Don Sketch Before Paint

I’ve been meaning to do some more portraits.
After finally watching the Mad Men season 6 finale I’ve decided to go with Don.

Paint to follow.

Sketching

I’ve been neglecting adding new sketches to this blog as I post them all over other social media outlets…

So here is to me finally updating.

Preview.

Find the final image in my portfolio.

…once I scan it.

Working out the details…

After putting this aside to do another project for her, I’m back at it turning Fawn into a superhero.

Fawn Dorr Mask Test

This is a quick test sketch of an old friend of mine from back home. Fawn is a talented and determined young athlete who has taken her skills to the professional level. (Check her out on twitter at here) After I had posted a number of my recent Character Chop Shop pieces, Fawn had asked me about doing a character portrait of her. I’ve been drawing superheroes for as long as I can remember so it seemed like a great project once she asked me to turn her into a superhero.

Stay tuned for the character sketch and final painting…

Goblin

So, there used to be a picture of an artichoke hanging in Portfolio Center a few months before I graduated. The moment I saw it, this painting is what I saw. I wish I knew which student photographed it, so I could show them. I wanted to add in a little bit of Spider-man into the piece, so I painted the spider dangling in the eye of the mask like Spider-man would hang upside down.

Scroll through for the sketch and the artichoke that inspired it all.

 

Marty with ASYO

This was commissioned as part of a gift. This will be a lead in to a much larger gift/experience…

Cisco Annual Report

This project was a collaboration for Mia Chubarova’s annual report for Cisco.  The concept going into this project is that “With Cisco, anything is possible.”  With that concept in mind, we worked on developing visuals for how Cisco is changing the way we work, live, play, and learn.  The benefits of this particular photography style allowed for so much more to come across on camera without having to use photoshop to achieve it.

Santa (is Nigh)

I’m throwing this one up on the blog because I don’t really consider this one done yet.

I wanted to show some process on a piece that I worked on recently related to the Holiday.  I thought about various holidays and “important” things or potential hot topics for the rest of the year and how to combine them.  I was thinking about what might be happening in December when I remembered that the world is supposed to end on the 21st, just a few days before Christmas.  Despite the fact that nobody really believes in these “end of the world” things, I figured it would get brought up again when the date is closer.  So I wanted Santa to take part in the fun of moving past this ridiculous event.  In the original idea, Santa was going to be standing over a man passed out on the sidewalk with a sign that read “The End is Nigh.”  However, Santa will have painted over “The End” with “Christmas” instead as he giggles to himself and tells the viewer to keep it a secret. As this idea continued to develop, I removed Santa and replaced him with a shadow.(img1)  It was at this point that the image started to take on a different kind of feeling than I wasnted, so I scraped those ideas to draw up a new Santa. (img2) So after this new sketch I thought this version looked like he could be tagging the wall behind him.  I removed the man with the sign and pushed forward with that.(img3 &4)

I consider this image incomplete because I’ve been playing with a number of different tags that Santa could be spray painting.  I have been diving into a number of conversations ranging from topics on security issues to Occupy and so on.  This current version is meant to get a little less heavy and make it more playful by having him paint a snowflake, but it just so happens to start looking like the Star of David.  So like I said, I’m still playing…

“Yeah? Well My God Has A Hammer…”

Assigned to paint a landscape environment, I wanted to do some work on “painting the air,” having a foreground middle ground and background.  Like the “Driver” piece in my last post, I had an idea, made some minor tweaks to the original sketch and this is what happened.  The changes I made were extending the image to be much more vertical by increasing the size of the giant in the background.  Some line work in the background will need to be softer in the final.