"Macie"

~30 min sketch; made during Thanksgiving at a friend's, while waiting for dinner.

This little old grandma Shih Tzu was there being cute and quiet the whole night; I don't usually like this breed, because I associate them with yappy toy breeds, but she was a very sweet dog.

"Caldonia"

Couldn't sleep - pushing pixels against insomnia!

"Bozo"

Picked one of those previous face sketches to continue a little further, digitally:

"Centaur" and "Mermaid"

These are two images to help me get back into the mood for finishing a comic I'd started a while ago. It involves a centaur and a mermaid, and so.

~8"x8". pencil.

~5"x9". gouache.

"Red Jasper"

~5"x7". gouache on chipboard.

Something I made to show students tomorrow: an example for painting on colored surfaces; in this case letting the surface be the middle tone for the subject.

Faces

Here are some sketched faces. I started to paint over one digitally.

That bottom right face is from a character I depicted back in 2007 when I was learning about digital painting. That older image was a self-assigned exercise, so I didn't finish it beyond the parts I was most interested in rendering.

I sketched the face from memory, and got some of the details wrong, but recalled the main design idea.

Thinking about digital painting stuff; sketching and moving pencil work into digital.

Catching up

Here's a bunch of stuff I've made that I've been meaning to upload. In no particular order:

A couple faces made when trying out drawing into my iPad:

A random object I made as an exercise. I made the black outline shape first as a scribble. Then I carved into it with the eraser tool, and rotated it a few times to help see the possibilities. Then I finished it as a solid, describing the interior features:

A preliminary sketch for something still in progress:

Some sketches and gestural stuff from attending the monthly Dr.Sketchy's life drawing sessions. I sometimes draw the model, and sometimes draw the other people attending:

Other model stuff:

Some logo stuff for friends:

A spaceship, meant for an alien witch! So it's sort of a mix of a broomstick and a shuttlecraft:

A 30-min sketch of The Masque of The Red Death:

Another 30-min sketch for a robot thing:

I was commissioned to make a custom bookcover for a Kickstarter project, the person who gave a enough money to qualify received an image of their choosing (so this isn't my imagery/character design, etc):

And some furry stuff, made as illustrations for a convention booklet:

I'm participating in a collaborative project with a few MassArt juniors to put together a simple alphabet and counting book.

Just due to the way the things worked out, I was assigned the odds and ends of the A-Z alphabet and the 1-10 numbers. I have Y, Z, and 10.

I took Y is for Yeti (on a Yak), Z is for Zebra (zooming with Zucchini), and 10 Fish!

Each of these is 10" x 10" in gouache.

Here we go!

The set of images put together looks really great. I can't wait to see how it comes back from the printers.

Gutman Library Opening

Hey folks :) So last night was the opening for the faculty show at the Gutman Library.

James came by and was kind enough to mug for the camera and help eat food and small talk; it was nice.

The show will be up until the end of October.

"James"

So I have a painting hanging in the Gutman Library, in Harvard Square. It's part of a small faculty exhibition from MassArt, and it will be up for a few weeks.

The Gutman Library is on Brattle Street, on your way out of the Square. It's about a block further past the Brattle Theatre, on the right. Location on a map.

The image is a portrait of my friend James. I hung the piece before I had a chance to document it with a good photo/scan. So, I'll have to do that later when the show comes down, and I can upload the image properly.

Meanwhile, I took some photos with my camera.

Here's the painting. It's 16"x20", and made with open acrylics and gouache:

Here's a view of the show, and where it's hanging. You can also see some of the other faculty work, they are all so good!:

Plus, the view from outside:

From the sidewalk on Brattle Street, you can see the pieces through the window at night.

If you find yourself in Harvard Square, walk by and take a look :) Or just, y'know, go inside the building and see the stuff up close.

Art Stuff

Haven't been keeping this up, but I have been keeping busy.

Here's some stuff:

"Dwudley" 8" x 10". watercolor, gouache, acrylic. Made for a friend of mine.

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"Model" ~10" x 11". gouache, watercolor. Observed from a two-hour pose. I didn't get the model's name.

The painting group I was a part of ended shortly after this, ah well.

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"Matador" digital.

Some character design work from an illustration project I'm in the middle of.

"Kylie"

~8.5" x 11". gouache.

From observation, three-hour pose. Fun, but slow; I could paint all day, forever.

"Midgard: The Tower"

~5.25"x7". watercolor.

Made for my friend T', who is a local boy far away from home. These may get a little fanciful, but they are more Wish-You-Were-Here postcards than literal documentary.

The Prudential Building is one of the primary landmarks of Boston. You can see it from miles away, like Mt. Fuji, or the Eiffel Tower - even as far as Waltham, (if above the trees, say, in the Viking Tower), and further if the day is clear.

As long as you can see it, you can't get lost in the Boston Metro area; aim for it and you'll eventually find the center of the city.

It's fundamentally a solid slab of brute Modernist construction from the mid-60's. I'm told it's an eyesore - or anonymous architecture, at best. Though I personally feel that the design is redeemed by the top observatory floors and the organic mass of antennas that have sprung up over the years on the roof.

Because it is so tall, the evocative radio towers on top are never actually all that distinct - they could imaginatively be anything really. An omnipresent, but inaccessible fantasyland of spidery spires like the Watts Towers. A distant magical forest. A micro-sized futuristic Buck Rogers metropolis, like Emerald City at night, or the City In A Bottle from 1001 Arabian Nights, or simply the Pru having a bad hair day. The rest of the building feels like a pedestal for this stuff and the top few floors. The whole thing could be a spaceship on a custom-built landing pad.

The top design justifies the plainness of rest of the building and gives it character.

The view from the observation floor is amazing, and all the more so during the various hazy states of moody New England weather.

I love painting heroic clouds.

"Artichokes"

~9.5"x12". watercolor, gouache.

Made for a friend of mine who likes to cook.

Corgis Makin' Bank

Corgis Makin' Bank, a set on Flickr.

Made a small series of gouache paintings of corgis, referencing various aspects of early 90's hip-hop culture.

The first image is more or less related, though made a year earlier.