Back to Life

Real talk incoming.  I haven't updated here in the better part of the past decade, and I'm not going to get into any kind of catch up here in this post at least.  I am writing to focus on where I am and note that I've essentially left digital art altogether, opting instead for oil paints and other traditional materials.

So, I am at just about one year since I finally picked up a paint brush and just sketched away. I have always just drawn, but the thought of feeling as able to paint to a similar level of competence to drawing, and the flexibility of just painting on its own, had been a distant aim for far too long. But in March of 2025, I painted that profile of a man. Admittedly, it was another couple of months before I returned and painted more, but when I did, the fuse was ignited. That sounds like hyperbole, but truly, I have painted with a consistency previously unseen for me. Only when I was doing daily drawing in recent years have I produced so much work. And it led to a massive transition; a massive shift of future plans - I dropped the PhD program I had been in, choosing to focus on art.  This move did also include applying the MFA program at Wayne, but in reality, while I do want to join that program, I am painting regardless of whether I get in. So, the reason why I’m writing this today is primarily to point out this surge and link it to my long term aspiration of being a self-sustaining artist.

Metrics. Oh, yeah, I’d wanted to note some numbers here. Since jumping into painting again, I have created 27 paintings to varying degrees of polish and finish. There were other paint doodles along the way as well, but I can say that I have done 27 distinct pieces worth counting. I am proud of this. The fluency I am building is real and I cannot wait to see where I can take this!

New Prints (+thoughts about the business of art)

There could also be a subtitle here, "I finally made a print store!"

I've been rummaging through old artwork trying to find things I know that I have legal rights to print.  I have a handful picked out and available in my shiny new print store on Inprnt.

In digging through dozens upon dozens of commissions from the past few years , and then having to look for the contracts and terms that were worked out, I learned that I really hadn't put enough effort into protecting my rights as a content creator.  At first, I was essentially just signing over full ownership of my work (and for very little, I might add).  Then I began adding terms. But these terms were flimsy at best.  They did not do what all contracts and terms should do, and clearly define who owns what, and for what use, and for how long.  I eventually began adding time limits onto license agreements - but a lot of damage had been done.  

At the end of the day, this was a positive learning experience.  I dug into the resources of Art Pact and set up a handful of base contracts to use in the future.  

Another thing I haven't spent enough time on is personal work.  It is so easy, and borderline required (when you have a wife and child), to be tied up in commissioned projects and chasing money.  It can feel difficult at times to see the path that I'm on, in relation to my goals.  It can often feel like I'm just moving laterally and not progressing toward where I want to be.  

I've still learned a lot and will carry this knowledge with me.

Anyway, print store is up and running! Time to get onto making more cool stuff that I can fill that page up with!

Cheers!

-Steve

Updates! New site is live!

I've launched an official website, VeneqArt.com!

And onto some art stuff.  2014 was a strange, yet productive year.  I had some health issues at the tail end of 2013, and 2014 had a major emphasis on health.  I also freelanced in-house at a local marketing company from April - September.  

Onto art!  Here is a dose of art created within the last year or so, starting with more Mierce Miniatures!  These guys were from a unit of nasty Baalor warriors.  A blast to work on!  I was also allowed to put more rendering in than I had been in the past. Still grayscale, but I'll take what I can get.

Just prior to working on the Baalor squad, I had the chance to work on some Legionnaire designs, also for Mierce Miniatures.  They came out fantastic as well: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/legionary-unit (by Hector Moran).

A couple more things from late 2013, early 2014 for Mierce - I got to design a mount for my first Mierce character, Idruaada; a massive wolverine creature.

Lastly for Mierce, I had the honor of illustrating the game map for Mierce's game, Darklands! This is essentially Europe + Dragons, Serpents, Giant Squid, and some bad dudes from Iceland.

These next pieces were done for Corvus Covax Miniatures.  I'd posted this first one in grayscale before on my Tumblr, but recently was playing around with alternate methods of colorizing grayscale images by using the Curves tool in Photoshop.  This was the result.  After that, 2 other grayscale minis from Corvus Corax.

Last item, I got to design the album cover for my friends in Sycamour's debut label full length release on Hopeless Records.

For Mierce Miniatures

via Tumblr http://veneq.tumblr.com/post/62750813720/for-mierce-miniatures

2013 - Copyright Mierce Miniatures

via Tumblr http://veneq.tumblr.com/post/62251202417/2013-copyright-mierce-miniatures

Work in progress.. can’t show the whole thing for a few months still but whatever. I probably won’t remember to post it when I’m finally allowed to.

via Tumblr http://veneq.tumblr.com/post/61281208549/work-in-progress-cant-show-the-whole-thing-for

Tee design commission for some handsome fellas from Virginia (ironically named after a [fictional?] city in Ohio).

via Tumblr http://veneq.tumblr.com/post/59821008126/tee-design-commission-for-some-handsome-fellas

Test post for inter site synced posting. Sketches from April ish.

via Tumblr http://veneq.tumblr.com/post/59211514782/test-post-for-inter-site-synced-posting-sketches

Ryan Gosling in Drive for the Portrait Party.

Gestures and sketch from a commisasion.

Small pile of recent stuff I can post.

Some housekeeping - I've kind of moved my main web update presences to tumblr and facebook, but I'm still updating the blog as well. For anyone that wants to connect with me elsewhere, choose your poison:

http://veneq.tumblr.com

http://veneq.blogspot.com

https://www.facebook.com/Veneq.Pierce

http://twitter.com/VeneqArt

http://veneq.cghub.com

And onto updates.

Couple of rough sketches from a new commission.

Recent stuff

Sketches, Studies

More sketches

Top thing is a week's worth of 60 second gesture warmups.  Below are character design roughs for a scifi MMO commission.

Sketchbook sketchin'

Sketches and a study

Nikolai!

I finally finished my fan art of Danny Luvisi's character Nikolai from Last Man Standing.

So much fun to work on this!!!
Enlarge it and you can open higher res in a new window.

Sketches

I've been neglecting the blog the last few weeks!! Well here's a sketch dump!

Also I dropped in a few thoughts down below amongst the sketches about some recent struggles and just cathartic venting.

First some scanned sketches in pencil and marker (some with both).

Some rough concepts for a current commission - so much fun to work on these and it's a very cool project that I can't wait to see become reality.

And some rough doodles between work. I've been playing around with the way that I sketch digitally.

It's weird because I've always drawn primarily with pencil on paper when "drawing".  I would shade and add value in my sketches but it always began with line.  When I first got a tablet in 2007  - this method did not seem to work the same for me, or at least it just felt completely wrong.  I basically put aside digital drawing and painting altogether for the next few years.  I still used the tablet in my day to day work with graphic design but I never drew or painted with it.  In fact I did not draw very much at all outside of work during that time - but that's another story entirely.

 In late 2010 I began designing tshirts for my friends' bands.  But they wanted illustrated designs.  So I busted out the tablet and went to work.  I wound up with the desired result, which was heavily cell shaded artwork, comic-book-esque artwork.  A very cool look - but not really my natural way of drawing.  It was just the tshirtification of what I knew about drawing and coloring.  This was a way for me to draw with lines, then draw even more lines, and then color with lines as well.  I don't know if that makes any sense, but everything was like a ink brush stroke (I work mainly with Manga Studio when doing that type of work).  So that pushed me into a weird place with my relationship with digital painting - I was forced to work with lines.  But this didn't really translate to the type of art I wanted to make.

Anyway, all of that is a long way of getting to my present struggle of finding a way of developing my images that both feels good and delivers a strong image.  I still love to draw with lines (and when I say lines, I mean very tight line work that pretty much finalizes the drawing before any color hits the canvas).  I don't know if that's really the way for me when it comes to digital painting.  I also can't seem to be a total silhouette and shape guy either.  It feels very foreign to me.  I think the answer for me is just a happy medium of the two with perhaps a slight leaning towards lines at the very start, but quickly bouncing to adding in large value areas.  So these 3 doodles from today were sort of experiments with my early sketch process.  Mixed bag here - but they were fun.

Lastly, here is the line art to a fan piece of Dan Luvisis's Last Man Standing that I'm working on.  I'm posting it to force myself to finish it.  This character is Nikolai.  The book is packed with unique, fun character designs so it was hard to choose just one.  And Gabriel (the protagonist) is so freaking cool, it was hard not to want to draw him.  So I just drew Gabriel helmets on a bunch of other sketches recently (including the latex lady in the image above this paragraph).