Prometheus

Have a nice weekend, everybody.

Spooky-scary

Smoker

Discovery

Allosaurus fragillis

Old dude

Dancer

Umbrella Acacia

Man, Eagle

Peccary

FAILURE

Two things in varying stages of progress. The top one was just a sketch I messed around with for far too long. It's not going any further. The bottom one is a piece for a book, but I'm not entirely happy with how it's going, so I'm starting over.

I like how the coloring was coming along, but it started to overpower the drawing -- or rather, the coloring was much better than the drawing, so I have to step that up before I continue. I just sort of feel like I'm going through the motions, especially in these two pieces. I think I need to be spending simultaneously more and LESS time working. More time thinking about what and how I'm drawing and a little less time trying to get the drawings exactly right. There's a looseness and an energy that's absent from the drawings here. I am trying to remedy that.


UPDATE:



I forgot that I never posted this. Something that I started towards the end of last semester but never ended up finishing it for whatever reason. Based on High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. Sigh. Another thing I will never finish.

Not Measuring Up

Hey everybody. Wasn't it appropriate that the image that has been up for so long has been a rotten corpse? I think it is appropriate. No more of that.

Here is a big project that I did recently for Muse Magazine. It's not actually out until September, but I was given super-secret permission to put it up early. I think it turned out alright, considering what crazy time constraints I had one it. Here is a brief timeline of how it went down:

Thursday afternoon: meet art director John Sandford at Carus while traveling through the Midwest with Kali. Assignment is given. Assignment is due Monday. Oh god oh god.

Friday: Traveling. Oh god oh god.

Saturday: Ok start drawing.

Sunday: Oh god oh god.

Monday: Done.

End of timeline.

The article is about how the average height of a given nation is affected by so many different variables like wealth, healthcare, leisure time, etc. Here are drawings:


Opening, with some really nice design that the editors did. I didn't do the little B+W cartoons in this article. Could you tell?
Short person tall person. Again, good design all around makes my work look better than it has any right to look.


Those top two closer up, outside of the layout.
Left: America in the 1800s was a great place to live. Plenty of sweet wild game to make friends with and then eat.
Right: Lincoln / Douglas debate. Lincoln was way tall, Douglas a little shrimp. Guess who won the election?
Left and right: Money-stilts. These were on facing pages. Wealthy nations have a higher-than-average height.
Left: Flat-landers are naturally tall people. This dude is looking over his fields.
Right: Mountain folk are usually shorter. Surprise tea and turkey!
Here are some criminals of varying heights and badness.
The last page called for a big lineup of people of different heights. You may recognize a couple of them...like that Groucho robot and others. So these guys were all in a big row, but I separated them for easy viewing.

Because this project had such a short deadline, I sort of had to go with basically my first drawings -- a good and bad thing sometimes. One of the bad things is that these are all really, really tiny drawings in real life. That lineup of people is juuuuust about two inches high at the highest. The flat-landers/mountain-folk pieces are about 3.5 inches square, and everything else is of the same. Crazy.

I'm looking forward to doing some more work with Carus publications soon. Very soon. Also, I am hoping for some other clients. I have a big stack of postcards all written up and ready to go out to art directors, and I have a couple of things I have been working on on-and-off over the past few days, so stay tuned! There will be more pictures.

Versus Exhibit // Bog Man

Quick post here guys, I'm supposed to be working!


Bog Man, pencil, powdered graphite, digital.

This was something that I did for a local gallery show put together by Sean Andrew Murray of Big Huge Games fame. The concept was simply "Vs." I went through several more action-packed pieces, some of which came awfully close to final drawings, but in the end I wanted to do something more simple and, in the end, it turned out as well as I could have hoped.

I've been thinking about Ireland recently, and I'm thinking of getting a little thing of peat moss to tend. Those little flowers are really pretty. They find all sorts of bodies in peat bogs, you know.

I also wanted to go back to a muted color scheme having just done all of those really vibrant book pieces (previous post). I'm much more comfortable with colors like this, but I love both.

I'm really trying to get some new work done in this method to unify my portfolio. Expect updates!

If you're in Baltimore or around it at all, you should come to the opening of the Versus show. Lots of great people have done great work for it, including a lot of my drinking buddies). It opens next Friday at the Windup Space (12 North Ave.). It's going to be sweet. You'll get to see this piece at its tremendous native size (27.75" x 19.75").

Thanks for all those great comments on the last post! Keep 'em coming!

Jack and the Beanstalk

Pencil, graphite powder, ink and digital. 10x10"


Pencil, graphite powder, ink and digital. 10x27"

Hey guys, I'm graduating. Isn't that sweet? Sweet but weird and scary.

This was the last project (aside from some academic stuff) that I did for my whole college life. Thanks for hanging on these last couple years. I'm going to try and keep up the work flow as much as I possibly can (I'll be doing one or two more pieces before the month is out, that I know for sure), so stay tuned. It should get interesting.

I don't have much to say about these things. I've been looking at them for so long now, I'm just kind of tired. I can say I set out to do something colorful (especially after my largely black and white work last semester) and weird. Expect to see me drawing more pigs soon. They are crazy fun.

AI 28

Hey dudes, quick post here.

This and this will be a part of American Illustration's online gallery TRIBUTE that accompanies their newest annual. Would've been nice to get into that, but I guess they had over 8,000 entries? Most ever? Online representation is better than a sharp stick in the eye, for sure. Congrats to everyone. Everyone!

I am super busy trying to finish this semester among other things. Had to do some serious redrawing on one piece, but things are shaping up. Big updates next week, for sure.

Color Test 2

The butcher hears something he likes.

The giant's wife is quite hospitable indeed.


v.2: Now with value adjustments!

I'm finishing up the first two pieces for this project (I posted the colors for those last time) while simultaneously working on these and the cover. I've got two weeks left to finish all of these (and a piece for thesis), so I'm going kind of nuts.

I'm really trying to push some unexpected colors together cohesively for these pieces, which just means tons and tons of tweaking. The top piece still has some drawing to be done, mostly in the background. The bottom piece has gone through more small changes than any of the others, and still has some to go.

As always, let me know what you think.

Color Test

Fee-Fie-Fo-Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

I'm working on balancing Jack's escape through the forest (greens and green lighting) with the giant's threats of violence (reds), while maintaining the clear treasure (golden goose).



Jack stopping for a break going up the beanstalk. I'm trying to keep this calm and cool, while not falling into the traditional blue sky/white cloud sky. The bark on the beanstalk was a little more purple, but Kali said it reminded her too much of the Incredible Hulk. I don't see why that's a problem, but it looks better now anyway.

Two of the Jack and the Beanstalk pieces are approaching their final colors. This is before any variation or tone is added, and before my lines are colorized. I just figured I'd post these because I'm pretty happy with them. There are sure to be minor variations here and there, and a couple of major lighting changes for the top one.

...and I just got done giving Daniel Krall's Illustration II class (which I TA) an assignment about mood in environments. I figure these better be pretty good so I prove I'm not just full of baloney.

If anyone wants to grab these and do major color overhauls for fun, I'd love to see what you come up with. It's always a blast to see what sort of color pallets people work with.

State of the Union

Hey dudes, I figured I'd let you folks in on what's been going down around here. I'm working hard on things that will eventually, eventually be finished. In all likelihood these things will be done by the time I graduate next month. If not, I am in some trouble.

Here is the updated Hamlet. Lots of stuff was tweaked based on the suggests you beautiful, talented, incredibly creative people suggested.



Next is just a quick heads up that in addition to getting me on Drawn! and itself appearing on the cover of Boston's Weekly Dig, this charming simian will be gracing Spectrum 16 whenever it decides to come out.

Remember that this started as a throwaway piece for a gallery show that I finished just after getting back from a stint in the ICU. I only did it because I didn't like my first painting, and I did hardly any prep work. You never know what's going to turn out well. I'm a little bummed none of my Innsmouth work made it in, but hey, something did.

This next thing is a little reminder that Popgun Volume 3 is now available from your local places. Book places. Just get it from Amazon or something? The quality is startlingly high, especially for a comics anthology that nearly breaches five hundred pages.


This is the first/title page of the 12 page comic I did for the book. Ever wonder why I didn't post anything from my first semester Senior Thesis? Well, this was it. It printed really well. I was worried for a second, but no! That Mark Andrew Smith sure can edit the hell out of some comics. Man.

The narrative in mine is ambiguous and a little wobbly. Most of it was crafted while I was in the ICU during that whole debacle last September, so forgive, forgive.

I'll probably put the whole thing up sometime, but maybe you should just go buy the book or something. Or maybe I'll put up all of the pages, just not in order, right? Yeah. That would really show you. Fix your wagon good.

I just bought my first round of leave-behind postcards featuring that monkey and this. I hope they turn out well. When they come, maybe I'll see if anyone wants one. You'd have to email me your address or something. Dangerous. These are dangerous times.

Jack and the Beanstalk // updates

Some progress from my Jack and the Beanstalk project for Allan Comport's Illustrated Book Class. These are all in various stages, but are more or less just updated sketches. They all have at least one, maybe two versions of the drawing left to go before color gets applied digitally.


Cover comp and updated drawing.


The swarthy butcher plans on cheating jack out of his goat friend.


Jack, halfway up the beanstalk, stops for a sandwich.


The giant's wife shows some hospitality. Got a ways to go on this one.
The giant is less generous with his golden birds.

As you might notice, a few characters got some redesigns. It'll probably drift further from the original designs as I keep drawing.

Prince Hamlet

Ok, I think this is done.
I've been tweaking away at this for the last couple of weeks here and there, trying to make small changes.

I haven't had a whole lot of time to work on it, largely because building my website and finishing that Munny took top priority, and I've had a ton of work to do outside of school. In reality, this version came together rather quickly and then, well, there was a lot of tweaking.

This is Prince Hamlet, by the way. More or less, right?

The original version of this was an acrylic painting, but it didn't work as well as I wanted it to. I tend not to give up on pieces dealing with a subject I have a profound interest in, and I've been known to redo a piece or two in my day. This is a combination of the original acrylic painting, pencil, powdered graphite, and Photoshop. At the end of the day I am pretty happy with how this turned out and the process involved. I've got a few more projects coming down the pipeline that will be treated in the same way.

As always, your comments are lovely. The way you write...it's...how do you say? Beautiful.

ADDENDUM: It was recently brought to my attention that my website did not display properly on lower-resoluton monitors. This has been fixed. Such is the issue with html coding on a 24" imac. Please take the time for a short celebration on my behalf.

ADDENDUM 2: I uploaded a second version of the piece where the design on the shirt is kicked back, becoming less of a focus. Let me know which you prefer. The contrast on the second one is a little different as well, but that's mostly to account for blogger washing out jpegs.