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.

WAR HAMMER Ornament

At the opening for the small works show at Arts Benicia, where I had a couple of paintings for sale, one of the board members approached me about making a Christmas ornament for her stepson. She bought the one that I made last year and it was a big hit. This year I was asked to make it War Hammer themed. Now I am not supper into war hammer but I used to love going to the War Hammer store in the Metreon way back when, and looking at all of the models. It also just so happened that when I went into Comic Relief in Berkley that in their 50 cent comic bin I found a War Hammer 40,000 comic, where most of my reference for the piece came from. My quick internet search confirmed this so I went ahead and made it based off of War Hammer 40,000 hope that was what he likes.

On the bottom I put one of the Space Marine symbols, a skull with wings in gold!

I actually forgot to take snapshots when it was actually done. These were the most finished progress shots that I took. I added silhouetted warriors in the back ground to make it feel more epic. The pictures don't show it well, but between the emblem and the picture on top there is a silhouetted pile of corpses that they fight on.
This was a lot of fun I can't wait to make more next year, maybe some more for planning and I can get more then one done in a season.

Christmas Card 2010

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Family portrait time again. It has been a couple years since we did a family portrait and my mom and I thought it was time to do another one. This time we did something a little more fun and had us all flying in Santa's sleigh being led by the families two cats Mr. Wiggles and Sammy.

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 2009

This year I ended up making two Christmas cards. My mom just asked for something funny. So in October I came up with theses sketches (previously seen on my sketch blog), they all had to do with global warming or the bad economy, things that are on my mind. Plus one about Santa being tattooed which was just fun. (If you are having trouble reading the dialogue on my sketch blog I wrote out the dialogue for clarification)










































My parents weren't too crazy about the ideas that I came up with but I guess it started my Dad's mind a turnin' and he came up with "Things may be a little tight this holiday season what with the recession and all. But there is a barrel of love and good wishes from the Royals." So with that in mind I just started working in Photoshop.























Here is what I came up with. I got it done pretty quickly for one of my Christmas cards (which usually take forever for one reason or another) I finished it in about a day. Yes I know "recession" is misspelled, I based it off of my Dad's spelling which is also not very good. My mom liked it when I showed it to her, but then I showed this to Laura and she didn't like it and thought I could do better. That the elves were ugly and they should be cute, so then I decided to show it to my friend Chris Vear, who felt that the back ground could be more detailed and that I could incorporate the text elements better. So I decided to just redo it to incorporate their suggestions.










Here are the new elf sketches that I did trying to keep them simple cute and homeless looking.













I compiled all of the sketches along with some of the roughs I had done fro the older version and I created a new back ground sketches adding more posters on the walls. This is the sketch that I took into illustrator and made into the card.






















Here is side A
I wanted to try and not do heavy black outlines and to not shade it so that they looked like little cut out characters. I took the finished Illustrator version into Photoshop and added paper texture to everything and added some blues to make the elves look more somber. Some of the lines got a little washed out; I should have paid a little more attention to my contrasts. There are a lot of things that I like about this piece and a lot of things that I think could have been better. I learned a couple of things and I think the second one definitely looks better then the first one. Though it took me way more time so we got off to a late start and I never got around to sending out my cards to my friends. Sorry guys, I still love you.


















Here is side B
We based the idea of doing a post card off of this weird troll post card my mom found, on the back of that post card there was an illustration of the troll kids just sitting there so I wanted to do a similar thing. So here is the back of the post card with my homeless elves dumpster diving.

Christmas Card 2008

Christmas Card 2008!
This years card my mom and me decided that we wanted to put my Grandpa on the cards.


















Here is the one of the many sketches that I did in October for my Daily Sketch Blog for my mom to pick what was going to be on the Christmas card. This was in fact the first Sketch that I did, the other ones were all "A Christmas Carol" based where my Grandpa was Scrooge, because he enjoyed saying "Bah, Humbug!" during the Christmas Seasons as well as he hung a sign in his front yard to that effect. In my rendition of "A Christmas Carol" my mom and dad were the ghosts of Christmas past, My brother was the giant ghost of Christmas present, and Laura and myself were the ghosts of Christmas Future. My mom and I both liked the concept, however some of my illustrations made my mom uncomfortable with the way i portrayed my grand father so she picked the first one I did where i had my Grandpa as father time and my new baby (second) cousin Reece as Baby New Year. This was very appropriate because my grandfather had passed away a couple of weeks before Reece was born, so it seemed like what happens with the changing of the year, the old pass one into our memories and the new is brought in with limit less possibilities.























I brought the sketch into Photoshop and completed the sketch to be a full body shot and then I added a clock and some texture for the back ground. For some reason every one kept thinking that my grandfather was death, instead of father time, I for some reason have references from the 30s in grained in my brain.

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.

Christmas Ornaments

This week I painted two Christmas Ornaments for Arts Benicia. This was designed as a fund raiser for Arts Benicia, where the artist members were invited to come and get a blank ornament and decorate it to be sold for their gallery and education programs.





















Here is the first one, a Daruma Santa, or more a blue eyed whited haired Daruma. I figured with this one I would try and be more commercial with a Santa-esque figure. Though I don't know if appropriating a Daruma for Christmas was the most socially sensitive thing to do, I liked the idea and the colors are similar to Santa.
My second idea was going to be for me and for fun. For my second ornament I decided to do a skull and tentacles. After I told Laura what it was she told me she hoped it didn't sell so that she could have it for herself, no such luck.





















Here it is half way through painting it.





















Here I am painting the tentacles on the skull in the Arts Benicia gallery.





















A close up of me painting a tentacle.





















Here are my ornaments on the tree during the Holiday Parlor Tour. I volunteered to help out Arts Benicia and their very talented program coordinator to set up the room, which involved me helping to carry lots of heavy things up a flight of stairs. The event wasn't much of a sucess, where as we didn't sell too many ornaments, just three. One was mine! I sold the skull one the day before the event to one of the Arts Benicia board member who loved it.

Laura and Me (cute stuff)

I’m not really known for doing cute things and several of my past attempts have resulted in something more creepy than cute (like one of those dolls that looks like it would rip out your throat as apposed to just sitting there politely). I didn't really want to do cute things and I didn't exactly understand what makes something cute (I have a better grasp of it now, but understanding the aesthetic of cutesy things is still beyond my grasp). The only thing I knew about drawing cute things was that if you give small things really big eyes, they seem cute. I much prefer drawing things that bleed, get naked or are robots.

Then I met Laura and I felt like drawing barf enducingly cute pictures of the two of us.

















This is the first sketch that I did of us as cute little versions of us. Also on this page is Laura as a mermaid, as a half human half millipede, and a pipe smoking yakuza.






































I’ll show how I did one of them because they were all pretty much the same (which is pretty much the same way I do all of my drawings)




















Here is the sketch from above that I blew up in Photo shop to be the size that I wanted to work in.





















I went over the sketch in a new layer completing the picture by cleaning up and finishing some lines in order to make it easier to outline. I decided to get rid of the glasses because at the time they were still new and I didn't like them. I still don't really draw myself with glasses on; I don't really see myself that way despite the fact that I’ve been wearing them for almost a year.





















Here are the outlines





















Here is just the color





























Here is the final version with shading, highlights, shadows , complete with a background.
When Laura and I got together she had a scarf that we some how lost in the course of moving from one room to another in our old apartment and I didn't have my beautimous beard.


























A regular date with a Bone Room girl.
This is where I had grown my beard and sweet stash in (that’s what the yellow steak on my upper lip is; my moustache grows in blonde and looks like I have dirt on my lip) but Laura hadn't lost her scarf yet (or the sketch still had it so I didn't feel like changing it).

























Tickle fight

Here is the one that I created for Christmas (DUH) with me as a young Santa (as my friend Pat had described me to Laura before she met me; she still finds the description fitting to this day) and Laura as a younger still Mrs. Claus.

I really enjoyed doing these and looking at them again makes me want to do more of them. I think that if I did them in Illustrator that they would turn out really nice and crisp and look even more barf enducingly cute.

Family Christmas Card 2006 (Drunken Gnomes)

Well seeing the idea that [the last post Seasons Eatings (or a zombie Christmas)] was rejected I feel that it is only appropriate to show the idea that was chosen by my mother to grace the Royal family Christmas card that year. As usual I made a lot of suggestions that were obscene and devoid of traditional Christmas cheer, leaving my mom no choice but to tell me what to draw. This year she wanted something less "Christmasy", whereas the cards of the last couple of years have all featured Santa.

2002

The Swedish Santa

2003

Why The Elves make the toys

2004

Santa Stuck in a Chimney

2005

Christmas Eric
For 2005 Mom wanted a Santa free card. At first she was interested in something styled after old fashioned Christmas cards that featured Father Time and the Baby New Year. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Father Time was rather like Santa Claus in appearance; I had always seen Father Time more as the Grim Reaper, or simply as a very old man on the verge of death. And so these were the sketches I drew.

New Year Sketch 01

New Years Sketch 02

Of course, these sketches were rejected by my mom, and so this idea was abandoned.

Instead she decided she wanted gnomes. I liked this idea because for the previous two years I was pushing for more Norse mythological Christmas cards, having read the mythology, I saw many Christmas traditions based in it I thought it would be good to use. However, my mom wasn’t as keen on having Thor grace our Christmas card, and said she didn’t want to have to explain what it meant. She always liked gnomes, and as they were an easy way of touching on our Swedish heritage, we went with Gnomes, the pointy hatted, big bearded, itty-bitty people of the Scandinavian mythology.















Gnomes and faeries 01
At first I did a couple of sketches with faeries because they are also part of the Scandinavian mythology, but I didn't go too far with that particular concept because the gnomes were just more fun to draw.












Gnomes and faeries 02

















Gnome sketch 01
Happy Gnome!
















Gnome sketch 02













Gnome Card Sketch 01












Gnome Card Sketch 02













Gnome Card Sketch 03












sketch with ink Overlay












Outlines












Color












shading















Final Version

From Our Gnome to Yours
Have a Merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year

The Royals