The New Year

Well here we are in the new year and to start things off I'm actually posting a new piece that I did in the middle of 2016. It's a commission for a friend of my family of her daughter and her horse, the only thing about it was that it took me a few years to get to it. It wasn't because I was overly busy, it was more along the lines of increasing my skills a bit. I look at being an artist (as well as many other things in life) kind of the same way you would a video game. I wanted my skills to advance a few more levels before I started on this and to do that I spent a good bit of last year stepping out of my comfort zone to try a variety of new mediums and it really helped to boost my levels. Everyone knows that the more you do something the more experienced you get, but at the same time the same approach and the same thinking becomes rigid and stagnant over time limiting what you can achieve, but by doing other projects (which will be uploaded before too long) I was able to expand my thinking and broaden my approach to each project which made me approach this commission with a new perspective. See for yourself.

It's been a few years since I had done a portrait and I'm glad I was able to do this one for them and they were very happy to have it. As for my next portrait I'm thinking of transitioning to color, but haven't decided on what medium yet.

Keeping with tradition, here's a preview of another commission that I'm working on, this one for a friends wood working business and it's also a new medium and approach. Very plain looking in the preview but it's coming to life rather nicely.

The new year is off to a good start, hope that it will prove to be a great one for everyone.

~Patrick

Winter is coming...

Nothing ominous about that, just always thought the Starks had the best words from Game of Thrones, but none the less Winter is coming. Technically it's here and now it's the holiday season, but since I didn't get this posting up sooner I'm acting like it's still earlier.

Today I posted a game changer for me as I really wanted to get into a very in depth color piece. I also wanted to experiment with a few other coloring methods that I've been thinking of and reading about, so I decided to give it a try and to do one of an animal, which I haven't done in the longest time, then I also debated about what kind of animal until I finally decided on doing one of a Hawk.

One of the biggest reasons of why this was a game changer for me was the way that I colored it which was a new way of blending color pencils, that was similar to how I do it with graphite pencils which all comes down to a number of layers upon layers slowly building up to a finished look, which made a familiar concept new and refreshing by doing it with color. As I said it was a real learning experience for me as it was my first time doing it this way and I was happy with how it turned out and how fun it was to experiment with and really helped kick start the creativity and helped make me more passionate about my work and continuing to experiment with new ideas and new combinations of mediums.

Overall I was happy with how it turned out, I was hoping for a better background for it, but as I look back at it now I realize I made a slight mistake in the first few layers of color in the background not being as solid as what they were on the hawk. It still came out nice and the point of every piece is to learn something new, especially when you try something new, so I look forward to continuing on with other pieces taking what I've learned with this to those in the future.

Here's a preview of what I'm working on next following the new ideas.

 

Some slight changes to the portfolio, more coming some time in the future, right now it's just a change in the header to reflect the coming changes.

In case I don't get another update in this month I'll simply say it now. Hope you all enjoy the holiday season.

Merry Christmas,

~Patrick

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween Everyone.

This first update I have since I started changing things over is a new sketch that I made up with Halloween in mind. I had scrap piece of black poster board left over from another project and decided to just sketch out a skull with a white colored pencil and then it just evolved into this.

All done with a white and blue colored pencil along with some white acrylic paint on a scrap piece of black paper. It's fun and a learning experience at the same time to try new things. The black poster board was definitely not one of the best mediums to draw on due to the consistency and how well the mediums worked with it, but still it was an interesting challenge and I hate to waste anything.

This piece also allowed me to show progression from an idea to a finished piece as I took photos of its progress and put them together in a video. I know a lot of other artists do this, but this is my first attempt and the quality shows as my progression pics were taken with my IPhone which lacks the ability to really capture the sketch at each step, but still came out rather nice.

See the video for yourself by clicking the link below.

 http://www.patrickmounts.com/storage/Skull%20Concept.wmv

Enjoy,

~Patrick

New Beginnings

It seems like its been so long since I've been on here and it really has. Almost two years since I posted anything new, not so much because I didn't make anything new but because I didn't have the time to upload new pieces.

In 2014 I lost my grandmother, lost the man who I loved like a father, almost lost my aunt and nearly lost my job, but my aunt recovered and just before thanksgiving of 2014 I was promoted to a full time position. Once 2015 rolled around I made a vow to myself that it would be the year I turn everything around and it has. Since that day (a year and half later) I'm a dedicated KenJutsu Ka (Technique of the Sword) which has been a dream of mine since I was a child. Learning the sword from my Sensei's at Traditional Martial Arts Society in Pittsburgh has allowed me to discover more about myself as well, so much so that I completely changed most of the things in my life. To date I've dropped over 80 lbs, I'm in the process of writing a fantasy novel, and my passion for my art has risen from that ashes like the proverbial phoenix.

So long story short I'll be changing things up here as well. The new header I put in is just the start of an overhaul I'm planning for my portfolio along with a number of new pieces that I'll upload in the near future.

~Patrick

Apologies for the updates

My apologies for the updates, or rather the lack of. I have close to a dozen new pieces to upload but life has kept me pretty busy lately. I also took a few commissions that the commissioners did not want me to add to my portfolio for different reasons.

For the last month or so I've been very busy as the Superintendent of Arts & Hand Crafts department at the West Alexander Fair and I gave the department a complete overhaul. The last layout had been that way for more than 60 years so it was in dire need of a change.

The Fair kicked off on Labor Day and the department got setup the night before. Had a few people who didn't make it because of the rain, but we still had a lot of people enter and I'm glad to say we had a lot of art come in this year, mostly for the junior division which is ages 14-19 and it was great and inspiring to see that there is a lot of young artistic talent out there that is going to bloom.

I'm allowed to compete in my department since I'm not the judge, but I don't because I think of that as a conflict of interests, but I do display my work in the hall for other people to see and I've heard from a lot of people who enter that they feel better that a fellow artist is in charge of the section. My latest portrait piece is on display in the hall of the fairgrounds at the moment, so when the fair finally concludes I hope to be able to get a few minutes that I can sit down and do a proper update to upload my new pieces and be able to share it with everyone.

Thanks for reading, Happy Labor Day!

~Patrick