I love fantasy. I like stories that capture the imagination and make us question the limits of our reality. After all, reality is only what we percieve it to be. Here is my latest fantasy painting. It’s called dance of the undine. An undine is a water fairy-like creature from European folklore.

The thing I love about doing fantasy art is the freedom it affords me to play with color. I can give someone blue hair and purple skin and it’s fine cuz it’s a fantasy painting. I also like to imagine the stories of characters that I’m creating. This one is called Daughter of the Sky. She’s a person who comes from a world where the sky and everything in it are considered sacred. She wears feathers in her hair out of respect for the creatures that live in the sky and she has a gust of wind tattooed on her face. I imagine that her people live on high cliffs in order to be as close to the sky as they can manage. It’s just fun to play with the imagination sometimes.
The other thing about color in a fantasy piece, or in any piece for that matter is that it can be used to help tell the story. In this one I tried to only use colors that you might see in the sky. I was playing around with the idea of the sky being so important in her world. I also wanted it to feel a little strange and even foreign because those things that are normally warm colors are cool and vice versa. Not only that, I just thought it would be fun to draw a purple and blue person.

Here is my finished painting.  I’m going to call it Searching for the Sun. I’ve included some close up pictures so you can see the details better. (more…)

Here’s another fantasy painting I did. I named it Queen of Neziaro because of a fantasy land called Neziaro that my family made up. We like to make up legends and fantasy stories and such. You can read some of them here.

I’ve decided to enter an art competition that will go from Feb. 15th through March 28th. My sister in law, Kristina found out about it in the paper and sent me the article.

It’s always fun to enter a competition. Even when I don’t win it’s a kick. I never actually agree with the judges and it’s a lot of fun to go around and decide who I would have picked as a winner. There is so much talent out there. I always have to remind myself that I don’t have to be the best. I just have to be as good as I can be and that’s enough. It’s better to compete with myself, to always try to make the piece that I’m working on better than the last one and then if I fail to not mind and just try again the next time. The day that it becomes too serious is the day that I’ll stop. It has to be fun or what’s the point? We are that we might have joy, not stress and misery. Those things come but why bring them upon ourselves? I paint because I love it. If it sells, it sells. If it wins, it wins and if it doesn’t, at least I enjoyed the ride.

The paintings that you see on this post are the ones that I have decided to enter.

Once in awhile I really get in the mood to do a fantasy painting. There is something liberating about painting imaginary subjects. It’s very satisfying to create worlds that don’t really exist. It’s like playing.
I remember when I was a child, my friends and I would create the most vivid and beautiful lands in which to roam as we transformed ourselves into mighty dinosaurs or fearless space travelers exploring strange and exotic planets.
Fantasy art feels a little like that. I can create whatever I like as worlds in my mind form around enchanting characters that eventually make their way onto paper.