Portrait

In an effort to make more art - no matter what, just something - I did this little colored picture and spent the afternoon reading Brandon Graham's livejournal insteadof doing my homework. Well, i did a little bit.

Trent and Draco. Not telling which is which.

Final scans of my graphite drawings from last quarter...I'm scanning this quarter's fresh crop today so those should be up soon. Exhausted.
***So...linking to these on Flickr doesn't work so well. But if you click on them you'll see the whole thing.

Big Blog

Wow, I haven't posted in a while and things are going very fast here....
A sampling:


Illustration for The Green Bird, Illustration Techniques. 8x10", scratchboard


Early stage of drawing for Drawing for Illustrators


Not done but mostly there.


Early stage of 3rd drawing for Drawing for Illustrators. The assignment is to do loose, unfocused markmaking (artist word! :D ) until an image starts appearing from our subconscious. Then we can start developing it.


...later on...


Done!


detail of bottom left corner


Pollockesque diptych of slouchy sad rabbit (left) and llama and bull's head (right). Not done. In the tradition of Ex Nihilo.


Experimenting with some new/old techniques. (Stuff I used to do a lot of updated with ideas from the internet).

Something From SCAD

I've been experimenting with the Scintique screens here at SCAD (you draw directly onto the screen using a stylus instead of using a mouse; it's just like using a pencil on paper (!!!!!)) and am digitally coloring this sketch/collage from my sketchbook.


Having some silly fun with lasers. :)



progress so far:

I need to redo the drawing on the pope/saint figure and figure out what drawing to do in the foreground.
(the main figure(s) are model Sean O'Pry, fyi)

Mother Superior

A drawing I did in my Drawing for Illustrators sketchbook. With details. I like the nun hugging the pony.





Also, progress shot of a drawing I'm working on for class. Probably about 1/4 done (?). 18x24. (Note: more here!

Foxworld...

Whew. That's a little better.

The Graphic Novel

So, I am back to work (art work that is) after broad-ranging shenanigans. We have a fairly finished script for Chapter 1, I guess you could call it, and I have been doing storyboarding and even some 'final' style pages ( "" because there are still a lot of kinks to be worked out).
For instance: Page 1

Page 4. I really like this, but it seems unfinished...

...so I inked it in a little more, which I think looks pretty good in general...

...but NOT how I want this book to look. I've definitely been envisioning something clean and foreign-looking, and inked this way it looks so generic to me. grrrr So, a lot more logisticking and drawing and redrawing to figure stuff out.

Graphic Novel: More

Some more sketches and working drawings. Am working on getting sets of nice drawings for each character, but also dong some quick brushy things to figure out stuff works (esp. the problematic anatomy of two-headed things) and get an idea of movement, etc.


frog sketches'n'notes


frog priest


aerial battle


swan princes


two-headed fox sketches


leopard saint

Progress Continues

section of hill with two fox saints


detail of third fox saint

More Foxes and Insects

"inked" version of the fox from the last post


black-tipped fox saint


progress detail with work done on the hillock: little flowers, vines, lichens, an aeromouse


mantis lord. only partially colored, as usual.


detail

Lofty Aspirations Produce Ideas

Another fox, crouching on a cliff. Battle inventory above.

I have big ideas!

Some Thoughts on Comics

Here are some sketches and workups for a story I have been building slowly over the past few months. It started with this drawing of a firefox from last June

and draws on Asian (mostly) mythology, Watership Down by Richard Adams, Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke, computer games like Starcraft and DungeonSeige, the Alien trilogy, Chinese landscape paintings and the art of Katsushika Hokusai, battle-epics, and the poem My True Love Has My Heart by the Elizabethan poet Philip Sydney.


St. Trueseam


St. Trueseam


Human form sporting same ornamentation and tattoos


sketches: swallows, rabbit saint, little fox, insect queen with a diadem of stolen pearls, black swan princes, some crappy cats and a little rabbit


fox saint with gems and medals


aeromouse captain


acheivement chart

The main challenge apart from working on the storyline, which will coalesce in time, is omcing up with a drawing style that I can maintain consistently for a long time. I love the line quality of the foxes above, but have concerns about weight once combined with value (ie. in a crowded scene areas of value would be valuable in order to distinguish levels of the plicture plane, etc. - but will such fine lines hold up against areas of darkness, and might too many fine lines become tangled anyway? (But, see this Hokusai print for potential refutation...)
[I know, what a terrible picture - why even bother including it?]
Anyway - did some sketching of frames, which I kind of hated until I worked it up in Photoshop a little:


blank bug hive

Bug hive colored
Now it looks ok, but upon re-examining the work of Hokusai and Chinese landscape painters, am reminded that one of my initial inspirations is the supreme clarity of line evinced by Hokusai, usually with no shading at all - must play to strengths and follow drinking gourd! No doubt recent aquisition of new drawings tools will help. :)

Image Bank

Kitsune


Alien Queen


Watership Down


Okkotonushi from Mononoke Hime


Starcraft


Dungeon Siege inventory panel


Clear Spring by Hong Ren


Hokusai