Owen William Weber Illustration

I have just finished another two paintings in my ongoing Prehistoric Creatures series.  The most recent four in the series have all been mammals that lived millions of years after the dinosaurs went extinct.  I plan to do seven of these mammals and then go back to dinosaurs, maybe group them into Prehistoric Creatures Series 1, Series 2, etc.  They are all for sale, but they have been snatched up quick, so if anyone as inquiries on pricing, please email me at owweberillustration@gmail.com . I have been doing pencil portraits of many prehistoric animals on my instagram account, and these two have gotten the most likes, which is a great way of knowing which creature to paint next for this series.  Smilodon is very well know.  Along with the Woolly Mammoth, it's one of the most well known extinct creatures from the Early Pleistocene era.  It was only a matter of time before I was going to paint this guy.  I wanted to show it in a way that was not ofte...

Though I did not do all the challenges of the Month of Love tumblr blog, I did do two.  I tried to come up with good ideas for the other two challenges, but for whatever reason, it just didn't work out.  So here are the two that I did complete. The first piece I painted was for the Second week, the challenge being: Language of Love.  I thought it was an interesting idea to convey the ways animals show love to their owners.  This image came to mind.  Though we have never had a mouse problem, our cat has on occasion displayed a waterbug or two it has killed.  I was able to piece together a couple reference photos I took of our cat for this piece, so it worked as a nice portrait of Mim.  I painted this all in one sitting, something I haven't done in quite some time. A Present , 7" x 10", Oil on Paper on Masonite, 2016.  The second piece I painted was for the Third week, the challenge being: Weapons.  I was really having trouble coming up...

A Winter's Dream , 17" x 11", Oil on Paper on Masonite, 2015. Back in August, the 6th to be exact, Sarah and I welcomed our baby girl, Dagmar, into the world.  She is now turning 6 months old and I am just now getting around to posting the first blog post since the summer.  She's a lot of work, but not enough to excuse my laziness about this blog.  Anyways, for the past three years I have done a Nisse painting as my Winter card, but for some reason I just wasn't in the mood to come up with a new Nisse painting, and I just didn't feel like I had a great composition in mind this winter.  So I looked to my new muse.  I took a picture one morning of her sleeping, and worked in some creatures, new and old, real and surreal into the winter landscape around her.  I've always wondered what she dreams, I can't imagine her dreams look like this, but I thought it was a cool idea. Also, I have been doing a One Sketch A Day sketchbook since New Year's, so ...

These are the finals for the two pet portraits I did a while back.  I've kept from posting them because it will be a long time before I have new material to post again.  I am working on two commissions that cannot be shown until they are made public by the company, so it will be a while. These were fun portraits to do, I love animals and they always bring completely different challenges to painting humans.  Fur is very meticulous, but really fun for me at least.  I can go on auto-pilot and slip into a kind of zen while painting fur.  These two where very unique animals, I am very proud of the paintings and since finishing them, a lot of people have been in disbelief when I tell them they are paintings.  But thats because they're on my iTouch and when shrunken everything looks tighter and more natural. Nikita and Babette , both 12" x 16", Oil on Paper on Masonite, 2011.

Lately I have been working on a couple pet commissions.  One is a Siberian cat and I will be starting an English Bulldog very soon.  Just thought you might see my day to day work on the Siberian cat portrait. This is my sketch for the portrait, I tried to get as much detail as I could, because winging fur like this is really annoying, and the painting went by a lot smoother because of going the extra distance with the drawing. Next I laid in the background colors, keeping in mind where the lights and darks would be on the cat, I put a light blue next to the portions that were darker in the cat and a more mid-range blue next to the highlights of the fur.  I like to lay in the darks when I do the background, so I can blur them a bit. The next day I put another layer of deep dark color and filled in more of the shadow fur so I could blend it easier.  I don't concern myself too much with keeping it too crisp, as I plan to do another layer over everything anyway. ...