Playing with Digital pencils.

I still believe in working traditionally, but I was watching a tutorial at svslearn.com on working with digital pencils. a lot of my favorite artists work 100% digitally, and I thought I would start to train myself on how to use pencils as part of my process.... So here is my first digital sketch made entirely by me: created my own pencil and sketched in Photoshop.

Yay for cows!

WEBSITE UPDATED!

I updated the website, trying to make it a little cleaner, with slideshows... and also added more recent art. Hopefully it looks better, and is easy to navigate:

JOEL COOK ART DOT COM

Drawing with purpose:

I can't say anything yet, but I have begun sketching and drawing textures.... I will let you know more later:

Sending out art packages!

Have spent 3 weeks of my vacation sending out art packages to publishers. This is a lot harder than you would think. The spreadsheet alone needed 2-3 days. But this is what it looks like, mid-mailing:

This is one of those things that I always needed to get off my butt and do. To be honest, getting this off the ground was the hardest part. Now it is all about updating art and contacts and repeating...

Long Time, No See.

Whoa. Last post was at the beginning of 2014, and it is now 18 months later. Guess I owe a little explanation.

In Spring 2014, we moved to suburban Houston... which was about 20 mins highway driving away from my teaching job. Long story made short, I hated the commute, so I was able to secure a teaching job much closer to home (about 10 mins away)... so summer of 2014 was spent working on the house and getting ready for my new job. and then fall 2014-spring 2015 was spent at my new job working... so I didn't have time to blog. Now that I have a year under my belt, I am able to do the fun stuff again like blogging, and sketching a lot more.

The fun artsy part of the new job, is that I am teaching sculpture and ceramics now, which for me were new subjects to teach.

On the animal front, we lost a beautiful dog, Bella in November, who was incredibly special to me, as she was my first dog, and my first life that I was responsible for...

2001-2014

 ...but adopted another (this time a BOY!) in April. His name is Thunderpunch! He came from BARC, which is the city of Houston's place for unwanted animals.

Been spending a lot of time trying to get my artwork out there. Fingers crossed... to more success and more blogging!

Oh yeah, and there is a baby on the way (November!)...