More Holiday Card

And not figure work, boy did last night's session kick my butt.  We took a couple of weeks off from our figure drawing session at the Dover Art League and I was feeling it last night when we picked back up.  Not to mention I situated myself in about the worst place I could - every pose was foreshortened hell.  Enough with the excuses though...but I'm still not posting any of what came out of last night.  Instead, some more work on the CRHS holiday card.

Studies for the other two carolers, I didn't have as many poses to choose from for these guys, but these two will work fine.  Will probably still do a few more sketches before paint, just to make sure I nail down the likenesses a bit better.

And here is the working comp that I okayed with the principal this afternoon.  Carolers front and center, the wreath will frame behind them with a pic of the high school inside it, and the Leyendecker-borrowed scroll with an old english-esque CRHS will close off the bottom.

I'll project everything to canvas on Monday and then start laying paint on Tuesday.  I'll take a bunch of pictures along the way.  And, deadline - Thanksgiving.

Also, this Friday's kicker - I made a video! Definitely not saving the world with this, but I had to do some video work for my grad class, and it was an interesting learning experience.  I'm definitely going to try and hone my skills with this and get some more up in the future.  Enjoy, and don't be to harsh.

Carolers

Well, it's time to start in on the high school's Holiday card, and the sketches came together earlier on this year during an in-service.  I typically take the opportunity to incorporate my boys into the card, but I was feeling something a little different this year.  There are a few elements that seem to make recurring appearances - scrolls, wreathes, maybe a street light.  But the main thrust of this year's card will be a group of carolers.

Some of the vocal jazz students were kind enough to costume up and pose for me.  They actually sang during the reference shoot, so that was super cool - definitely got better facial expressions than just asking them to fake it.  This is the first batch of sketches for two of the carolers, more will be up next Tuesday, along with quite a bit of progress on the finish.

Academic Work

I've been wanting to try some very academic graphite drawing for a while now.  I don't think I've ever been satisfied with the way that I draw with a pencil, but I think I'm starting to get there.  Somewhere around the second session on this, I realized that I could use the HB pencil to push around and blend the 2B and 4B - so that was pretty cool.  There is definitely more to do here, and we'll see where next week takes me, I really just want to see how far I can push this one.  A little detail below. Obviously the hair and the jewelry need a bunch more work, and I'll keep fiddling with the flesh as well.

And as a kicker, a little 20 minute oil study in Raw Umber and Titanium White.  I picked up Jeff Watts' awesome DVD on gesture work last month for my birthday, and have been itching to get my paints back out ever since.  I really love his philosophy on approaching the work - which seems to be fairly intuitive.  I especially needed to hear the bit about using MORE paint, it really does make a difference.  Go figure.  Anyways, the study is about 8x10 on canvas board, Gamsol was the medium, and a #2 round hog bristle was the brush.

Studies for Muse

After tearing into one of Rob Liberace's DVDs on drawing the figure in motion, I took a crack at some in depth studies of my own.  Following Liberace's method pretty closely on these, black prismacolor verithin pencils on paper that has been toned with shelac.  I really liked the process, the hard surface of the shelac eats away the pencils pretty quickly, especially when I really dug into some of the dark areas, but it really let me move the black around like it was charcoal.

So these are studies for a larger piece that I have had kicking around in my head for a while now, and I really like how the far right figure turned out.  These also represent a bit of a new direction for me. 

For the past several years, I have had a fairly concentrated focus on the Sci-Fi/Fantasy illustration genre, but I think that's starting to change.   Maybe some of it's because as a teacher, I don't have to conform to some of the requirements/constraints that publishing puts on illustration.  Maybe it's because for the first time, I feel like I am comfortable with what I do, where I am, and what I think I want to do.

Now I certainly haven't lost my interest in the genre, it's just that I'm finding myself more and more drawn to the figure and the dynamism, emotion, and subtlety that it can convey on it's own. I'm not completely sure yet how this is going to translate into new pieces, but I'm feeling more directed now than I have in a while - so I'm excited to follow this track and share the journey along the way.

Pieces

 

Something a bit different.  A few pieces of larger images that I can't quite show all of.  Soon though. Soon.  More MTG sample work in the next post.

Sparkmage Drawing

 

Final drawing for the Sparkmage painting.  I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, I was a little worried in the early stages that I had lost some of the movement I had in my initial thumbnails, but I think I found my way back.  I'm particularly happy with the armor - I had initially thought I wanted it to have a bit more cobbled-together look, but this, I think, is certainly a bit more "manufactured" and orderly.  Probably all of that Warmachine influence bouncing around in my head, and I'm sure watching Iron Man 2 again didn't hurt either...  

I've got the drawing projected onto the canvas everything primed up for an evening of paint as soon as I leave the keyboard.  I'm going to work a bit smaller for these than I have in the past year, this one is clocking in at 20x15, mainly to see if I can speed the whole process up a bit.  I'm also not sure how much help my color roughs will be, as I've got something completely different in my head for how I want everything to look, playing into the "Red" color scheme and whatnot.  I believe I'll tackle the background tonight, or at least as much as I'm able.

So, will the painting be done by Tuesday night?  We'll see, if the post contains thumbnails and roughs for the second card sample, I suppose that will be our answer.  Stay tuned.

Study No. 3 and Blatant Paternal Pride

 

Hopefully this is more of a hat trick than a third strike...  This little series of portraits has been good fun.  Had a blast drawing from Hubble images, got to create a bunch of space tech on the fly (which I think was a bit more successful when I only had to deal with a bust as opposed to a half figure) and I also got to do some more art of the family, which always seems to net me good results.   I do wish the lighting was more interesting on the face here, obviously flash lit, but the photo was too cute not to work from.

Also, I've included a shot of the latest collaborative piece that my wife and I have been working on.   This would also explain the delay between postings, as this little guy arrived a bit unexpectedly on the 15th.  Looks like I have another drawing to do...

Space Portraits

Two studies from the past week.  Both in chalk and charcoal on 6x9 toned paper.

The self-portrait actually started out twice as REALLY crummy 5x7 oil studies that will NEVER see the light of day.  I actually told some of my students to stop looking at them the other day as it might make them worse...

Anywho, third time proved to be the charm, and it might also have had something to do with switching over to chalk and charcoal, where I could solely focus on value and form and not get so caught up with the color.  Have had a lot of fun with these two drawings, I've been working in a real fantasy/medieval vibe for a while now and I was really Jonesing to break out of it.  Digging through references for outer space also allowed me to indulge in one of the more rewarding sides of art - actually learning about what you're drawing.  I loved outer space and the universe as a little kid, and it's been all kinds of fun diving back into that material and relearning a lot of the stuff that was taught about the solar system et al back in gradeschool.  And the images, HOLY COW, the images.  How can you not be completely blown away by some of the stuff out there.  Well that's a lot of rambling, at least one more of these little studies is one its way for sometime around Tuesday - probably on Facebook and Drawn Today before here though - so until then...

Of Giants and progression...

A short little post with some WIP shots of my latest painting.  I've been taking the opportunity to work back through some of my thumbnail sketches from right after I got back from the IMC last year.  And this frost giant has been lurking around in my sketchbook just waiting to find a piece of unsuspecting canvas.  There's obviously a long ways to go in the painting above, but I'm really digging the blues in the underpainting so far, I'll have to see how much of that stays, and in turn, see how much it forces me to change in the figures in the foreground. 

The sketches for our three adventurers were pretty straightforward, although I'm sure our neighbors think I'm now truly crazy - I shot everything behind our garage (hey, the light was right...).  And just for kicks - the dwarf up top started out as me snarling with a snow shovel, I'll let your imagination do the work on that one, as I don't think I'll let that reference see the light of day.

 And, here's the origin of our starring giant/titan.  I had been wanting to make a maquette for a while now, and this seemed the perfect opportunity.  They are absolutely fantastic tools for finding value reference, and damn fun to build as well.  I found that my sketches never quite got to what I was looking for in the giant's face, so I figured I would kind of "feel" everything out in the clay.  It worked quite well, but I found that the maquette ended up with a bit of a "slow" feeling in the face, the tight drawing turned out to be a bit of a blend of thumbnail sketch and model.  A good learning experience in all, and I'm really looking forward to getting this one finished up.

War Priest Finished Pencils

Piggy-backing off of the post below...at least I made use of the time between my "free time."  I think I mentioned this before, but I find it's a lot easier to drop in and out of a drawing while teaching than to drop in and out of a painting.  Fairly happy with the skulls in the background, but still need to tweak the values.  Hoping for paint around December.

Harvey, not exactly an NDA...

The high school that I teach at has a really great drama department, and since last year I've been doing the poster art for the fall and spring shows.  This fall's show is Harvey - set in the 1950s, it's a little yarn about a fellow named Elwood who sees a spirit, Harvey, who happens to be in the form of a six foot tall rabbit.  Needless to say, Elwood's a bit off his rocker, since no one else can see Harvey, but it's his sister, Veta, who has grown tired of Elwood's eccentric behavior, that gets committed to a sanitarium.  Don't worry, there's a happy ending.

These posters are a great opportunity for me to stretch my "inking" legs, since they are printed in black and white, and try to channel some of the great illustrators that I admire from the past.  The figures are the two leads from the show, we did a quick photo session (man does stage lighting come in handy...), a few sketches for an approval from the drama teacher, some ink and hand lettering later, and here we are. The printers will take care of the rest of the layout, I'll try and post the finished poster once it gets back.  Good fun.

Works in Progress

One drawing and one painting.

Thumbthing

MGF

Hanging in the studio encased in a cocoon, this specimen will emerge as an oil painting in approximately 4-6 weeks.

IMC 2010

In a word: Wow.

In many words:

Begin stream of consciousness...

I spent the week of June 12-18 up in Amherst, MA at the Illustration Masterclass, and it was without a doubt the best experience of my artistic life.

The class was created by the fantastic Rebecca Guay, and the other instructors included folks such as Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Donato Giancola, Dan Dos Santos, Scott Fischer, Greg Manchess, and Irene Gallo, with special guest appearances by James Gurney and Jeremy Jarvis.  The class is open to anyone who wants to enroll and a choice of assignments is given beforehand, each student is to choose one to work on during the course of the class.

I don't know if I can truly encapsulate the whole experience into any kind of coherent statement, it was a crazy week full of new people, new ideas, fresh takes on old ideas, reinforcement of skills, and everything in between.  I met a ton of great people, most of whom I will hopefully keep in contact with for a long while to come.  So here goes...

The class started with a good old fashioned critique of everyone's sketches, it was just like school we hung everything up on the wall and the faculty went through each one and gave feedback.  It was straight up with what worked, what didn't and how to fix it, and it looked kind of like this:

Needless to say, this took a while.  The class was about 85 students total, and we broke into two separate groups and I was in the upstairs group whose critique was run by Donato, Dan, Boris and Julie, and Irene.  We clocked our critique in at just over 5 hours, the downstairs group which was headed up by Greg, Scott, Jeremy, Rebecca and Jim finished in around 9 or 10 hours.  Word has it there was a lot more "fun with tracing" in the downstairs group with Scott, Rebecca, and Greg drawing all over everyone's sketches.  While the critique portion did take a while, it was incredibly informative to hear the feedback about others' work, and for me, some of the most critical ideas and concepts came from the notes I got during this session.  The critique also served to show that there was some serious skill on display at the class.  About a quarter of the students in the class are pros already.

So I didn't take a shot of my initial sketch (the assignment I chose was Joan of Arc), but after the crit and some time at the drawing board, it looked like this:

The drawing had started with two additional figures, kind of like a personal guard, with big old two handed swords.  The very first comment I got from the instructors was to lose the extra figures, which is funny since my first thumbnail for the piece was Joan floating like this with her banner, and I then proceeded to spend a dozen or so pages trying to figure out how to "fill up" the rest of the composition.  Big mistake, the figures were just filler and it showed, one of many things learned - if it's not essential to the piece, it shouldn't be in the piece.  So Joan is the focal point, make the painting about Joan.  So with this in mind I moved on into the painting and over the next four days (and nights) or so ended up with this:

I got some good feedback on this along the way, but overall I wasn't really that happy with it.  I realized that in general, I had come into the class very under prepared, and that was perhaps the best thing that could have happened.  Well, maybe not the best, but it forced me to really look at how I was approaching my art, about how I should never take anything for granted and always make sure what I'm doing is as good as I can possibly make it.  

As the week went on, a lot of us started talking about what our big "take away" was from the class.  For some, it was this or that bit of technical information or way of handling paint, and at the time I said that my big "take away" was that I was going to go home and do the painting over but twice as big.  One of Greg Manchess's first comments to me was that the painting was a bit small (16x24).  So that led to me getting back home and rethinking my reference and redrawing my sketch (at 16x24) and ending up with this:

and this:

The original is that puny little thing at the bottom...

Greg mentioned that he often keys the size of his paintings the main figure's face, just to make sure he has enough room to really work out all of the essential details.  I had really started to work bigger before I left for the class, but I wasn't sure how much room I would have at Amherst, so I opted to bring the 16x24 board and just hack it out, mistake number two.  So this is where I'm at right now, I don't think this is the biggest painting I've ever done, but it's the biggest in a while.

Back to that "take away" from the class.  Mine really wasn't doing a big painting, the real take away that I got from the IMC was community.  I love fantasy and sci-fi art, it's what got me interested in art in the first place from the very first comic books that I cracked open, to the first time I saw a Boris Vallejo painting in the bookstore and made sure that my parents didn't see me looking at it, or the first time I discovered that Frazetta was FRAZETTA, to the first copy of Spectrum that I picked up and saw Greg and Dan and Scott and Donato's work and thought, "man, where have I been to have not been looking at this stuff all along."

Maybe it was college, and to some extent growing up, and feeling like fantasy and scifi and all the fun stuff was just supposed to be for kids (or nerds, dorks, or whatever, your pejoratives will not phase me). And especially having that reinforced by art instructors who didn't even feel that I should be working with representation.  But that's neither here nor there.  IMC opened my eyes to a whole community of like-minded people, hell, it opened the door to that community, and the great thing was that everyone was basically standing there saying, "come on in."  That was another thing that blew me away, here are all these people who didn't exist beyond the printed page for me a month ago, and now I've met them, I've talked with them, they've critiqued my work, we've joked around, we've partied together...They're real folks, and they're really good folks.  As I mentioned earlier, I hope to stay in contact with as many of the people that I met at the IMC for as I can for as long as I can.  

Starting to ramble and gush here, better wrap it up before it gets ugly... 

The IMC let me walk into the world that I love and always wanted to be a part of as far as my art is concerned, and it showed me that everyone working in that world is a real person who is doing just that - working, and the only requirement for being a part of the world comes back to something I tell my students all the time (which may be corny but hey I am a high school teacher after all):

"It's like Nike Art - just do it."

Bard. Me. Me Bard...

A little progress post.

Another piece from The Hobbit, as well as the "How do I work?" category.  I feel like I'm getting closer to figuring things out.  The beasty from the last post definitely got me thinking in more step-by-step terms, a set process to work through, if you will.  But I'm still not totally sold on a few issues.  I may just be hard-headed at this point...

This is Bard, and as I'm not sure if my Mom has finished reading the book yet, I'll leave it at that.

A little sharpie thumbnail, was digging this.  Lots of energy.

Learning from mistakes.  This is a terrible drawing, I debated not posting it.  I may yet remove it.  But it serves a purpose for the moment - this is out of my head, going off of the sketch above, and it is useless.  It solves no compositional problems, it's stiff, inaccurate, and just plain bad.  Now I think I may leave it up, just to shame myself into never drawing like this again...

My faithful assistant, getting ready to give some critique...

"Something looks a little off..."

"There.  I fixed it."

I had a lot of reference for this one, so I'm not gonna post all of them, but in summary:  I did pose using a stick and a curtain rod for the bow and arrow, and I definitely took a picture of one of our stew pots to get ideas on reflected metal... So here is the drawing thus far:

Well, that's not quite how the drawing stands, I finished most of it up (I think) before I sat down to post this.  Originally, I wasn't going to make this a self-portrait, but then I figured I might as well go for it, as I haven't done one in a while, Bard is a pretty cool character, and I didn't feel like looking up another face to plop on my figure.  I also haven't worked this realistically in a while, we'll see where this goes.  I'm not sure if I want to continue working with this much realism, but I have a feeling it may be good for me to really crank out some polished pieces.  Plan from here is to get a copy made of this drawing (it's 20x30, I just wanted to do something big) then mount the copy to masonite, seal it in, and then paint.  I'll make another brief post when I've got the painting surface ready.

One last note, I should have done a quick reread before I started drawing.  It's a thrush that comes to Bard, not a raven.  Ah well, at least I'll have a self-portrait out of it.  And another thing that this particular piece is teaching me, is that there is ALWAYS so much more to learn.  And after chewing on that a bit, I find it incredibly refreshing.