A Boy and His Pig

I spend a good chunk of time every day looking for jobs; when I run across postings that want an art test, that always stimulates me to create something different then I usually would. Here is one Laura found in Portland craigs list for a a children's book illustrator. They wanted a test drawing of a boy kissing his pet pig.
Here are the sketches that I did.



































After I showed Laura the first page of sketches she said that the kid had to have a stripey shirt. The guy didn't express if this was a city kid or a country kid so I tried to keep it pretty neutral with his clothes.















With the last page of sketches I started to play with shapes and I also started looking for reference of kids kissing other animals like dogs.




















I took some of those sketches and I drew them onto water color paper and inked the drawing and painted it. I only painted 2 because the guy wanted just one example of the boy and his pig. I picked the two pieces that I felt represented two different takes on the same idea. I decided to not add any back grounds because I felt that they would take too long and that there wasn't a setting to put them in so I thought these would work well as like a little corner illustration of the boy and his pig.


















I really liked this one I liked the relationship of the boy and his pig where the pig was bigger then the boy. This is the one that I sent in, and I also sent in the one I made in Illustrator.


















Here is the version that I did in illustrator, I think the way that I did the shadows gives the whole piece and really soft edge to it and makes it feel very warm and inviting. I like how all of these came out. I have yet to hear back but you never know.

Drunken Rabbit Sees a Pink Elephant

Here is a little doodle I did a long time ago to make Laura laugh. This prompted me to look into the origin of the "seeing pink elephants" which comes from Jack London in 1913, who describes one sort of alcoholic in the autobiographical John Barleycorn as "the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers."




















One day I decided to developed it into a full illustration. I originally wanted to turn it into a paper texture piece, but I think it works better like this. I might go back into it and add some lighting effects though (mostly highlights on the rabbit and the pink elephant and then perhaps add a moon beam). I wanted to play with color and have a complete background, which I usually neglect because I find them difficult and I usually just muddy up my illustration with backgrounds. Though I think due to my color choices and the changing levels of details I was able to create a cohesive illustration.

Jay Z as King Koopa

In late 2009 I was commissioned to do a picture of Jay Z as King Koopa by a friend of my brother's.

















This one was simple enough, I just placed Jay Z's head on to King Koopa's body


















With the second sketch I was going for more of a King Koopa and Jay Z fusion and I leaned on the Jay Z side. I think this turned into an awesome design for a hat and coat that I would love to own.

















This one I tried more of a half and half (i.e. more human proportions on King Koopa and Jay Z's face) and it turned out to be the approach that I felt looked the best.
















Here is a refinement of sketch number 3 with some sketches of Princess Peach and Beyonce as, which I played with for a while, though then it seems like Mario is trying to steal Jay Z's girl instead of vice versa and I couldn't play Mario like that. So instead I left it as Princess Peach but I made it seem like Princess Peach liked Jay Z Koopa better then Mario, which I felt worked for the piece.


Here is the final version on Paper Bag















This was a fun project I hope I get to work like this in the future.

Prana Portraits

I have started to dabble in digital painting. Here are some of my early attempts. These are portraits from a comic Laura and I are working on. These are some concept drawings. The comic won't be in this style, but maybe the covers. We'll see. I did these more in an attempt to build up my concept art portfolio. I have been watching videos from Idrawgirls.com and have been trying to start doing digital painting each one of these took around 45 minutes, I hope to cut that time down or raise the quality.























This is the second one I did; the first one was awful. This is Sasuma who starts out as a Geisha and becomes so much more.






















This one I more or less copied from a reference picture.























This is Roger. More on him later.

Gnomes: PIG RACE

In December I was commissioned to do a painting of gnomes hunting for mushrooms for a friend of mine and it turned out really great (I forgot to take photos, so I still need to ask for a photo of that particular work). When working on it I did five different sketches for the piece, and I quickly became obsessed with drawing the gnomes with pigs because pigs are used for hunting truffles. One of them was of gnomes riding pigs in a race.















Here is the sketch of the gnomes riding pigs in a race.



















And the final painting.
This is a photo so the colors look weird, I'm not the best photographer. I am pretty happy with the results; I'm trying to to have more of an emphasis on lighting and tone in my newer pieces, so I did some small lighting effects. This is the 3rd painting I have done using watercolor pencils (I forgot to take pictures of the other 2) and they give me really good results. I'm really enjoying painting and drawing gnomes right now, so I'm sure there will be more to come in the future.

I have submitted this to the art of a community show for Arts Benica which runs from January 21st to February 28th. This peice, which is framed, can been seen as well as purched at the Arts Benica art gallery at 911 Tyler Street, Suite 144, Benicia , CA 94510. Any one who can should come up or come down and check out this art show it is really great.

2010 Calendar

Laura was lamenting how boring her office calendar was, so she asked me to populate the landscape photographs that filled the calendar with monsters. These are the monsters that I came up with; they are now happily cohabiting with Laura in her office.