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.

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.

Congrats to the Wedding Zombies

Congratulations to my friends Catey and James DeSantis who tied the knot on this day in Las Vegas.
Here is a drawing of the happy couple as a pair of zombies.This was done on the inside of the card Laura and I gave them congratulating them on their wedding.

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.

Two Cups of Tea

Here is something I did for my friend Catey for her bridal shower, which is today. Laura is one of the brides maids and was helping out with the festivities of the bridal shower and had me design an invite. The theme of the bridal shower was a tea party, which made Laura think of the song by the Star Fucking Hipsters, Two Cups of Tea. One of the lyrics is "Two cups of tea // one for you and one for me."






















This was always designed to be a painting but I started out by sketching it in Illustrator because I wanted a nice and clean template for the cups and the pattern going around the cups. The sketch I made in illustrator ended up being too flat for Laura and she sent me some tattoo pictures of tea cups for reference. Based off of those I sketched out these tea cups and added a ribbon to it with the song lyrics in the ribbon. I was really happy with how the painting turned out














This is a used tea bag that was meant to hold the the info for the bridal shower. In the end it was not the right size to fit all of the information. So I added it around the illustration, using the tea tag for the RSVP information.

We ended making these into postcards to send out to invited guests.