“I am become Cockroach…Destroyer of worlds”

A colony of cockroaches has taken up residence in our home. I drew an ink sketch of one of the little free-loaders and then transformed it into a super-villain.

Window painting

I wanted to do a goauche painting and found a nice window view to sketch from. I’m really loose in my use of the materials and I hate wasting paint so I try to use my various tiny mixtures through the painting in order to minimize waste. This has the beneficial effect of creating unity. I haven’t been able to find any really excellent books that deal with this medium alone. I’m in awe when I see smoothly and realistically modeled gouache paintings. However, I enjoy flat illustration usage as well.

If anyone knows of any helpful print or web resources drop a comment, per favoré

August 25th 2009

“The thing I saw shining in your eyes…was enjoyment of life…What you knew… was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place”

—G.K. Chesterton

Appliance World

Ballpont, rapidograph ink and watercolors. Color added at Panama Red.

Meanders with Oleanders

The oleander bush outside the window was the jumping off point for this one—ink and watercolor. I took it into PS and messed around with textures, layers, masks, and shadows/highlights.

Outdoor fun

Ink with Photoshop coloring and textures. IF the composition looks lopsided, it’s because I had to lop off a bunch of the scanned image since it was blurry. C’est la vie.

Academy Thumbs

A few years ago I was able to take a drawing class at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. It was a great experience for me. Even though my undergrad studies were in Graphic Design, I never got to do as much drawing as I would have liked. Taking a 10-hour-per-week, five-week course was a shot in my creative arm.

I was cleaning out some closets and found these marker exercises. I think the idea was to play with layering the marker grays and think of different scenes, perspectives and camer angles.

Action Sketch 1

A few years ago I shot a few rolls of film depicting some of my relatives in customized action poses. It was fun sketching thumbs and having them act out scenes for my future reference. They prints  have been in a photo album, largely unused… until now! Enter the new category “Action Sketches”. Here’s the first one done in Photoshop in under 5 minutes.

Green Rooftop

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

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.