Jackalopes, Dragons and Bunny Warriors

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Today was the sale, and here you can see my super-duper professional looking setup on a W.B. Mason box and some papercrafted and spraypainted stands. It turns out that though people love the Bunny Warriors, people will actually spend money on the Dragon and Jackalope. This was a great day for my first experience selling things in this sort of venue. I will certainly be making more prints to sell in the future, on Portland's First Friday Art Walks.

FRELLING NARWHALS!!

 My friends displays by my own.

 Caricatures by Alysa Avery, the upper left portrait is me.

MECA Sale

Hello, I am going to be selling my art at the MECA Holiday Sale come next Friday and Saturday. Those dates specifically being December the 3rd and 4th. Here is a preview of the artwork that I will be transferring to linoleum printing blocks by that time and selling for prices yet to be determined. Stay tuned for more updates on how it's looking and come down to the Porteous building on Congress Street to see what the Illustration majors and other artists in the school and community are doing!

In the Works

I have neglected what has become a vital part of my process for I think over a week... horrible!

These last two weeks have been awesome. Just this Tuesday my Illustration class went on a field trip to see a lecture given by James Gurney, the creator of Dinotopia and an astoundingly masterful painter, followed up by a trip to the Natural History museum at Harvard... I was simply overwhelmed by the sheer variety of nature. I didn't get to look at it all but I want to go back and stay the day drawing from open to close. You can find out more about the trip from my professor, Jamie Hogan's blog.

I have not been neglectful of posting because I'm not working hard, in fact quite the opposite. All of my projects are well under way and I'm deep into my work on them, but you'll see more of them when there is something more to show.

I wouldn't post without some images though, so here are a few pages from my Summah Sketchbook.

Upcoming Projects

 

Some studies for upcoming projects. DUN DUH DUHN!

Father Fox and Rev'run Wolf

An experiment with a sketch of mine on how I ink and then how I get those inks to color in Photoshop.

Also, introducing two new con-men characters who may be making it into more of my work soon.

Oil Painting Away!

So, I've been oil painting these past few months. You might ask, my hypothetical reader, "Why haven't I seen any of these oil paintings?" The answer, landscape painting is an ordeal. You have to get to location, if you forgot your stuff you're ruined for the day, their are insects that want to eat your face, freezing cold, high tide sweeping your paintings away and I'm plain inexperienced. However, there is good news, I do have things this week I am proud to show, they are quick and/or in progress but they are showing definite improvements in my ability to paint. So hell yeah!

Here are a few on site paintings:

 

This next painting started this way today: 

...and ended this way:

More work will be happening on this over the next week but I'm pretty happy with the progress.

I'm Fine Art (NSFW, nekkid people alert!)

This is an old drawing of me as a zombie wearing my "I am a Fucking Warrior" t-shirt that my grandmother made for me. My Illustration professor, Jamie Hogan drew this as part of a collaborative zine project we did over a year ago. Between now and then she took this drawing, cut it out and framed it. And she sold it!

So now I'm telling all of my friends that I am fine art... and they've been all like, "Whatevs Tom." So it goes.

Here are some nudy drawings I did over the summer. I have filled up quite a few sketchbooks this summer and will be collecting scans of my faves over a few weeks. Without further ado, nekkid men and ladies.

Little Better'n Celtic Women

The Morrigan project is coming along surely but slowly, I am still in need of much practice on rendering things out so that I can get more or less consistently good results every time. Then, because good is never actually good enough I'll practice some more until I achieve mastery.

Y'know what though, I've been painting now, and inconsistently at that for about 14 months so I should be damn happy about being where I am because I'm still a beginner. It's crazy to think as an artist I would've never thought I'd ever consider myself a painter. But hey, that's what I've been doing. Most of my work this semester has been either oil or digital painting, drawing has become just a part of the process for the final piece.

Anyhow, I'm not just going to blather on about being a painter, because this blog isn't about what I have to say, it's about what I paint and draw. So here is a portrait study of Olga Kurylenko as Etain in the UK movie, Centurion... a movie I've never seen but she's a sexy celtic lady who murders Romans, what more do you need to know.

WIP and Bear's Vigil

I am really excited that I am doing three pieces on The Morrigan, covering three different aspects. The first, the one I'm presenting is Badhbh. This is currently the accompanying text that is supposed to go along with these images.

We are Badhbh, the grim feast of battle,
Where swords and ravens eat of flesh
We are Macha, the hand that spurs the pawn
The sovereign lady of knights and kings
We are Nemain, the lust for combat in every warriors heart
The pounding fury of the charge to battle
We are the MORRIGAN. We are WAR.

Also, the second part of Bear's trilogy. Enjoy!

The Old Crone

This is the first of a trilogy of three comics I wrote... Now tell me, what's wrong with this sentence.

Considering this is the way I've started my blog I think I will end my word count here.

Quick Sneak Peek

Sometimes you are working and working in the studio and the last thing you care about is a silly blog, but what's the point of all that work if you don't share it with someone? Here is a sneak peek at what I've been doing.

Potatoes in my Eye

Today its Okk and his buddies. They'll fuck you up. These are some of the sketches I'm doing for my most recent illustration project, which is do three of whatever you want as a portfolio building exercise, andI have desperately been wanting to practice my portrait painting.

One of the things I got caught up on during my last project that was a very unnecessary waste of time and made the project suffer was not being able to do the rendering. This project allows me to simplify my goals and focus on some realistic rendering.

This would end up being a bit more concept arty but for now credit goes to Armstreet for the helmet design and Rembrandt for the mockery of a master study to the right.

I think I wanna do this one, they are the three faces of the Morrigan; Mabd, Macha and Nemain. As you might see I am missing one, it's in progress.

Okk for President

I made no art at all on Tuesday, it made me so mad!

Here she be...

Il est fini. At least until I'm told otherwise in critique.

It Got All Inked Up

So ta-da! This is the final inked thingamajigger (not done yesterday because I took some sorely needed me time) that I just finished my color studies for... Color studies that I am going to have to incorporate earlier in the process so that the last few hours could have been spent less distracted while thinking it out. Ah, well hopefully I can pull that all together soon enough.  Here it be:

You may not hear from me tomorrow while I'm busting ass on finishing this, I am way behind where I want to be. The day after, however, I will be posting the final for this and beginning a comic book project. Also did some figure drawing today and decided get some more practice with my nibs, plus the advice to draw in pen every so often is pretty constant. Here are two I felt came out well.

Processi

Here are some of the thumbs for my most recent Illustration Majors class. The project? To draw a Sci-Fi novel cover. I did a little mental "Yippee!" when that was assigned... probably did it out loud too.

I spent way more time on these and the seven other thumbnails I did for this project and the closer this project is to completion, the more I see that time paying dividends towards the final results quality. These three are in order from my least favorite to favorite. Quite naturally it's also in order of my classes favorite to least favorite. Oh well, so I merrily went on and made this drawing...

...which is to say I made a bunch of other drawings but this is the one best reflects what the final was going to end up looking like. Including this drawing where I tried to design the aliens, this came before I decided one of the characters was going to be a child.

Then with much drawing, then redrawing, then some more redrawing (though the aliens remained much the same, I redrew the soldier like 20 times) I started work on the final linework which looks something like this.

With all that repetition I think I finally got a hang of how to draw this scene though. Hopefully you'll agree. What does tomorrow hold? Other than a long day of work as a cashier possibly some inking!!

What's this!?

That's correct ladies and gentleman, I am posting two days in a row! If I keep this up I won't be able to make snarky comments about myself and how I don't ever post anything. Then I suppose I'll have to talk about my art or something. Art like this...!

Chronicling my journey from suck to awesome (something that I am certain my professors will tell me isn't the greatest way to sell myself) is my first attempt at doing a landscape as a Photoshop painting. Okay so this is attempt two, my first attempt had a quick death, but this one has some level of resolution to it (in other words, if you squint it kinda looks like a landscape... a landscape that you're squinting at anyway).

Above, you see my second attempt, which proved two things to me; it's easier to paint a sunny day and fluffy clouds are kinda fun. As today documents something which I'm normally quite bad at I'd say this day is a high point in my road towards becoming a successful artist