Famous artist/illustrator Norman Rockwell said something like: “some paintings are easy to paint and some are very hard”. This painting of a “girl, snake, and an apple” has been kind of hard–but an enjoyable challenge. I think I started this painting around 5 years ago, and have worked a little on it once in awhile over those years. It started as a small sketch of hands, and then became a watercolor painting. A couple years ago I put a lot of scratchy ball point pen lines on it. Tonight I added the “white” apple (using gesso) on the far left and the blue long finger in the middle (those colors will change). It is all in a state of progress… One of the intriguing things I like is that the identity of the person with the eyes and the nature of the conflict between the snake and that person, and who will ultimately win the battle is somewhat of a mystery….is it all related to the Bible story or is it some other story….

I have been an artist my whole life. And I have had dreams and goals of doing great things with my art my whole life. And I HAVE been successful as an art teacher and at creating my Treetch paintings and becoming known to some degree for my unique art creations–especially locally in the Antelope Valley. But I have more I want to accomplish.
And I still dream… and still get discouraged that I have so much trouble making those dreams a reality!!! I have had a dream for over 7 years to create a Draw Fantasy Creatures book and website: DrawFantasyCreatures.com. But I am still bogged down in the creation of both of these. If you go to my website it says the website will be coming soon sometime in 2017. ( I will soon need to change that to 2018!) Many of you reading this may be artists who I imagine have similar struggles with your artistic goals. One of the keys I think to accomplish our dreams is to be more disciplined at working each day at our goals. I try to do that– sometimes! But there always seems to be roadblocks that I let stop me. So, I want to remind and encourage myself and any creative artist reading this to do what the sign I have on my wall in my art studio says to do: 
“Figure out what you are passionate about that you could turn into a living and spend some real focused time on it everyday. That is the only way to feel fulfilled and satisfied with your life.” (this “sign” is from a review on Amazon of the book The Art of War by Steven Pressfield).

I recently made my “Lightninghead” watercolor painting into a night scene with a moon (using Photoshop) .  I like how it turned out printed on a black t-shirt.

The lllustration Class that I teach at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California just ended.  And I had a great class with lots of talented artists. Here are some of the illustrations they created. They were done with traditional media– watercolor, pen and ink, and prismacolor pencils mostly.

I think it is fun to explore a theme in your art creations — like paint a series of dragon paintings. Over the last 3 decades I have had fun creating a series of paintings of tree creatures. I even made a tree creature mask to wear!

I have always loved drawing eyes, swirling lines, and the human figure and here I put them all together in this fantasy image that came out of my mind. I drew it with pencil, colored it with prismacolor colored pencils, and did a few finishing touches digitally on the computer.

Most people are always trying to figure out how to draw hands correctly. I decided instead to try drawing it all wrong with too many fingers and impossible positions. I looked at my own hand in different positions to draw this on my high school whiteboard. Maybe it could be some kind of monster’s hand!

For the last 4 years I have had my art for sale as high quality prints on http://fineartamerica.com/artists/frank+robert+dixon
and for the first time ever I am currently offering a discount code: HMKPUL on any of my artwork. The code is good for the first 10 people to use it and ends on January 31, 2017.

This is a large charcoal drawing (40″ x 96″) I am currently creating.  I have always loved the expressive gnarly-looking hands that Arthur Rackham drew, and these hands were strongly influenced by Rackham.

I am having fun slowly creating my DrawFantasyCreatures website and at the
same time making a similar Draw Fantasy Creatures book. I have decided to make the
book first (in Indesign) and I will use some of the pages in the book on the website. Here is one of the pages I spent time designing to start one of the chapters.

Yes, that is a distorted version of me.

I am not sure when I will finish the book.  I am just going to have fun creating and designing each page.  (But I am hoping to finish it sometime in 2017.)