CLICK ABOVE.

So as 3rdSpud last posted, I gave him a hand providing some artwork for Avon Union’s CD. He also posted some black and white line art that I done-did. I originally had a bigger more colorful vision for the finished piece, but we were pressed for time, and the simpler black and white version you saw was more than enough. So I handed it over to 3rdSpud, who handed it over to the band.

Now, the band had free reign to work with the artwork and put on the CD however they wanted. Over the weekend I got a copy of the finished product in the mail, and let me say I happy with the changes they made. Luckily for Avon Union, their drummer David Mayman is also studying Graphic Design and with limited time he threw down color and photoshop to help bring the art to life.

As an illustrator, you often have no idea how the work you turn in will be manipulated or presented. Fortunately, there are plenty of times when it turns out well. Like now. For instance. Check it out.

My God the Colors.

Welfare State has nothing to do with this.

CLICK ABOVE.

Clowns used to be about the funny. Big shoes, crazy colors, and flying pies.
But now they about serial killers, nightmares and poison pies. What happened? I don’t know, maybe the trend toward clowns being poorly disguised evil started with that serial killer that dressed up like a clown.

Well clowns can still be funny. Or ironic, or whatever the hell the line drawing I’m posting implies them to be.

Originally titled “Pie-Slaughter”, this black and white drawing turned out better than I thought. Good enough to garner a spot at the Academy of Art spring show back at the beginning of 2007. Oh and I sold a print of it too.

My inspiration was the desire to illustrate an emotionally heavy post-man-slaughter situation, but replace the key players with clowns and weapons with pies.

CLICK ABOVE.

I’m wondering, now that I have the ability, whether or not to devote some time to coloring this piece on the computer. No wait, I know I should devote time to coloring this piece, but time is the problem right now.
Also, for your benefit, here is the preliminary perspective study for said drawing.

CLICK ABOVE.

Today I post a digital painting called, ‘What Now?’. This painting was done as a final for my Illustration class this last semester.

It’s an important painting for me, because after one year of Art School, it’s the first of my works that I am happy with. Oh sure, I can still see the flaws, places where I could go back and improve things. But overall, I managed to use composition, color and perspective to paint the picture I wanted. Please Enjoy.

The original size for this piece is 15″x 20.” It was created with Photoshop CS2. It took me about 40 hours, spread over three weeks, to complete. I haven’t named the characters or explained their present situation. I mean, I know that the child in the painting dreams he awakens in very real and dangerous worlds, where his only friends are the his toys come to life. But how old is he? What are his toys names? Why does this keep happening? These are questions I have not answered but should have.

My excuse is that I was pressed for time, and was focused on coming up with a compelling composition and not a back story. I realize now that it was wrong of me to side-step coming up with character and story descriptions. Why? Well, making a story to go with your illustration, or to inspire it, enriches the final piece. It also makes me look like less of a thoughtless bonehead when people ask about the painting.

In other news I’m back in school. My schedule is rough. Five days of workin’ from dawn till dusk. Three days of school and two days of work. Nevertheless I have a collaborative project in the works with ThirdSPUD and another with Thee Dynamic Effect.
The first project is cover art for a CD, and the second is production art for an animation short. Good times.

Bonus: Also, my friend Gabe was inspired by our threadless t-shirt design submission, from the inspiration was born an artwork serving as promotional art for his daughter’s b-day bash. I got a kick out of it. The theme for the party was Pinata mayhem. I went. And there was. We named the pinatas Paco and Chuey. Click here to check it out.

We’re getting Older.

It was supposed to be “New Art Wednesday” here, at least that’s what I told myself, but I let it slip. Doesn’t matter, because here I am now, with another project. This one was finished Tuesday morning, the assignment was to use the power of Photoshop and Painter to take someones portrait and age that person. I started out with a picture of the spectacled, yellow-tied man on this webpage.

What I ended up with was what I have posted on this webpage. Originally I was going to do the extra work and make it a color portrait. But after doing the black and white value study I found that it looked pretty kick-ass that way. It also added to the “aged” effect of the project. So I saved the extra color work for never.

My process was to take pictures of three old men, and then with photoshop make a composite “old-man” mask on top of the original picture. I adjusted the composite so that the eyes, brow, width of the mouth, and nose were at the same place. When capturing likenesses, the eyes, brow, lips and nose, both their placement and size are very important. Then I opened the photshop image in painter and in a new layer painted the thing, referencing my composite in photoshop.

Shackles.

The bonus drawing is from my clothed figure drawing class. The bonus drawing started as the thumbnail you see to the right. Before I finished people assumed that I was going for some kind of S & M thing, they were in for a surprise. My mind isn’t always in the gutter like the rest of America. It’s in the sewers. Pardon the imperfect quality of the image, but since it’s “Bonus” material I did the best I could with a camera, which is not much but good enough.

What’s to look at?

When I look at the drawing I posted today, I smile, because even though I drew the thing I have to try and figure out where the details came from. Sort of like trying to find the meaning in a weird dream.

This is because even though most of the big elements of the composition were thought out in my sketches, which I have also posted, I came up with everything else as I tried to fill in the empty spaces in the composition.

Drama!

The houses, suburbia, are an image and concept that has been on my mind. I don’t like suburbia. The houses, hunched together yet isolated from each other and far from their food sources make me mad. The crevice that is expanding and eating away at the suburbs probably comes from watching a documentary on people building beach houses that fall victim to errosion, then building houses near the same place again. The penguins marching along, from who knows where, are cool. I like penguins, I think most people do, cause penguins just don’t give a shit.

B & W

The wild mouthed tractor going to fame from no fame is my depiction of a lack inhibition.

The flying ship is an homage to the MAD blimp thing that would float around the pages of MAD magazine, an artist and reader in-joke.

I don’t know if the blimp thing still makes appearances. I wanted to draw it though, and it took plenty of false starts to get it drawn convincingly in Isometric Perspective.

Where Ideas are Fleshed out.

The second part to this assignment was to take markers to the drawing and put in shading.

First shade it to like sunlight, then shade it to look like light is coming from one point within the drawing. The drawings I posted here do not look like the originals, these have had their contrast upped in photoshop because they needed it. Yeah, I still have a problem with value in my compositions, I’m working to fix this. In the meantime, Enjoi.

Needs more Colgate.

Click on the picture to the right, then if you please, read.

This painting always gets a reaction, usually more than I expect. I know that it’s a little, just a little, ghoulish, what with the zombie-green skin and red eyes, but I didn’t think it was “creepy” or “scary” as described by some people.

I photocopied a photograph of a cheery old man I found in a magazine, then drew outlines of the face and its shadows onto illustration board. Then I painted. I painted with the intention to “liven” up an otherwise charming but boring picture. I ended up with something interesting, but I may have overshot the creepiness. Not that I mind.

Bugs. Bugs. Bugs.

Click on the image and view a painting. A painting that serves as evidence of my first semester of Art School. Let me tell you, it was quite a semester, starting in September and running until the 23rd of December 2006.

After about three weeks the semester became a time of non-stop sitting on my ass painting, drawing and obliterating any semblance of a sane sleeping pattern. I grew a potbelly, grew my hair out, and learned a lot about where I stand when it comes to drawing.

About the painting.

The rundown:
6.25″ x 10″, Gouche Watercolor Paint on Cold-Press Illustration Board. Presently Untitled.

It was painted for an assignment in my Introductory Color and Design class. The task was to create a pattern design that would interest and confuse a viewer’s eye at the same time. The design had to be complex and interesting enough to accomplish this. The key here was to produce a pattern with rhythm and visual movement. I think I accomplished this. In fact I am really happy with the color scheme I chose and how I was able to harmonize it. I scanned and took pictures of the basic steps to this project. Check em’ out.

Things are Sketchy.

Rough Colors and an unused alternative.

Testing.

Deliciousness.

I present to you my submission to the 2006 RedVines drawing contest. I found out about this contest about a month and a half ago through a scholarship website. Naturally I thought, “I’d better enter this.” Naturally I waited until the day before I had to mail it out to sit down and crank it out.

Yes, I did not spend more than an hour and half sketching it and then drawing it out. I’ll be fair to myself though, I was pretty busy.

I want comments about this drawing, like what you think it means and the drawing itself. Let me tell you somethings I already thought about though, too help filter the comments a bit:

-It’s not a winner: Maybe it might win, but I don’t think so because the drawings biggest problem is that while it’s interesting it’s not clear. What the hell is going on? What the hell does it have to do with RedVines? Who is that man? Is that a dinosaur behind him? What are those tubes coming out the beasts neck? Also, there are a lot of badass illustrators out there and who knows what awesome stuff they submitted.

-It could have been way cooler: If I had made it obvious that this was a robotic monster that feeds on Red Vines, which also happen to be it’s creator’s favorite food.

Pencils, all over paper.

I only did one initial sketch when I should have something like to ten to develop the idea. Looking over my one sketch I’m reminded that the final drawing always seems to lose something that the initial sketch had, even though it picks up cleanliness and finality. For instance in the sketch the monster looks angrier and the bald man’s face has more expression. Man I should have done more sketching that day. In my mind the bald headed man was putting the finishing touches on his robot monster and the RedVines serve as his favorite work time snack. Originally I just thought about drawing a student studying hard while eating RedVines, but that seemed boring when the time came to draw my submission, so I threw in a dinosaur looking monster. I went all hollywood on my concept with the dinosaur thing.
Internet, give me comments.

Computers can take you there.

This was based on something that frognuts acted out when he got the news that Dave and Carmen’s relationship had dissolved. I don’t think he really meant what he said though, instead he was just trying to be funny, or maybe he just really likes Dave Navarro and is just happy Carmen wont get in the way anymore.

If you notice, the line art for this comic is…inconsistent. The character’s face changes, so that he looks younger in the last panel. This was because I drew a quick rough draft that I used as the final line art instead of doing another draft. Was I lazy? Maybe, but that doesn’t usually stop me. What stopped me was when I looked at it and wondered if I could cover the crappy line work with color. So I did, and then showed the comic to some people, and they laughed so it worked. But then they mentioned that going back they noticed the inconsistency, but I was expecting that so it was cool with me. As long as they laughed and didn’t notice it the first time through.

This might only be interesting to me.

Also, this is the first color comic I’ve posted here at frognuts.net. I used color pencils and markers…giving the comic a “homemade charm.” The markers are made by prismacolor and they give a nice color and blend really well. They are something powerful though, and bleed through almost any paper, marking up any surface underneath. I protected the table I was working on by coloring on a folded piece of paper. When I was done the thing looked like a crappy work of incidental art, so I will share it with you. It reminded me of a time long ago when I would color with marker all the time, and how the first time I did I made a small irreversable marker mess on my dad’s nice drafting table.

I’m going to work on computer coloring techniques to color future comics, so expect some more hand colored comics before the techniques are learned.

Here is some advice for people who work on any type of projects…actually, it’s less advice, more of me venting about how much of a dumbass I was on making this one.

Sometimes it’s best to shut the hell up.

The “production” phase for this comic, the phase where I actually put the comic I’m going to post together, was too disjointed. I kept starting and stopping, figuring I would come back to it later…and I did, but the constant stalling took its toll on the quality. I sketched and inked it over a period of two weeks, in between work and random stuff I needed to do. That’s not a good way to work on something that should only take a day of focused effort.

I blame my human brain. It can make leaps of insight, bringing together desparate bits of information for a great idea, but when I take too long coming back to something all of a sudden I can’t remember how I was inking lines and suddenly the results seem disjointed to me. But I am putting it up on the internet because I believe in the joke.

So yeah, try to get things done as quickly and smoothly as possible.