Good Bye Gluten

Laura has recently become sensitive/ allergic to gluten, to say good bye to gluten she asked me to make her this.

R2 Valentine by Laura and C3P0 Valentine (work in progress) by Me

Laura made me an awesome Valentine this year!

On the back it says "You R2 good to me"
This is a picture of it hanging at my work station

She put much love and care into the R2 and it turned out beautifully I absolutely love it. I want to get it framed.

I felt really bad that I hadn't got around to finishing my Valentine for her (which I will finish and post later, always later).

In response I made this while I was at work.
I want to add some texture and change some parts into hearts and make it feel more Valentinesi.

A Modest Proposal

Last week the greatest thing happened.

Last week I got some good news at work so  Laura and I went out for dinner at the local sushi restaurant. Over dinner we talked about how happy were were that moment and about our plans for the future. I decided it was the perfect moment to pop the question. So, I asked Laura if she would marry me (something that I had been planing to do with more grandeur later in the year). She said "YES!"

I didn't have a ring so I grabbed one of the edamame bean pods that we had been eating and wrapped it around her finger like an engagement ring. It was a magical moment and we are very happy. 

Don't worry the real ring is coming later in the month, so I can I get to propose again, next time less spontaneously.

Laura Portrait 2012 2

I was not really happy with the last portrait that I did last time so I decided to make another one today. I think this one turned out much cuter.

Laura Portrait 2012

 

My awesome girlfriend!

Christmas Card 2011 Mr. Royal and the Electric Mayhem Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!
Well this year I just barely made it under the wire for the getting the Christmas Card done "on time" this year as in I got the card done before Christmas.
This year no one really had any ideas on what should be going on in the card. Then Laura, Alex, Uncle Ricjard, Nathan and I saw the Muppet movie for Thanksgiving so my mom threw out the idea that we should all be Muppets in this years card. So I drew us all as our own Muppets.

 (Rough Sketch with us as Muppets)

 I also had the idea to make us into Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the Muppet Show band.

 

I decided to ink this version and make it clearer what was going on.

Every one liked the Dr. Teeth version better so I went ahead and worked on that version. I found it really hard to find time to devote to working on the card this year with school, work and being a procrastinator. 

I wish I had thought out the layout better, but over all I am really happy with how the card turned out.

Arts Benicia Mosaic Project

During the Open Studios (I also created the flier for the show) which was may 1st, (I finally got around to uploading the pictures) this year they did the Mosaic Project for the first time where they will be raffling off 144 little panels created by some artists in the community. Laura and I created panels for the exhibition.

144 tiles
It was a smash success and all of the tiles were sold. I have no idea who got my tile but I got a tile of one of the artist members whom I like very much.
My tile, The Octopus and the Skull
Laura's Tile, The Bunny Skull
It was a lot of fun and I am looking forward to doing it again next year.

Zombie Laura

Laura Portrait 2011 02

This was one of the warm up drawings that I did for the caricature gig I did last Saturday as well as one of my early tests with a new technique I am trying.

With this I added a simple color layer and had the layer in color mode. I think I need to go crazy with the grey tones to make this work better.

I added a few more layers and played with the modes and it came out like this; it was pretty much what I wanted it when I started working on it and it's fun to play with. Looking forward to doing more with this technique.

The Fat Knight Returns

This is a picture of Laura and I as Batman and Robin from the Dark Knight Returns.
Laura recently dyed her hair blonde and her new look reminded me of the Robin from Dark Knight, so to go with my drawing of myself and my friends as Batman (circa 2006) the Fat Knight has returned.

I recently purchased a new set of pens for a characture gig I did for a high school grad night. I noticed that a lot comics already have the greys in them before colors, so I started to experiment with drawing, inking and shading my drawings with markers and then coloring them in Photoshop.

Laura Portrait

Laura 2011 portrait

Lub Kiss

It has been too long since I posed anything so I thought I would quickly share a little doodle I did for Laura.

FAF: Chewy and Chewy

The pet name I have for Laura is Chewy,
So I drew us as Han Solo (Laura) and Chewbacca (Eric)
So this is "Chewy and Chewy"

Pokemon Valentine

Poke'mon Valentine
with Eric (SNORLAX) and Laura (CLEFAIRY)
HAPPY VALENTINES!

Laura's Bert Impersonation

Laura often has this picture of Bert from Sesame Street, that she found on tumbler, as her status message with the note, "This is how I feel."

Looking for a quick project to work on and realized I haven't done a portrait of Laura in a while I decided to do one of her looking like Bert in this picture. Thinking it would be good for a laugh if nothing else.
I then formatted it like like the image if Bert. This is a look I am all too familiar with.

IRDRIVR

I only learned how to drive last October, and after I passed my driving test I sketched an Ed "Big Daddy" Roth style version of me driving a hot rod for my sketch blog.














Here is the final version that I created in Illustrator. A friend of mine recently contacted me about doing some Illustrator work and now I'm all gung ho about working with the program. This project was something that I have been wanting to work on for a while so I decided to just do it. I got this done in 16 hours or so. I haven't decided if I want to do more with the image, like shading. I want to do a little more with the background but right now I can't think of anything specific that would add to the piece.






















Close up of my head. I based my head mostly off of Rat Fink, thus the bug eyes, tongue and drool.






















Here is a detail shot of my Kappa Tattoo. I decided to show a detail of it because it turned out really cute which I hadn't really expected.





















Detail shot of Laura riding on the back of my hot rod in a bikini with her parasol.






















Detail shot of the snake tattoo that I designed for Laura's arm. She doesn't really have this tattoo but we've discussed the concept before.






















Details shot of a Jellyfish tattoo I made up on Laura's leg. She doesn't really have this tattoo but she has talked about getting one like it for her mother.

Christmas Gifts

This Christmas I did several acrylic paintings as Christmas gifts, half of which I forgot to take pictures of, though some were small enough and flat enough that I could run them through my scanner. These are just a few I will post more when I am able to get pictures of them.
A while back laura showed me this artist who uses oil on wood and I really liked how that looked and the texture that wood gave to the paintings, not to mention how easy and cheap it is to find pieces of wood to paint on. Though I don't have any oil paintings, I don't have a work space with the ventilation to work with them, so I decided to use acrylics instead.






















I did this one for Laura.
I started this painting like 6 months ago for the longest time it was just a daruma on a piece of wood for Christmas I decided to finish the painting by adding Hungarian (since Laura's family is Hungarian) flower designs inspired by their traditional style of embroidery, Kalocsa. This seems to be something I have been doing combining Daruma's and western European culture, I hope it isn't too culturally insensitive of me, I just love the design of the Daruma as well as the cultural meaning. Surprisingly I think that the flowers and the daruma work well together and the Kalocsa was a fun style to work in.



















I did this one for Laura's mom
She is a former nurse and now a nutritional instructor at John F Kenedy University and when ever Laura and I come to her with a question about an ailment or a food question the answer is usually "try putting some coconut oil on it." She even fixed a a stuck lock by sticking coconut oil in the lock. So I wanted to make her a plaque that said just that. I looked at a lot of vintage signs as reference and came up with this design. On Laura's painting I would draw on the wood with a pencil which would dent the wood and aake it more difficult to put a smooth painting on it. I went to an art show last year and saw a show of Todd Schorr's work and they had a DVD on how he worked. One of the things that he did on his paintings was to take a drawing and cover the back with charcoal and then trace the drawing on to the canvas. I did the same thing here and it worked really well. Though I think in retrospect I would have painted the white on the board first. I really liked how the text came out. I showed this to Laura and she felt that the composition felt unbalanced and that I should add another coconut. I had wanted to avoid having two coconuts because I thought it would end up looking like balls (just sayin').
















Here is the final version with the extra coconut and the added palm frond. It was kind of rough around the edges but I really liked how this turned out, and so did Laura's mom.

Christmas Card 2007

It seems that despite the fact that I had this blog way back in 2007 (I think) I didn't bother to post this on my blog even though I posted all of my old Christmas cards from the five years before that. So Before I let another year pass without posting it here it is.
In 2007 my mom asked me to do a family portrait being tired of doing Santa jokes from the years before. In 2o07 I also met Laura and my mom recognizing how important Laura was to me and how much i loved her offered to have me put Laura in our family portrait. Letting her know that she is part of our family.






















Here is the sketch that I started with the idea being that it was

























Here is the final version of the card that was sent out to every one.

Gloom Cupcake

This is a painting that I did for Laura; she likes cupcakes (baking & eating them) and skulls. Our mutual friend Amaya used to call Laura "Gloomcake"; this gave me an idea and I started to do several sketches of cupcakes with skulls on it. I liked this one that had the little plastic skull cut out on the top. I'm not particularly pleased with how the little yellow light burst off the skull turned out, but I think it came out pretty cute regardless.

Styrofoam Block Print

During Spring term, Laura was a teacher's assistant for the Museum Studies class where she helped curate a show of a series of Ukiyo-e prints that were commissioned after the 1923 Kanto Earthquake now on exhibit at the Mills College Art Museum. The show ends on the 2nd of August every one should check it out before it's gone.

Laura lead a seminar teaching the techniques used to create Japanese wood block prints for families. She did a great job teaching the class, if I do say so myself. After the seminar the families were invited to create their own Wood Block Prints out of a type of foam called Prestofoam. This is the print that I made. It was a great art project and it made me want to create some actual wood block prints.