Green Rooftop

I’m going to refine this when I get the time: either Vector or hand-inked I haven’t decided yet.

The Premiere

I have a lot of stories bouncing around in my head. I usually try to jot them down immediately in a nearby sketchbook for later development. Sometimes they become a poem, a song, a short story, an illustration, or comic. In this case, I created a storyboard for a short film (could live action, could be animated). I had alot of fun working on this idea. It has a wide range of emotions and some nice acting moments. It works great in pantomime. It’s also the first time I’ve used a female protagonist. Enjoy.

The Sarge

Tooling around with a story idea, I sketched a few versions of Sarge. I like this one soI thought I’d walk through some digital inking, coloring, and texturing. For those of you with military knowledge, the uniform is a total fantasy based on poorly remembered war movies and cartoons (mind you own beeswax.) Real research to follow.

Natural Inks

Yesterday a friend invited us over to pick blackberries. I ended up sketching some flowers and plants in her backyard. I was promptly loaded up with clippings from a variety of plants to take home with me. One flower (whose name I don’t know) had petals with a vibrant, nearly flourescent blue-purple. I boiled some of them to make a thin ink. I also made some 2 strengths of Blackberry ink and used some of my morning coffee to round out my pallete.

Sketching a quick composition of some leaves from a Bleeding Heart plant, I just began layering the drawing from light to dark with my natural pigments. I did add a little baking soda to the various mixtures since I don’t know what the pH values were and I didn’t want any acids eating into my sketchbook paper too soon (I have no idea if my logic is sound from an archival perspective, but I know that coffee is acidic so a base should neutralize it , right?).

I mixed linseed oil with the darker blackberry ink so it would stick to my chop.

I also scanned some negative washed paintings of the actual Bleeding Heart leaves that were my model as well as scanning the leaves themselves. I took those and messed around in Photoshop using various blending modes to get the final composition.

Below is the final composition followed by the 4 painting stages:

1. Coffee
2. Petals
3. Blacberry thin
4. Blackberry dark

T-Shirt sketches

I volunteered to design a tshirt for my family’s summer reunion. My initial idea was to to set up a campground look with each tent representing the various sub-family groups. I set up an isometric perspective grid. The idea just wasn’t working. So I changed gears.

Concept 2 depicts iconography from the various states-of-origin for the participants. They’re assembled in a whimsical collection of floating islands joining together, a visual definition of a reunion.

As is often the case, I like my sketches  more than the final which I composited in Photoshop then redrew and tweaked in Illustrator. Since I have the illustrator files, I may do a colored version for fun at some future date. The tshirts will be a single-color silk screen so I had to work out how the lines and closed negative space would interact with the shirt color.