Long Time No See

Well it's been waaaay too long since I've posted anything and I'm sorry. I haven't really done anything finished in a long time, which is my ongoing struggle as an artist. My usual excuse is that summer has been busy for me at the park, but summer is over now and I'll be spending more time getting myself ramped up for the NCN Caricature convention. If you've never heard of it, its basically a huge week long draw-fest for caricature artists all over the world. Go check it out!

In the meantime here's some stuff to look at. First off are some caricature speedpaintings I did to post on the NCN forum. Basically its an exercise where you digitally paint a caricature of someone from scratch in a very limited time. You just time yourself for an hour or half an hour or whatever and just try to get as much done as you can in that time. Most of the other artists' posts are way more finished looking than mine, but thats a good thing because it gives me something to work towards.

Michael Douglas


Robbie Williams


And since I love drawing cars so much and want so desperately to get good at it, here are some sketches I did today. I hope to give some color to these at some point.

This one is my Focus SVT. Thats my baby.

And this is an awesome car I saw in a parking lot one day.
And here is another one I started today. A work in progress of Hillary for my website.


Thats all for now. I promise to be better about updating this thing. Thanks for being patient in the meantime.

Some acrylic practice

Here is a caricature of actor Keith David that I've been working on. I actually started this a few weeks ago, but I got sidetracked by some other projects (some art projects and some home projects). One of the few things I've ever done in acrylic. I will repost when I get around to finishing this one.

This is a park sketch I did of Ben Stein. I started a few more exaggerated attempts at his face, but none of them even came close to a likeness. Sometimes I have a hard time with faces that should be really easy.

Published...Almost...Again.

One cover and two interiors. This time the article got canceled.

Portrait Painting

I took a portrait painting class as a follow up to my Intro to Oils class. This class was acrylic or oil optional. The first session I tried acrylic, but I quickly realized that with a live model, acrylics just dry too quickly to be useful. So for the rest of the classes I used oils.

I'm not really sure how I feel about this class or the results. I went into the class feeling like it would be an easy transition from the last class, considering I draw faces for a living. I quickly found out that painting portraits would me much more challenging than I thought. When drawing I can usually get a likeness when I want to. But for some reason, in every class, I couldn't get one piece to look like the model. Unlike the previous painting class, I left every class quite frustrated.

Here are some samples, but there's not much I can say about them. I must be perfectly honest: None of these are 100 percent my work. The instructor would go around the class (which by the end was all of 2 people), and pick up a brush and fix problems with our paintings. Not to say this method didn't teach me anything, but I think I would have preferred more verbal instruction to go along with it. But if i had to put a number on it I would say these are about 85% my work. But the 25% that looks good on all these is the instructor, who is a very talented painter.

I have, however, enjoyed the process. I am beginning to get the hang of paint. This is definitely something I want to do more of on my own, and definitely something I want to improve upon. So I'm sure you will see more paintings in the future.

O Brother

Here are some sketches I did a month or so ago. They are from one of my favorite movies, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" I love the color schemes of that whole movie. I've been thinking (once I get my painting skills up) of doing a good finished piece based on the characters. Enjoy these till then.

Oil Sketches

I realized that, for whatever reason, in my artistic pursuits I have steered myself away from painting. When I discovered Photoshop, I was very happy because it seemed like the "safer" way to paint. The time has come where I can no longer avoid the issue, so I decided to take some painting classes to get me started. Theres a great little not-for-profit art school locally called Crealde where I signed myself up for an Intro to Oil Paint class. Unfortunately each class only has like 5 or 6 sessions, but thats enough to get the ball rolling.

Here are the results of my oil painting class. I call these sketches because they aren't even close to being done. This first one was about an hour's worth of work. I think its obvious I have a lot to learn here.

Each session became less demonstration and more time to paint. This one took about 2 hours.

This last one took almost 4 hours. Painting onions is deceptively hard.

For years I would hear how great it is to paint in oils, but I must admit I don't feel like its a medium I would pursue much further.

On one hand, I like the mixing of colors because theres just something about colors in oil. There's a certain...naturalness or life to the colors that you just can't capture with a camera. Well maybe thats not true for these, but if you ever see really good paintings in person, they just have something that you can't reprint in a book. Plus they dry really slowly so mixing large amounts of color isn't much of a problem.

On the other hand, they just dry sooo slowly! I can't stand the drying times. If you are working on something and you want to let it dry before you go on, you have to wait about a week! Plus there is a lot more of a process (and more chemicals) that goes along with oils. Its just a little too high maintenance for me. Which says something about me: I'm impatient and lazy.

Even though I didn't enjoy the oils as much as I thought, I'm still willing to give it more time. Maybe I'll have an epiphany or something. In the meantime I have signed up for a portrait painting class and this one is mostly acrylic, so I'll see how that works out.

My first published work...almost

Here's a lil something strange I drew up for New York Post. It was a spot illo that was meant to go with an article about Yoko Ono's newest album. If I had to tell the truth, I would say I'm not super happy about the final result. I should and could have done something more dynamic with what I was given. That might be why it never made it to print.

Buffy

This is a weak attempt at that Buffy chick. Done at work on a slow day from a photo.

Digital Condi

A 20 minute digital study I did of a photo I took at Sea World. Mostly done for practice in picking colors in Photoshop without the use of the eyedropper tool.