Chickadee

As promised yesterday, today I present you with the second of my quick study paintings done just before IlluxCon.

 While I could have dug back into my catalog of model photos, I decided I needed to do something different. Really different. I wanted the second piece to clearly be a fantasy image, but that's about all. I pondered this for a while and began to list off things that I hoped the piece might accomplish thinking that placing these restrictions on myself might result in an idea. What it resulted in, however, was my thinking of this second piece as being very precious and important. So I threw that all out the window and looked at it another way.

One of the things I am often asked to do at events and conventions is to do drawings on the back of my artist proofs.  For those not in the know, artist proofs are essentially Magic cards printed with a plain, white back instead of the Magic logo. Long ago, artist proofs of various products had a very real purpose. They existed so that the artist could see their work printed in hopes to control quality. As time passed, artist proofs became less necessary as the printing process continued to improve and the margin of error continued to narrow. The artist proofs Magic artists get nowadays, for example, are issued to us long after the print runs have been completed. Indeed they seem to exist for only one reason: they're highly collectible as there are only 50 in existence of any given card.

Now that I've gotten that explanation out of the way, I can tell you that one of the side effects of the artist proofs existing is that Magic artists are often asked to draw on the blank, white back of them. Sometimes specific images are requested. More often than not, however, I've been asked to draw whatever I want.

While I do try and treat each drawing as a unique piece of art rather than an opportunity to knock out a stock image I could do with my eyes closed, themes have inevitably developed within my drawings over the years. One of the themes I've revisited most often involves the juxtaposition of fantasy/horror tropes with small birds. The origin of this theme is hard to explain but suffice it to say that I've always had a fascination with little birds throughout my life. Sure, the larger avian species are cool and all, but the little guys who nonchalantly flit about have always been the most interesting to me. Especially those cloaked in browns and grays, eschewing bright plumage like that of their flashier cousins. Appearing unremarkable, such birds are nevertheless ever-present, always watching.

And so, I decided to treat this second painting as I would the blank back of an artist proof and visit this theme not in pen or marker, but in oil paint.

©Steven Belledin

The first session took about an hour and consisted of me blocking everything in using colors I had left over from another painting I was doing at the time. Initially, it had some interesting qualities that evoked the idea of a monotype, but not really. Essentially, it was just really scrubby and loose, but I am kind of kicking myself for not photographing the thing at this stage.

The second session consisted of me finishing the painting over about two hours.

Like the first study, this is oil on primed harboard and measures 5" x 7". As I see it, this piece is not about the zombie, and so I titled it accordingly. Or maybe I was just trying to be cute. Whatever the case, I call it Chickadee.

The takeaway from these pieces is that I should do more. I enjoyed painting them immensely, they involved very little risk, and they got a pretty decent response. Above all else, they're a fast means of getting ideas out in a very tangible way and in a more fleshed-out manner than my lackluster sketches allow for. How often I'll get to do them and how many I'll be doing in the future is something I can't rightly answer, but I suspect that you'll be seeing me talk about more of these as they come into existence. I'll be sure to include the failures, as well.

Study of Apathy I

This past weekend, I had the fortune of being included in the Weekend Salon of IlluxCon. It was an interesting show and as usual managed to both crush my soul and provide ample amounts of inspiration. If nothing else, the show managed to remind me of how hard I should be working if I want to be included in the main show. But then no one who has ever read this blog should find it surprising that I see my work as inadequate.

Anyway, between the cross country relocation, my assignments and two weeks spent chained to a desk doing concept art, I was left with very little time to prepare for IlluxCon this year. In addition to this lack of time, I was for a variety of reasons also short on new work to display. And so, given the circumstances, the best I could do as far as new work went was to paint a couple quick pieces that I hoped would be worth a darn. Work on these pieces was done while taking short breaks from painting my assignments at night after long days of concepting in-house in the weeks before IlluxCon, and their completion came down to the wire. Indeed I was expecting to have to varnish at least one of them during the show itself.

I decided that the first of these pieces would be figurative, and at the end of the day did not include any fantasy elements. It would be just a straightforward study. And were this a normal discussion of my work, I would show you a sketch at this point. However, where this piece is concerned, there was no sketch. I had a reference photograph I took of a model from a couple years ago (the same model that can be seen in my as yet unfinished and only recently unboxed personal piece), and a primed 5" x7" piece of hardboard. And some oil paint. And brushes and such.

Here is the result:

©Steven Belledin

Aside from what I've already said, there's very little to add. I guess I could say that I blocked the whole thing in in about two hours and then refined it in a second session that lasted about an hour. I guess I could also tell you that I enjoyed painting it quite a bit, and that I'm not entirely unhappy with the piece — especially given the fairly minimal time investment.

Tomorrow I'll show you the second one, which is quite a bit different.

Where I've Been...Sorta

I'll open this post with the obligatory apology for my absence. I have not posted anything for over a month and I'm not super happy with myself over the fact. If nothing else, it nags at me that the entire month of August will be unrepresented in my blog archive.

June, July...September. Fail.

I also apologize in advance for the amorphous nature of this post and it's total uselessness. If anything, it exists purely to assure anyone curious enough that I am, in fact, still quite alive, and have not given up on the blog.

Still, in my defense, a lot has happened since July 29th, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to give you all a bit of a rundown to bring you all up to current events.

First, we completed the move from New Jersey to Seattle. This involved two stays at two different temporary housing facilities, two stays at two different hotels, and finally an apartment. It also required a tractor trailer with a driver called Virgil, and about six weeks of time total to get us and our stuff out of the Garden State and deposit it in the Evergreen State (which over the summer took on a brownish color in Seattle).

Second, we managed to completely unpack. Normally, this would have been a slightly more leisurely event, but I kind of needed to get my stuff squared away before the 19th of August for reasons I will get to in a moment. I also had painting to do and apparently have an inability to think clearly when all our worldly possessions are crammed into boxes. Rather than painting, I felt the need to help our stuff escape its respective corrugated prisons so that I might create chaos from order only to enstate a new order, which allowed me to finally start painting on a "Blue Monday" with a clear mind.

See what I did there?

The short version is that we got moved in and settled. We even managed to take the time to clean the mystery stains out of the basement carpet.

Mmmmm... mystery stains.

Third, as mentioned above, on August 19th, I started a two week stint as a concept artist. It was a short burst and it was intense. But it was also awesome. During that two weeks, I did lots of stuff I can't talk about. Some of the stuff I did was with a pencil. Some other stuff was digital. And when I was finished doing stuff I can't tell you about during the daytime, I would come home each night and paint more stuff I can't talk about.

Funny how secretive I must be about what it is that I supposedly do all day. I mean, I'm not exactly starting coups and unseating dictators. Not exactly. Steve Belledin: art spy.

Anyway, with those three big events, time became a very precious commodity. I was busy. Really busy. Too busy, even, to get stressed about any of it. I had so much on my plate that all I could do was focus on one small thing at a time and ignore the bigger picture. I just had to trust that the bigger stuff would fall into place while I slowly completed things on a checklist. Fortunately, my faith in things working out was well founded because they did, in fact, work out. Plus I got all the things done I needed to do.

Except write anything for this blog, of course.

Now, I do have some false starts of posts begun over the last month that I'll be looking over again — mostly to do with moving one's studio and the kind of people you deal with when you move (people who tell you you're wrong for liking cities you like and such). If they're worth something, I'll try and bang them into shape. They just won't be particularly timely anymore. But, there might at least be enough useful information or entertainment value to excuse their existence.

Of course, all this depends on how the coming months go. I've got a few art posts that need writing and IlluxCon to prepare for. Then there's the painting that I need to turn in before the con. And then it's off to do more concepting once I'm home from the con, plus more painting. I'm sure I could afford to skip a meal or lose a few hours of sleep to make a post or two happen. No one will notice. Right?

How did I get so busy? And why am I so happy about it?

Revisiting Reprints: Tome Scour

It may interest some of you reading this that Tome Scour is old. Really old. In fact, I think it may have been around the 5th or 6th painting I ever did for Magic: the Gathering, which would mean that it was painted in 2006. Despite this fact, the piece did not see the light of day until the Magic 2010 core set which was released in 2009.

Why the delay? My suspicion is that whatever the image was originally commissioned for either got dropped, cancelled or kicked down the road. Perhaps the set the card was originally intended for was no longer necessary. Perhaps the card was set aside in order to preserve mechanical balance within its intended set. Or perhaps the designers just couldn't get the original card's mechanic to function properly. Who knows? Such things happen in the wonderful world of games.

And so it was put into the flat files at Wizards of the Coast where it would sit among all the other images that have never been published for three years. Three years, it turns out, that saw a noticeable degree of artistic growth from yours truly. Enough growth, in fact, to come to the realization that I wasn't quite happy with that piece anymore. Well, I would have been unhappy with it had I remembered it existed in the first place.

Don't worry, fate made sure I was reminded upon the arrival of my artist proofs¹ for the M10 Core Set in the summer of 2009. There the image was atop a card called Tome Scour. My heart sank. There the image was, exposed for all to see, and one of many that I would end up wishing I could take back. Indeed, had I known that Wizards intended to use the piece in M10, I would have made the time to paint a new piece or go back into the original version. But it was too late.

Sigh.

So let's take a look at the piece in question. It sports a young wizard gleefully pulling the writing from off the pages of a large mystical book, the words and diagrams once formed of ink consumed by magic as they float away in the air. Sounds potentially cool when I write it. But somehow less so when I painted it. But then I'm kind of blind to any charms the piece might still retain.

©Wizards of the Coast

The finished piece was done on Strathmore illustration board and measured 11" wide by 8" tall.

The painting is one that falls short of being the worst thing I've painted for Magic, but falls far shorter of being the best. What bothered me more than anything is that because it came out with other pieces done more recently that I was actually happy with, it had the appearance of being the ball I'd dropped. There was no way for anyone to tell that it was just an old piece that I'd outgrown.

Sigh. Again.

I wish I could tell you that it got printed and the game moved on — that it was a one-off and didn't see a lot of play. But that wouldn't be accurate. A year later, it was reprinted in the Magic 2011 Core Set. And I grew to dislike it a bit more. Another year had gone by and I'd like to believe I'd progressed a little further. But then time passed, and I saw the card less and less. I became optimistic that I might not see it as often anymore. But alas, it was not to be. The thing has reappeared in the new Magic 2014 Core Set.

Now, reading this, one might get the sense that I'm completely down on this piece. Surprisingly, that's not so. Like I said before, it's not the worst thing I've ever painted for Magic, and it represents a very wonderful thing that I intend to share with you. While I do feel like I've outgrown the image, I can't say I have any true animosity toward it. Instead, I see it as a reminder in some ways of how fortunate I actually am. You see, under most circumstances with gaming art, this piece would have disappeared and passed out of the public consciousness long ago. Why? Because under normal circumstances, the game likely would no longer be in print. Indeed under normal circumstances it might even be considered a miracle if the company that produced the game was still in business.

You see, the nature of the business, I'm sad to say, is that few companies have had any kind of longevity. Of the imprints manufactured by those few companies that have managed to stick around, even fewer games have had anything even resembling a long life. The only reason I even have the opportunity to complain about this less than stellar piece of art still kicking about is that I just happened to have done it for a game that has withstood the test of time and has continued to grow over 20 years — something that is pretty special. If I'm honest, having pieces that I'm not happy with floating out there for all to see is a pretty small price to pay for being a part of the Magic brand and I have to say once again that I'm honored to be a part of the the game and the community that goes along with it.

---

1 For those not in the know, artist proofs are copies of the artist's cards provided to the artists which have a face — which includes the artwork — but no printed back leaving a white side instead of the usual printed Magic card bacing. These artist proofs are also referred to as "white backs" for this reason, and are considered highly collectible due to the fact that only fifty are made of any given card.^↩

The Fun Stresses of Relocation

Moving across a continent, it turns out, is a difficult thing. Though I've not completed the task as yet, I'm at least deep enough into the process that I can safely tell you that I'd do things differently if I had to do it all again in the future. If there is a next time (and there won't be), I'd likely just pile my worldly belongings in the front yard and set it all on fire. Then I'd be free to move with ease and have the ability to start from scratch at our final destination. Fortunately, despite the inherent stresses of this particular move, Amy and I have somehow managed to keep our cool.

Mostly.

The issues we have had were mostly due to timing. First off, while Amy's new job was the stuff of dreams, it carried with it a need to be in Seattle very shortly after accepting the position. As a result, we were left with just enough time to once more sort through our worldly belongings (which after several previous moves had been thoroughly picked through), make several trips to the local donation bins, and for me to get a couple days of painting done on an assignment that I'd already committed to before the job offer even came along.

What we didn't have time for was the little things like getting our stuff packed up and moved out to Seattle. However, even if we had the time to get all that squared away, we'd have had no address to give the movers as we didn't have a new apartment lined up. And so the moving dates got kicked down the road to relatively arbitrary dates which would hopefully result in our stuff arriving in Seattle on or about August 1st. In the meantime, we would temporarily relocate to Seattle with whatever would fit in two suitcases (mine was mostly art supplies), with the mission to find a new place while Amy began her new job.

Having gone through a couple moves in the last three years, we thought we were pretty prepared — in fact, Amy managed to get most of the ducks in a row. And though it seemed as though we were on top of things, it turned out that what we simply were not prepared for was the rental housing market in Seattle. Previous experiences in shopping for a place to live in the Boston and greater New York Metro areas yielded multiple viable options in very short periods of time. This was not to be so in the Emerald City.

Initially, we did what we'd done before: call some realtors. Unlike in previous cases, realtors turned out not to be particularly helpful. Not only did the realtors rarely get back to us, but it turned out they were actually an obstacle to finding a place to live. Why? Simple. Involving them lost precious time in reacting to opportunities. This is extremely important in the current rental climate because apartments and houses are being snatched up within minutes of being listed. Several times we arrived to see properties that had been listed a mere day before only to be presented with stacks of completed applications from other potential renters. Other times we dealt with the gauntlet of open houses for rental properties where dozens of people were crowded into spaces not fit to hold them as they all vied for a chance to live in the place.

The net result of the extreme competition in the current rental market in Seattle is that the easiest places to get to see were the places that most folks would not want to live in. Places that smelled of cat urine or wet dog. Apartments completely devoid of light. Houses with mother-in-law suites where the mother-in-law just might be stuffed into the crawl space or boarded up behind one of the walls. Places completely wrecked by previous tenants or kept by seemingly indifferent landlords. And then there were the many decent dwellings that were in less than optimal neighborhoods.

For the most part, visiting many of these places was like being thrown into a pit to fight it out with other potential renters. While some of property owners were likely just attempting to ferret out bad candidates, I'm certain that many of the tactics involved were attempts to start bidding wars. Either way, we figured that you could tell a lot about potential landlords by how they treated their potential renters. Folks that created situations that encouraged passive aggressive behavior or open hostility between strangers were not the kind of folks we wanted to write checks to every month. It's no surprise, either, that there turned out to be a correlation between the level of class displayed by landlords when dealing with potential renters and the quality of the dwellings themselves.

To say that our first few days searching here were disheartening would be an understatement. While I attempted to stay optimistic about it all (something that is quite out of character), Amy began to have her doubts and I could tell she was starting to get a little stressed. Nevertheless, each morning we got up early and went through the listings, making phone call after phone call,  just hoping for a place to come along that we could snatch up and make our own.

I'm happy to say that after many days of searching, we finally did find a place with promise. Within five minutes of the house being listed, Amy had already sent an email. Not long after, we got a call to come look at the place. A tour was given, an application was filled out, some references were checked, and the place was ours.

There was much rejoicing.

Now, I realize that I've made it sound as though we've done all this ourselves. The truth is that we've had a lot of assistance. Amy's new employer has been incredibly helpful in trying to smooth out the logistics of relocating cross-country. They've answered a lot of questions and have bent over backwards to make the compressed timeline easier to deal with.

Our biggest thanks, however, have to go to Franz and Imelda Vohwinkel who have given generously of their time to help us find a place, advise us on neighborhoods, and send us more listings than we could count. Their aid was key to our finding our new home and I simply cannot thank them enough. A new place to live was easily the biggest variable we had to solve for and was probably the most stressful.

Securing an apartment here in Seattle meant that the remaining big puzzle pieces were finally ready to be put into place, and for the most part we've managed to get everything figured out. Next week, we'll return to New Jersey, pack a few things, close up shop, and supervise the move. Then we'll fly back here and wait for everything to show up. And while waiting in some ways will be the most difficult part of this process, I must confess it'll also somehow be the least stressful. There will be no decisions to make after all, and at least I'll be able to do some prep work at the new place to bide my time.

The end of this journey may not be in sight, but I'm happy to say we've got a pretty good map to help us get there.

Breaking Radio Silence

I have not contributed anything to this blog in a long time. Too long, in fact. But I've been doing stuff. Lots of stuff. There's been fretting stuff and logistical stuff. Rummaging stuff and sorting stuff. Just not so much art stuff.

What have I really been up to? Preparation. Finally, after hinting at big changes to come for quite some time now, I can finally reveal the news:

We're moving. Again.

Big deal, you must be saying. You've already moved twice since this blog's inception. This is not interesting!

True. All true. But for us, it is a big deal. Sure we're not strangers to relocating, but this time is a little different. This time we'll be moving far away from our families and the areas we've grown so familiar with. This time we're finally moving out of the Northeast Corridor. This time, we're headed West.

You know, I think if Amy and I could go back in our mutual past and do one thing differently, we would have spent some time traveling the United States after college in order to make a real decision as to where we wanted to live. Instead, we took the safest route and stayed right where we were at the time: New York City. After all, our stuff was there, and I had a job in a public relations firm. What quickly happened, however, was that we got stuck in New York. Like so much quicksand, every bit of struggle just sucked us in deeper. We could never seem to get ahead, and before we knew it we were incapable of comfortably making an exit, and so we put our heads down and continued doing what we were doing, all the while hoping something might come along.

Miraculously, a few years ago something did. We got the opportunity to move to Boston and we were finally able to begin breaking ties with New York City. Not completely, of course, as only fourteen months after leaving for Boston we once again found ourselves in the New York area. However, this go around, we managed to orbit the city from New Jersey, thus keeping us from being totally sucked in all over again. Of course, we were immediately and constantly reminded of why we wanted to leave in the first place, and so we began to hope anew.

As you can tell, we spent a lot of our time together waiting for something to happen to us. We knew we didn't want to live around the city anymore, but we didn't take any action to alter our course. But over the last year, that began to change. We began to talk. And that talk began to evolve into a plan. We made a short list of cities we'd potentially like to move to and started doing some research. We were determined to move, it was just a matter of where.

Coincidentally, as our plan coalesced, the possibility of new work for Amy came out of the city at the top of that short list. The possibility, over time, became a reality. And so we're moving to Seattle.

So what does this all mean?

For the blog? Well, you'll probably get to bear witness to my summer being consumed by all the things that come with moving. Hopefully there'll be some art stuff in here, but I'm sad to say that much of my work will be in boxes for much of the coming months. That being said, there's still a possibility that I'll be able to pull something together, but right now it looks like you'll actually have to read rather than look at the pictures.

For my work? In the short term, it'll mean less work getting done, but some semblance of normalcy once the dust clears. I have, after all, been partially hobbled with the knowledge that much of my situation of late was temporary. That type of thing makes me anxious and I'm less productive when I'm anxious.

But all that's in the short term. As regards the long term, the plan (if it proves viable) is that I'll be taking the time to do more personal work. I will try, once and for all, to find my voice and my passion. It's something I've struggled with for a while now, and it's Amy's biggest wish for me. The heart of that journey, when it finally begins, might just be my ultimate reward for rolling with all the moves as they've come by. I look forward to seeing how this new move plays out and where (aside from Seattle) it takes me.

Spectrum Fantastic Art Live 2 By the Numbers

Total number of miles traveled round-trip: 2,431

Total days spent driving round-trip: 4

Total number of times we re-filled the fuel tank: 8

Total amount of gas we had in the tank when we returned home: 3/4 of a tank (11.25 gallons)

Approximate miles per gallon (I lost a receipt so I had to estimate one refill): 27.38

Our car's rating for estimated highway miles per gallon: 27

Total number of Cracker Barrel restaurants encountered one way: 24

Number of deer carcasses seen on the way to Kansas City: 16

Number of deer carcasses seen on the way home: 12

Number of billboards advertising something religious on the way to KC: 15

Number of billboards advertising something adult on the way to KC: 18

Number of billboards advertising fireworks on the way to KC: 24

Number of billboards advertising the sale of cowboy or Western-style boots on the way home: 8 (a number seemingly much smaller than that which we might have have gotten had we kept track of them on the way to KC)

Number of billboards advertising the sale of antiques on the way home: 19

Total number of billboards advertising pie round-trip: 4

Total number of pie pieces consumed by both Amy and me: 3

Of those pieces of pie, the total that were lemon meringue: 1

Of those pieces of pie, the total that were cherry: 1

Of those pieces of pie, the total that were blackberry: 1

Total number of billboards advertising the value of using billboards to advertise: unknown, but easily far exceeding any of the other totals

Number of convertibles encountered on the way to KC: 6

Number of convertibles encountered on the way home: 5

Number of those convertibles with their top down: 5

Number of those convertibles seemingly driven by maniacs: 3

Number of drawings done while at SFAL 2: 10

Number of drawings I was happy with: 9

Number of PopTarts consumed by both Amy and me during the entire trip: 14

Number of PopTarts I was permitted to consume before the age of 18: 0

Number of therapy sessions required to deal with the previous number: 0

It was a crazy show, to be sure, and it was fun to share the ride with my wife, Amy. I would have bet that she'd grow irritated by me at some point during the trip (and I'm sure some of you might have thought the same thing), but it turns out her tolerance for any annoyance I might dish out far exceeds expectations. Always fun, though, to have her by my side, and I suspect my fellow artists find me slightly more tolerable when she's around. I'm more than a little partial to her, myself.