The Sandpeople (1998)

A major shift

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My Honeymoon served as the dividing line between the era when I mostly worked in acrylic, to switching full-time to oils either alone or over acrylic underpaintings. Before leaving on that trip, I had worked on The Imperial Escort in acrylic, but had switched to oils towards the end. I had the next painting ready to go, this one, but it would wait until I returned from our trip, whereupon I began a second Star Wars-related piece, here.

The Sandpeople (1998), 11x17” oil on illustration board

This time I did it in oils entirely, for no reason except that finishing the prior one in oils was really enjoyable in a unique way and maybe for the first time, and helped with the final outcome. This wasn’t the first all-oils illustration I had done, but for the first time, I really felt comfortable with them, and I produced a piece that I felt in full control of.

Preliminary study (1998) 4.5x7” pencil. You can see I indicated a prior victim of theirs here, but thought the better of it and removed him before proceeding to final.

I don’t believe I did another fully-acrylic painting again after that point until 2017, nearly 20 years later, and even then it was in monochrome illustrations for digital coloring after. There were occasions when I might’ve attempted to do so, but usually well before the halfway point, I grew frustrated with the medium and switched back to oils.

Still, all was not easy with oils after that. The Sandpeople showed me it was possible, but I still had to fight a bit longer to get the medium to do what I wanted, reliably. There were many experiments left to try and new sets of habits to pick up, but overall, I think my work made its first real turn at this point. I scaled my first artistic plateau, one that had me leaving behind a raft of bad habits I’d developed on my own in acrylic.

Color studies, each 4.5x7” gouache. Unusually, I printed the sketch out on three sheets of watercolor paper and did different color studies. I usually don’t do color studies on my own. Interestingly, I didn’t choose any of these, exactly.

No one had taught me to paint in acrylics. Painting in that medium had been me reinventing the wheel from early high school when I first picked them up through 1998. Still, I’d taught myself lots of stuff that helped when I moved to oils. I only received very rudimentary instruction in oils back in college, close to none. So in both cases I still consider myself a self-taught painter. That wasn’t by choice—I had hoped to gain a lot of painting technical know-how in art school and instead received next-to-none.