Since 2006 Tom creates the composition in a 3D program called Poser. It helps work out all the hands and fingers so you can see them. The arms are moved into a plan equidistant to the viewer.
This process takes a week to carefully adjust the limbs to expose themselves to the plan of view. You are looking for each part to be ever so slightly undersized. The viewer never notices that the items are not real.
Tom normally draws on the finished gessoed canvas with a pencil but the pencil has to be removed before painting. He removes the pencil with alcohol swabs. It is a tedious process. Now he covers the canvas with paper. Once the ten or so drawings are done he carefully draws the outline on the canvas.
He paints the work in two manners. One using powder pigments mized with castor oil becaue the paint takes months to dry and he can work the transparent nature of the paint until satisfied.
The other is a new manner is painted by melting handmade crayons on heated metal. In 2003 Tom made a painting machine out of Lego's Mindstorm Invention System. He invented the “metaling wax on hot metal†technique for the robot. Sakura Oil Pastels are melted and mixed into a certain color then sucked into a brass tube, cooled and extruded.
Tom Lohre learned by living with a master portrait painter, Ralph Wolf Cowan. Tom painted the hands, animals, pants, etc. that the master did not care to paint. Searching for new subjects, he painted the eruption of Mount Saint Helens while it erupted from life, twenty miles to the south on Tum Tum Mountain. He also painted the first space shuttle from life, 200 'feet from it, under armed guard, the day before to took off.