Cat bus, Imaginism news and new schoolism info

Here's a little sketch of the Cat Bus from Totoro :)

and some news...

- FREE SHIPPING on our books again! After many requests we're now selling our books on our site as well as Brand Studios.
If you don't mind waiting a bit longer so you get free shipping you can buy the books from our STORE.
If you buy from Brand Studio then you'd probably get your books quicker but might have to pay for shipping.

- 8 more originals for sale in our STORE

- The Conceptart.org workshop was amazing. If you ever have the opportunity, definitely make the trip. It's so inspiring and fun. Thanks to everyone that came! It was great to meet and speak with many influential people in the industry and feel honored to have been a part of something so pure and wonderful.

- It looks like the Pet Monsters book is going to be a bit delayed... we just want to make it perfect and it's been taking much longer than we anticipated. The good news is that at the same time we've been working on our Life Drawing book and that's been going much better since we do life drawing so regularly. So it looks like the Life Drawing book is going to come out before the Pet Monsters book.

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SCHOOLISM ONLINE CLASSES:

- Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu is now registering for class starting on June 22, 2009.

- Building a Powerful Comic Book Portfolio with Alvin Lee is now registering for class starting April 24, 2009.

- Character Design by Silver is now registering for class starting on June 8, 2009.

- The Art of Caricature with Jason Seiler is now registering for class starting April 10, 2009.

- Storyboarding with Kris Pearn is now available as SELF STUDY course.

More info at SCHOOLISM.COM

Elvis Costello

With this painting my goal was to paint loose, blocking in with shape and color. To some viewers of this blog "hyper-realism" is impressive, but to me it can be lifeless and boring, and it's not as challenging to me as brushy painting seems to be. To quote my friend Jan Op De Beeck . . . "You can train a monkey to render".

I'm more interested in creating art and I prefer paintings that hold life within the brushwork. I love that through the mess of brush strokes and overlapping color, an image can appear . . . that's why I paint, to understand and experience more.

On another note, I'm happy to announce that my painting of George Lucas was accepted in Comminication Arts Annual 2009!