David Dibble Works
Born in 1977, David Dibble was raised on a farm in Davis County, Utah, where he was influenced by the landscape from an early age. He completed a BFA in Illustration from Brigham Young University and began landscape painting in earnest in graduate school at the Academy of Art University. Following the Academy he and his wife Liz moved to New York, where he worked as a color artist for Blue Sky Studios (20th Century Fox), creating Concept Design for such films as Rio, Epic, Ice Age 4, and Peanuts. David and his family now reside in Orem, Utah, where he teaches Illustration at Brigham Young University and paints often in the surrounding mountains and valleys.
"Having grown up on a farm in Utah, the landscape of the West is ingrained deep in my soul. Mountains and barns seem to be what I constantly come back to for inspiration. Seeing the loss of so much farmland in the West and the struggles that remaining farmers face, I think part of me wants to celebrate that legacy and help others see the nobility in it."
"Plein Air study is, for me, vital to landscape painting. One learns things on location that can’t be gained any other way. But for me, plein air is the study stage that provides valuable information that is continued in the studio through more developed pieces. When I stopped trying to do finished paintings on location and instead see it as study time I became free to take risks, learn, and be inventive in ways that I never was before. Contrary to the past, I now find that, while being careful to not trade observation for haste, three small studies on location often yield much better results than one large piece."
"My time doing digital painting for animated films* has taught me the value of working small and loose, but all with the goal of getting to the essence of a scene. To riff on a common phrase: Painting trees is easy, painting a forest is the hard part. In other words, we focus on details and not the overall sense of light, value, and composition."