Hello Everyone!

Long time no update. As many of you know from earlier updates, I've been wading into the unknown waters of digital painting and I've spent the last few months getting familiar with these new tools. It's been a tough and confounding road to travel, but to be honest, I love new art toys so its been super fun as well.

Most of this time has been spent customizing my work space and finding Photoshop brushes that will allow me to create artwork in a similar way to my original work. I also wanted to make sure that my digital work would complement the aesthetics of my traditional paintings. When it comes down to it, there's only one way to improve at these things. Dive in, create a bunch work, punch the air & scream cry, and figure things out through some old fashioned trial and error... so many errors... so many scream cries. Anyways, practice and repetition go a long way in these matters.

I started a few pieces and played around with a ton of new techniques and tools to see what worked for me and what didn't. When working on a traditional painting, there are always moments in the beginning stages when everything looks like dumb garbage. It's all rough underpainting and half formed ideas, but from the experience of completing many, many paintings, I know that things will come together in the end. Though with this new medium, I reached that point multiples times, but lacking any experience of progressing past dumpster fire stage, I kept stalling out. This meant that my first few attempts were abandoned, stewing in their unfinished garbage water. In their place, new fresh pieces were started and hopes were renewed. None of this was in vain though as it's all a part of the process. Many lessons were learned along the way, new tools were added, and on the 5th or 6th attempt I ultimately got to a point in a piece where things started feeling pretty natural. I finally reached that sweet state of creating with out thinking and getting lost in the work. Love that zone. And I finished my first digital painting. Breakthrough! Who's scream crying now!?

Here's the piece:

Since I was dealing with so many unknowns through out this process, I decided to create a piece with elements I was super comfortable with. Really happy with how it turned out and I'm super excited to start a new one. I'm also really excited to make prints from these digital pieces. When I make prints from my traditional work, it requires me taking it to get photographed proceeded by hours of touch ups and color correcting. Getting the more subtle colors correct is always very tough and one of the hardest things to do is to get the blacks just right. These digital pieces completely cut out that whole process. The colors are what they are and the blacks are deliciously perfect. So nice.

To make this a reality, I'm releasing this new piece as a print this Friday, March 15th, at 4:00 Eastern Time. As I hoped, colors came out great and black is super tasty. As always, the print will be released in Andy Kehoe Art Shop. Here are the details:

Aligning Under New Skies
22” x 17” (Includes 1” white border)
Limited Edition of 100
$70

Other News:

For those of you that were signed up for my Patreon page, you know that I paused my campaign to get familiar with digital painting. So the announcement of my first digital piece must have you wondering if I'm going to restart my Patreon campaign. The short answers is, YES! But before I relaunch, I'm going to do some restructuring and figure out ways to make the Guild rewards a little more streamlined. I'm also going to switch to a format where Patrons pay per creation instead of having a monthly fee. I plan on releasing a new digital piece every month, but if I get sidelined by art shows, then you won't be charged until I get back to digital painting. All traditional work and art show updates, including Progress Reports, will be posted free of charge to all Patrons. I'll also be adding some videos of creating digital pieces which will be super cool. So stay tuned. I hope to relaunch in the next couple months and I'll be sure to send out an announcement email to all former Guild Members.

I also have a couple group art shows in the works this year and I'll update you on those soon.

Thanks so much for reading!

Andy