Monday, November 21, 2011

A piece for Chatterbox Theater's Halloween program. It was based on the show's second act, which explored the dynamic between a man and his werewolf wife.

For Ten Paces and Draw's Fan Art theme. This was the finish I came up with, based on Sarah Stroub's sketch of a Jack Skellington/Mickey Mouse hybrid. Here's Mika Nakano's drawing of my sketch.

Some Yardbird fan art. I was trying out a process that's not too dissimilar from one that I saw on Cam Floyd's illustration blog.


Some black and white gouache demos for my buddy John's Illustration 1 class. The top drawing was an example of working from a mid tone and painting in lighter & darker values, and the bottom one an example of building up darker tones while using the white of the page for light values. 

Finally, I've been playing around with making actual art objects, you know, things that have an x,y, AND z dimension. I took some small graphite drawings, mounted them on some small blocks and painted them to all hell with acrylic. There was a lot of matte medium involved. 








I'll be finding more ways to apply this technique, and perhaps a process post is in order? We'll see soon enough.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Updates for October

I've been pretty busy the past month; working on commissions, teaching, getting ready for a solo show, and getting a few boss illustration assignments, so unfortunately that means a lonely, unattended blog. I figured an image dump and and some corresponding ramblings would make up for lost time. So let's get started with a few commissions and odds & ends pieces:





The last two images were scans of a practice drawing that I did in preparation for a Halloween illustration that I'm working on. I've reintroduced graphite into my image-making arsenal, and wanted to combine that with some of the painterly work I've been doing lately. I started out with a graphite underdrawing, fixed it, then built up my value range further with ink and added glazes of subtle gouache color for emphasis in some key areas. The next piece is gonna be a badass and a half to draw.



This is an illustration I did about a month ago for This Land Press, once again under the art direction of Jeremy Luther. It was for an article about the band Tesla. Given that hair bands were the central subject matter, it was an excuse to come up with some ideas including these:









And this was my color reference:


This a quick drawing I made for the Ten Paces and Draw blog. It's a fun sketch swap blog where illustrators take each other's roughs and bring them to finish. I had the joy of working from Pawel Mildner's hilarious sketch (it's probably not so funny if you're a dog lover...).

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Finally, last week I spent some time with Occupy Memphis during their first few days in the Civic Plaza downtown. I went with the intention of asking what it was all about and doing some sketches. Fast forward to three nights of camping and occupation later, and I collected a nice little set of images from my time with the demonstrators. I tried to capture as much conversation as I could without the luxury of an audio recorder, but I'm happiest with how things developed visually. 

















I plan to return to the occupation soon to see how things have developed.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Experiment Comic and Some Late Night Gouaches.

I had a weird dream about being in space, which led me to a quick scan of a Wikipedia article about exposure in the vacuum of space, which in turn led to the above comic. The images below are some good fun with ink and gouache.






I checked out an exhibition at the Dixon gallery yesterday that featured the work of  Jean-Louis Forain. Not so crazy about his oils, but his ink, watercolor, and gouache work left me excited about trying out a different techniques with wet media. I should also mention that his studies and observational sketches are excellent.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Catching Up!

Hey guys! Sorry about the posting hiatus- Between a trip to New York and a CRAZY (for so many reasons) month, I haven't really been tending to the blog like I should. Consequently, the Daily Gouache project got pushed to the backburner (Shame! Shame!). To rectify this terrible wrong, I'm gonna post the last few gouache pieces I made before my trip up north, some quick sketches and doodles I did there, some illustrations for This Land Press and Baker & Hill for National Geographic's website, and a few more awesome projects that I've been keeping busy with! Does that sounds like a lot? It sure is, but that tends to happen when the regular flow of posting gets held up.

First up, some gouache/inks from early August:


















Here's a illustration I made a few months for an awesome publication called This Land Press. It was based on a short fiction story by Lori Ostlund.


These are some thumbs that I sent for this project:


These are a few ideas that I narrowed down for the piece, but the one that the art director and I leaned towards was the one that emphasized the escape from one place to a destination that was less than ideal. On the drawing side of things, it was a lot of fun playing with the perspective and crazy color contrast. A big thank you to John Lee and Jeremy Luther for this assignment.

These are "stills" from an animated quiz that I made for Baker & Hill at about the same point in time for National Geographic's website:


This project was a triple-prong endeavor, with different quizzes being handled by the before-linked John Lee and fellow 901-er Bee Johnson.

Finally moving on to more recent things, these are some quick studies from my trip to New York last month. I plan on making a series of drawings based on that week when I'm able to make time for it.




These are a few gouache pieces that I made based on Kurt Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan":

The novel was full of great imagery to work from; the two moments that I picked pertained to "goofballs", pills which allows one to breathe in low-to-zero oxygen environments, and Kazak, the faithful canine companion to a chief character in the book. The third image was an idea sketch for the image above it.

This was a piece that I drew live at the Cooper-Young Festival. Live From Memphis invited me and two other REALLY talented illustrators to set up at their booth to sell our wares and do some on the spot drawing. I had an hour to make a piece from scratch, so I pounded gouache and ink onto a piece of Arches until I ended up with this guy.

And finally, this...


and this...
...are from "Tanuki!", a comic that I started a few years ago. I have the first chapter drawn out and I'm working on finishing the second one. There's going to be changes to the look from when I last posted about it. I'll definitely have something up in the near-future time frame.

So with all of that covered, I'll be keeping my posts short, sweet, and regularly spaced from now on. More Daily Gouaches to come next week!

Thanks for looking!