Portraits

This portrait of singer Sufjan Stevens, which I did last quarter in my Illustration Techniques class at SCAD, was juried into the Society of Illustrator's 2010 Student Scholarship Exhibition. So I framed it all up and sent it off to NYC. I'll be going up in May to attend the festivities/observe the proceedings. A really exciting opportunity and a great honor!!

Some process shots for a portrait I'm doing. I've been looking at illustrator Mel Odom and wanted to try my hand at some fun 80s splatter backgrounds.

Frederic Michalak, French rugby

A little shot of my desk, mid-painting. I think its fun to see people's workspaces.

Recent Events

I wanted to practice this technique a little more, so I put together a portrait of my friend Ryan. Some steps:

First I transferred my image and painted over it with a warm acrylic undertone to establish the highlights of the painting.


Then I went over the acrylic with a contrasting dark layer of gouache to establish the darks. The gouache is watersoluble so once it's down you can remove it with a wet brush to reveal your image.


Then I fixed the gouache with sprayfix, and started going back over it with acrylic again.


Not much of the gouache layer ended up showing through, but its still a really useful technique for establishing values. I wanted to work with some fun shadow colors here. I've been thinking about Pontormo's Deposition a lot.


Grisaille underpainting on shaped canvas for class. Pretty excited about this. Not done yet.


Some mail art I made.

Homework and Funwork

Our most recent Illustration techniques assignment was a multistep, multimedia process that we used to design a cover for a story by Poe. You lay down a layer of acrylic to establish your midtones, then a layer of gouache to establish your darks (spray-fixing between each coat), then you pick out highlights from the [water-soluble] gouache (which is opaque watercolor) using a wet brush to expose the acrylic underneath. Then you add color with watercolors and put in your highlights and other details with a final layer of acrylic. There are pictures because it is confusing.

This is part way through picking out my midtones through the gouache. The acrylic layer, which is that yellow-green greasy color, is showing through the dark maroon-purple of the gouache. (This is an illustration for The Fall of the House of Usher btw...showing Madeline merging with the house as it sinks into the glowing waters of the tarn.

All the acrylic-midtones are established now. At this point the water seems much more stylized than the rest of the image, but this got sorted out in the final acrylic phase.

I've started to lay in colors and highlights with acrylic on the face and the undersides of the clouds.
Here's a picture of the final product. it is blurry and the color is a little off (mostly just in the lights of the chin and the waves) but I thought I would include it since the texture of the gesso made the scan pick up a little reflection on each imperfection of the surface...not so good.
And here's the final, with type treatment.

Something fun I am coloring in Photoshop. The water looks sort of the same.

More Collaboration

Friday Blog

The 'real' class project. Portrait of Sufjan Stevens.

Poetry collab. tester piece. Inside your chests are bent down branches burdened.

More Paintings

I will scan this once its further along so you can really see the details. On the left side you can see some of my initial layers, and then a later version. I work spontaneously right onto the painting, and then occasionally take the image into Photoshop and superimpose my initial sketch over it to see what I need to change. I end up with sort of a plastic surgeon's notebook page of changes. :) hehe

Sometime I will be more diligent in documenting the various layers that go into a painting like this - I do some fun stuff with pouring, dripping etc. Basically I came up with a line drawing, copied it by lightbox onto the paper, then painted loosely over it using a lot of liquid, flowing paint to get various exciting textures and a lot of movement. At this point the underdrawing is only vaguely visible, so i repaint it from what I can see of it, and then started applying really, really thin glazes of translucent acrylic. Then take it into Photoshop to compare to the original, fix stuff, paint more, on and on until I am happy. Depending on the subject and how things turn out on their own, I may be more or less meticulous about sticking to the original drawing.


There will eventually be a huge field of purple peonies in the background. I think.

This is coming along. I think it's mostly done - just needs some darker values and some more color in the twisted branches.

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).

More Fun Than Homework

I continued to productively procrastinate this afternoon by working on Retinue. It is coming along well and I have a spin-off piece using one of the figures.

Also doing some watercolor work in Illustration Techniques that I will post soon, maybe. Well, next week probably.

Retinue


Gaurd


detail

These things are starting to suggest other, bigger things to me.

From the Graphic Novel Front

Some process shots from a little bit of The Pearl Wars (working title!) that I was able to squeeze out last week.







Some bug snuggling, right before things start going wrong. :)

And some collages I made on cards.



The inside of this one is a pop-up and is really cool, but my camera cord is currently AWOL so...
edit: found it!

Beetles

Getting there.