Dang you Goldilocks!

The final assignment in digital painting was to do an illustration on the theme of "3 Bears". That could mean anything and some people did some pretty crazy things. I decided to stick with the first thing most people think of, but with a twist. I never found Goldilocks to be a very sympathetic character. I'm sure if the story continued it would get to this point. "Goldilocks, insulted that the 3 bears did not like how she broke into their house and broke their stuff, came back that evening teach them a lesson..."

What a nice...smile you have

I love caricaturing faces. Especially when there is an obvious emphasis in the face I'm referencing. Guess what this girl's dominant feature was. Done with black and white Col-Erase pencil on dark green cardstock.

"Ghosts of Departed Usurers"

My digital painting instructor loves Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". One of our assignments was to illustrate a scene from the book. We were each assigned a portion of text and I got this beautiful moment:


    "The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley’s Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped. Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night. Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out. The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever."

I really wanted to make the ghosts the focal point of this illustration and have Scrooge just be a supporting element. I started with a sketch and brought it into Photoshop to clean up and color. I'm quite pleased with how this one turned out.
My biggest lesson learned? USE REFERENCE. I shot myself as reference for the foreground ghost and for scrooge poking out the window.

 It sure helped solve the intricacies of those poses. So listen to your art instructors! Reference isn't cheating!

Gallery of Terror!!!

This be my submission for the Gallery of Terror at UVU. It seems most of the other submissions I've seen have a humorous twist to them. I decided to go very traditional and do a foaming zombie, no joke, no twist, just a mean ugly zombie. Sketch done in pencil and then inked and colored with copic markers. Pretty fun.

Summer of Sketching

    (I almost titled my post "Summer sketching" but realized that might imply a certain musical that I don't care to EVER reference.)

  This summer I did a lot of sketching but very little completed work. I poured over my sketching I did at church, in front of the tv, and elsewhere to put together some of my favorites from these last few months.

   These were done in a variety of mediums: felt tip pen, brush pen(LOVE brush pen!), and pencil. Some came from my head and others from interesting speakers at church (like the mustache guy who always looked angry). Hope you enjoy them, definitely more posts to come during this next semester.

Sketchy to Color

Just finished a late night project that is due in 7 hours (I'll post it later). Since I'm up here's something:

I sketched this in my Illustration class from Fall 2011, going for a Mike Mignola style. Threw it in Photoshop and came out with:

Just some color and mood.

Let me know what you all think, if I get comments I promise I'll post more regularly.