I really like they way they look, a few years ago we fished all summer for a really big cutthroat trout on the Teton River, one afternoon my son and I were floating and we stopped where this big fish liked to hang out, well long story short, I caught him... I took a photo of the fish laying in the net. The photo turned out really great and I thought at the time, "this would make great reference for an interesting painting" so I painted it and if you follow me you probably saw the painting, well here is the next painting in the series, a rainbow trout in the net, this fish my brother in law caught while fishing the South Fork of the Snake river. The next painting will be of a brown trout my son caught on the Henry's fork of the Snake river. Anyway, the paintings are great fun to make, the net is particularly challenging to paint, and I really I like how it turned out, I hope you agree. I'm going to sell prints of these paintings due to some interest, I'll post the details if you are interested.

Sketch for painting

I do a fair amount of illustrations for Pheasants Forever magazine, this is a sketch for a painting for an upcoming story about hunting in Iowa, its a great story and was fun to come up with the sketches for the story. I use a fun process in Photoshop to do my sketches, I use an overlay layer filled with the color of my choice on a separate layer above the drawing layer, it gives the drawing this nice color that you can't get by just changing the color your drawing with. Anyway, just mixing it up a bit.

Sams Secret Christmas, (my latest book)

On friday I finished my latest book, I have been working on this one day and night for a while now, I don't know why but deadlines seem to creep up before you know it and then... a disaster happens. Fortunately this one I was able to pull off, I only had to ask for a few extra days to finish it. Its another Christmas story written by the great author George Durrant. The story is a touching one that will pull at your heart strings, (It did mine) the characters were fun to try to capture and make feel like they fit the part of the book, the main character, Sam, takes a big jump in time so I had to find two models that I could use to try to make the jump. I really enjoyed illustrating this book, it seems that most of the paintings turned out good, I remember reading some thoughts that NC Wyeth wrote when he  finished painting the images for Treasure Island, he seemed to be satisfied with the work he had done on the project, I sort of feel the same way on this book, the paintings turned out good for all the right reasons. I am satisfied. Of course if I had time to make changes I'm sure I would find something to fix or change, but alas the deadline has come and gone and I am on to the next project, actually I'm going to take a few days off and do some yard work and boat work. The book will be out for Christmas of 2014, I hope it does well, it was like I said, very satisfying to work on. Here is one of the illustrations of the angry Sam. He eventually comes around to grateful, happy Sam.

One Little Match

One little match,(my latest book) came out in March, the designers did a great job putting the book together and the publishers did a great job with the printing, all in all the book looks great. I was glad to be part of such a great book by such a great author. You should all run right out and buy several dozen copies for all your friends and family. Here is a link to buy it.