Before working extensively with digital tools, I spent years painting and drawing traditionally. These few examples are pieces that were created primarily with acrylic paint using layered glazing techniques to build color, depth, and atmosphere.
Traditional painting requires thinking carefully about light, shape, and simplification. By mixing color by hand and building an image layer by layer, it develops an intuitive understanding of how lighting shapes mood.
That knowledge continues to inform my digital work today, especially when exploring stylization in rendering. Many of the visual decisions in my shader and lighting experiments trace back to lessons learned in traditional media: how light wraps around a form, how color shifts in shadow, and how small exaggerations can give a character personality.
These paintings represent an early part of that exploration. They are small experiments in character, lighting, and atmosphere that still influence the way I approach digital imagery and rendering systems.
February 5, 2024