Keeping it alive

I'm right in the middle of the end of semester crunch and as a result my posting here has been slim. Luckily I have a spare moment at work and some images on my iPad of a project from my previous semester crunch.

The assignment was to do an illustration based on a piece from any dead illustrator. I quickly (and naively) chose JC Leyendecker and found this piece:

I took the idea into a more modern era and with my wife and myself as reference I went to work.

I took these horribly yellow progress shots with my iPad along the way, I've never done an oil piece of this size and it kicked my butt for a good awhile. I think by the end I had some kind of idea what I was doing and I learned a bunch in the process.

That's it for now, I shall return in about 3 weeks with work from this semester to show off!

Happy Congrats You Have Cancer Day!

My wife and I no longer celebrate Valentine's Day. It holds no special value to either of us because something else far more personal and shared took place that day. 6 years back we had just started dating and I asked her out for Valentine's. At the same time I was starting to feel very weak and sick pretty much all the time. The day before Valentine's I went to the hospital to see what was going on where I found out I had very little blood in my body and needed a transfusion. That brings us to Valentine's Day. My then friend had come over that evening along with my family and while she was there the doctor came in to tell me I had Leukemia. What followed was months of chemo and treatments and fevers and crappiness all around except for her being there and helping me through it.

As a result we celebrate that "great" news I received every year since because 1. I'm still alive and 2. she is the reason why. For this year I had been working on this piece for quite some time to give to her. She's a Harry Potter nut so there she is with her beautiful yet ferocious patronus. Happy to report that she was quite fond of it as well. Happy Congrats You Have Cancer Day, Love.

Red Riding Hood scares me

In keeping with the twisted fairy tale theme I've given Red Riding Hood a shot. I've decided I might have some vendetta against little fairy tale girls. This is a WIP so I hope to get a finished post up in the next week or two. Just gotta keep this blog alive! Let me know what you think and what I can improve.

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.