A brief story about a carrot

Quite moving, I know.

Until Gwen

An illustration for the story "Until Gwen" by Dennis Lehane. If I could find anywhere that seemed legitimate where I could link the story I would, I really recommend digging it up, it's pretty neat. Pretty dark, but neat.

I did this one with cut paper markers and a little bit of photoshop.

Sometime soon I should finally get around to scanning my sketchbook and photographing my paintings for figure painting, that should be a couple pretty lengthy posts...

2001: Playstation 3

I think I'm finally getting this whole dimensional illustration thing under control, and I'm having a grand old time with it. The prompt this time around was to do an illustration about a product, advertisement of sorts.

If I keep this up I'm going to have quite a collection of little figures...

Digital Illustration

Some work from digital illustration. Top one was a digital collage assignment. We were supposed to do a book cover, I did Blindness by Jose Saramago.

Next is a painter still life assignment.

Frankenstein

So in keeping with my last post, here's my next swipe at sculptural illustration. Given my past failures I did my best to learn from my mistakes, this time around I sculpted all of it, so if I decided to change angles it'd work, and I made everything underneath the clothes out of wire, so I could re-pose if necessary. I think it worked this time, definitely better than it has in the past at least... we'll see what Joe Thiel has to say about that though...

Doctor Frankenstein making a shopping list.

I have some videos of the process I might post later, I think they're pretty neat. That and I might be posting revisions, I'm still not completely comfortable with the whole thing.

Experiments

So I'm playing around with dimensional illustration again, seeing if I can sharpen that stick into something I can actually use... hoo boy. So this here was something I did to get back into the swing of it for Digital Illustration. The assignment was to read a personal add and try to make a portrait of them based on what you've read.

The add reads as follows:

Cougars Only - 24 - men seeking women
Single white male seeking cougars ONLY. Preferably 28+ but willing to go younger if I "like" you. Must be clean. I am 6'3", 210, dark brown hair, blue eyes and have plenty more pics if interested. Your place, not mine.

Now if that doesn't sound like a classy fellow, then I don't know what does.

Honestly this was a lot of fun, I might do more of these just for kicks.

Robots? ROBOTS? AGAIN?!?

Something I put together for illest of ill. Didn't make it into the show, but hey, what can you do?

A robot graveyard, like an elephant graveyard.

I just sort of imagine that if the robots did become self aware, there's no saying they'd be angry, that's how a human would feel. Maybe they'd just be sad, just go off and find somewhere to rust.

Anyway, there you go.

Digital Illustration - Illustrator

So, digital illustration class is pretty neat. So far we've just been messing with Illustrator. Assignments one and two right here. One was to make themed icons.

I made fancy animals...

Two was to do a vector portrait.

Got a little ridiculous on that one.

More on the way

Something Political

We were given a very vague assignment in illustration class: Draw something political. Here's my piece about the disappearing middle class.

And that's our first assignment for the year.

We have a map of the piano

This is from way at the beginning of summer

My mother had an old broken piano that came with her house. We couldn't get rid of it, so we explored it instead.

The initial plan was to dismantle it completely, but we hit a point where we couldn't get much further without brute force, didn't have enough muscle, and had to call in the cavalry.

All that's left now are a couple strings and a bar I took for souvenirs, the rest is in a scrap yard somewhere.

Occupying my time

Painting painting painting.
I'm pretending this is done but honestly it really really isn't - I'm just tired of working on it. It's sort of funny how I get to that state, and I might not even see anything wrong with it until I decide to share it. About the moment I look at the photographs I've taken a whole bunch of things jump out at me... eh, we'll see, a revision of this might end up here later.

Starbucks

Trying to keep busy and keep on with drawing, so I've been spending a couple hours every day in starbucks (weekdays at least) drawing strangers. Some results (most recent at the bottom):

I've done some more paintings and things that I'll probably be uploading sometime over the next couple days... I know you (the audience that essentially comes down to myself, family and maybe a few friends when you boil all the imagination off of it) probably have much better and more important things to look forwards to in your life, but the inherent egomania that comes with writing this sort of thing (LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT WHAT I DRAW!) sort of infects, and I feel compelled to make announcements about future things that I will do and post... man I feel lame...

Your Children

Summer so far...

So I've been trying to keep busy over the summer...

Painted a Cyberman for Carina's birthday...

That and I've done a number of self portraits, that number being 3 so far. This is the second of the bunch, I might post the third later, but the first is just... well... clearly the first? Going to see how far I take this, how competent I manage to get...


That's all for now.

Tying up loose ends...

Right then, so here we have the last assignment of my sophomore Illustration class. The assignment was to do an editorial piece about phosphate mining. We were assigned a lot of reading on the topic and then set loose. Honestly there were a lot of things that I could have made an image about, but in the end I settled on phosphogypsum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum ) and all that.

I had such a good time doing the 3d stuff for my last assignment that I figured I'd give it another go, and there's the result. A step up but definitely still learning. This time I didn't use as much sculpey, it's mostly cell phone pieces, a broken RF switch, paper mache and wire.

Also, the lighting set up I made was pretty ridiculous, so I figured I would share that too. That's outside in my backyard by the way.

And on a final note, I put together a website (as an assignment for my graphic design class) and I think it turned out pretty neat. Some of the stuff on there is just placeholder (see bio + portrait of the artist), it's not really complete in the sense that it's something I would send to someone I wanted to show myself off to, but I'm happy with the tricks and whatnot I learned doing it (translation: Thanks for showing me around Carina).

That website is here

That's all for now. One more assignment by 4:00 tomorrow and a test. The marathon is almost over.

More heads...

You know what they say about practice...

nowhere near perfect yet, but I'm making ground.

Attempt No 3:

So this one is starting to get towards a likeness, but still quite a bit off. Some features remain generic while others take on the characteristics of the model. I did this in a combination (about 50/50 mixture) of super sculpey and super sculpey firm (the grey and the flesh colored). A step forwards but still not there yet...

If you know the Ringling models, this is Sarah, by the way.

Attempt No. 04:

The closest I've gotten so far, right here, though, after a certain point I just sort of veered off in another direction. It started out looking quite a bit like the model (Allison) but right around when I put the eyes in the sockets and started putting the meat and eyelids on around them I noticed the eyeballs I had made were very much too small... and she started to look like a deranged Asian woman. Since it still looked quite a bit more like a real human being than any of my previous attempts I just sort of ran with it (though I mostly ditched the deranged part).

Anyway, that's how that goes, more to come most likely.

Experiments

So, for the sake of exploration I've been bringing sculpey to figure class and trying my hand at sculpting from life... frankly it's giving me a lot of trouble (getting any sort of likeness... ugh) but it's a grand old time I've gotta say. Here are the first two stabs at it, probably somewhere around 1.5 to 2 hours of work a piece.

Attempt I:

Attempt II:

So they both sort of look like the same face, and I never got around to giving them hair or ears, but hey, I got a little faster the second time and figured quite a bit out (hah... figure...). Anyway, forward ho and all that business.

we'll see where all this sculpting takes me

Right down to the bone...

So, illustration assignment, right? Ok. Well this time around it was to do a poster for a play... we got a list, we picked our plays and went to work. So when I got to thinking about what I could do, I got to thinking that Chris Sickels is pretty cool... and... well... yeah, so I sculpted my figure, built my set, hung cotton ball clouds and toy airplanes from the ceiling in my room and this is what happened:

The play was, by the way, called Souvenir. It's about Florence Foster Jenkins (a real person...) who was a tremendously bad opera singer, and famous for it.

It didn't turn out exactly how I wanted it to, and there were a lot of things that suffered from the time available, but all in all it was a lot learned that I can apply to the next time I try something like this (which I'm thinking I might...).

Oh, and because it's awesome, here's some process:

my favorite part is when I eat the sandwich...

by the way, if you don't know Chris Sickels, go here and cry sweet tears of joy

if you thought that was cool, check out Paulo Ventura ... if you can get your hands on it, his book War Souvenir is pretty mindblowing.

We'll see what the future brings...

12, 12x12 paintings

For painting class we've been working on a series of 12, 12" x 12" paintings for homework. This has been assigned since ages ago, which invariably means that time will not be spent appropriately...

In any case, they were due yesterday, so I thought I would post the result.

The theme I chose for my series was a sort of surreal animal mish-mash thing. Kind of a way of highlighting some of the bizarre things that happen in nature by taking them a little out of context (applying them to another animal). Some turned out better than others.

Vulturephant


Walropillar


Moosetopus

Bioluminescent Peacock


Snigeon


Chrout


Uh... Spamtis? (Hamster Spider Mantis)


Catepede


Fostrich


Mosqiwi


Barn Owlmingo


Beagle

And there (in no particular order) you have it.