Hello again, It's been some time since i've posted a blog entry but I feel that this one is kinda important since a lot of people seem to struggle with the age thing when it comes to making art as a profession. I am 36 years old, just shy of 37 in a couple of months and I am not working in the industry nor am I getting steady work as a freelance artist. So I know exactly what the feeling is to be at the beginning of your art journey at a "late" age. I do firmly believe that there is no age limit to when a person can delve into becoming a professional artist but I do think the sooner you know when you want to be a professional artist the better, because distractions and personal issues can get in the way of you ever truly putting your nose to the grindstone to becoming one. A little background about me is that I had some training at a for profit art school that I went to in 06', I enjoyed the 5 or 6 2D art classes that I took there and the rest I basically half assed because it was heavily 3D oriented, In which I had no interest in at the time. I was introduced to the basics of art however and I feel that I did what I could with those skills up til now, But I'm digressing.  Since graduating  in 2012 and after meeting my life-partner, I've basically been working non art jobs to cut out a life from scratch to get basic things like housing, a car etc, all while sketching only from imagination but never really practicing the fundamentals enough. Fast Forward to 2021 I got the basics that i needed covered but I was truly burnt out , so I took a year off of working at the warehouse,I lived off of selling my posessions and basically undwinded myself from the non stop physical work and pent up personal baggage. I was ready for a serious change and I honestly thought that I could just delve back into the world of freelance art as a living because I had done a little before, but I was wrong, Things have changed so much in such a short time And I came to realize that I lack much of what people are asking for and it is ALOT as it turns out. Even worse is that I had put myself into a niche of drawing mainly creatures while most clients look for human characters and studios that are hiring want an even broader skill set including 3D. SO, I If I am bieng brutally honest with myself I am really at the beginning of my art journey at the ripe age of 36. It can feel little overwhelming but that is the reality, I feel ready though  to stop skipping to the fun stuff and really buckle myself down about getting better because I still have this drive to make art for a living someday.  So this is really me saying that no, it's not too late to start and that learning from our struggles and mistakes is a part of the process, But we have to be honest with ourselves as artists, accept the reality of our own circumstances and to put more time into filling the gaps in our skillsets before we can offer our best work to people. I hope to make it as fun as possible learning in the days, months and years ahead, and I know that I will look back at this post and be grateful that I made the decision to start taking my art journey seriously. So, Here's to beginnings and as many more beginnings as it takes, just don't give up if you really want it.

This was a practice study for rendering in color, the process is the same as usual just blocking things in generally and then going into specifics. I went with a monochromatic color scheme with just the color red and I rendered it from there..
I'm positive I can keep rendering it til the cows come home but I think for the practice this was good enough and I did learn a little about rendering in color besides my usual grayscale comfort zone. Hopefully soon I'll be able to start out entirely in color but for now the process remains the same.

Sooo, I updated my site's domain and somehow lost my blog with it. I decided to post some old stuff I had saved that appeared on the blog from before the wipe out. So here is my first post in a long while which is my old post from a while back showing my process.
As the notes will tell you, there isn't much to it that isn't available freely on the internet that I will show you here, I always start with a thumbnail sketch to get down ideas and to pick which I want to render.
the next step is refining the sketch, making it more solidified as to what exactly the messy shapes are and lastly I throw on some color and put in the hours to get it to something I like and or want to show.. nothing "really quick" just yet but I'm sure with time these things can be done faster, but then what fun is that? I don't know...
anyway, thanks for reading and hope you get some insight out of the diagram.
Enjoy!