The Competition

I came up with this sketch because I was told I needed more females in my portfolio. I dug into my past and remembered a number of my friends who were girls were always so competitive with each other - whether it was academic, athletic or social. So I thought this would make a pretty decent subject for an illustration. So I gathered up what reference photos I could find and pieced this together. It's mostly about facial expressions - I wanted to show some sense of jealousy while the other one was not only oblivious but very proud. The writing you see at the bottom is something I sometimes do: I'll write a little paragraph or story to go with the drawing. I'm not a writer. It's just part of my creative process at times. I think it "grounds" the image more to have a story to go with it.

The Dark Times

When I was a young artist, I guess I thought my only source of inspiration was my emotions. Not just any emotions, but my negative ones: anger, depression, sadness, etc. This may have stemmed from something my high school art teacher told me once. She told me to stay in touch with my emotions, because they seem to drive my artwork. Which it did in high school. Art was very therapeutic. Of course, I would never show my own kids the sketches I did during those turbulent times. When I got into college, I still stayed in touch with those emotions. But many art teachers pointed me in many different directions. But as I reached my 30's and had kids, my emotions changed. I don't know how many moons ago it was when I let go of most of those emotions. But for a while, I was filled with joy and inspiration and positivity. Hardly a place for dark subject matter. My taste for the macabre diminished. I haven't seen a horror movie in ages!

Then there was a point in my career where I had to tap in to those dark images to produce art for a haunted house. I found many of the sketches I created for this project. And just recently, I resolved to use them to work on a Hulk illustration. For some reason, the Hulk has always intrigued me as a character - I suppose it was his duality. Much like Jekyll and Hyde. I also like how Bruce Banner had to maintain his cool to keep the monster at bay. I found this struggle interesting because I can actually understand it: we all have to maintain some civility to coexist. Otherwise, we risk chaos. Or you could look at it as society dictating how we should act - putting us in the position of repressing our true selves. Anyway, here are some of those sketches I did. Kinda has a Wolverine pain and anger to them. Hmmmm, Wolverine....

Drawing Blind

Sometimes, I like to challenge myself and do some different things with my art. This summer, I did a lot of plein aire painting. Just recently, I wanted to challenge myself to come up with drawings that did not rely on models or photo reference. That really made my brain work. It's almost like drawing blind. At least, it felt like it. The drawings are more cartoonish compared to my actual style and I'm not sure what I think of that. Perhaps it's my way of taking baby steps to more complicated drawings. Or maybe, that's just how I visualize without reference. I had to use many "rules" of art to create some sense of realism in these drawings without reference: shadow, light source, overlapping, proportion, etc. I can only hope that practicing these techniques from memory further enhances my skills when I DO use reference. And perhaps there's a place for both these styles to coexist. We'll see.

I'm going to call this one, "Mortimer Watches Ant Dance."



This one, I'm calling "Fizzard."

Star Wars: Graveyard Moon

As I build my portfolio, I create my own projects to do. One of the ways is to take a piece of narrative or fiction and illustrate it. For this one, there was a series of Star Wars comics set during the Clone Wars. I decided to do the cover of one chapter of one of the stories, "Graveyard Moon". The downside to doing this particular project was that there was already a cover illustration for it. Typically, it's a good idea to pick a narrative that is less familiar and not popularized already (like Wizard of Oz or Jungle Book). That way, you run less risk of creative obstacles those stories may pose, because they already have some ingrained cultural history. The beauty of Star Wars is that its characters aren't literary - they are based on the actor's likenesses in the film. My drawback was the actual cover composition. I decided to make this an exercise in likeness and just keep the main composition and add flourishes here and there. Here is the sketch I came up with. Along with the final color which I did in Photoshop.





And just for funsies, I did a mockup to see what it would look like as the actual cover. The real cover is first followed by my version.

Cupid's Aim

As I catch up on some illustration ideas I've had brewing, as well as working on a new project, I thought I'd post this small sketch in the spirit of Valentine's Day. I must have done this about three years ago. I stopped because I couldn't find the right model to pose for Cupid. (My daughter was only one and my son wouldn't be caught dead in a diaper). Anyway, I put it off to the side (like many sketches) to approach again at a later date. Perhaps my son would reconsider wearing a diaper...

To Date or Not to Date

I'm not sure how many artists find value in dating their artwork. As for me, I haven't given it much thought in the last 10 or so years. I just sign my initials and that's it. But last night, I was going through some old portfolios, and I found a multitude of paintings I did with my watercolor instructor as a kid. Hardly any of them were dated except for one in 1981. I guessed that that put the rest of them at around the same time period. But then I started turning them over. And I found more work I did, but I knew I was older. The subject matter was more personal and the drawing skill was different. I could only guess that I did those in junior high or high school. But I will never know for sure! Now the OCD in me wants to rifle through all of my artwork and date the ones I can remember. But then the artist in me doesn't really care – it was done by me, it doesn't matter when. Oh well. Perhaps I should look at it this way: it's important to me right now because I'm just curious as to when in my life I created a particular piece of art. More than likely, it's not important to anyone else. In the meantime, here is one of those mystery pieces. I don't remember painting half the stuff I found, but I really don't remember EVER drawing anything from "E.T." but here's an "E.T." watercolor I did. That's the other thing that troubles me - why don't I remember doing this? Anyway, since most of the work I found was probably done around '81-'82, I would guess this one was done later. "E.T." came out in '82, so I would venture to guess this was done in that year or '83. But since there were other pieces in the portfolio that looked like they were from my early teens, it's a possibility that I did this in junior high or high school. I'll leave that up to you.

My First Season of "Lost"

This sketch really wasn't done because I was excited about the new season of "Lost". I was actually wanting to practice drawing more entertainment based artwork again. And when I used to do that, it was very "Star Wars" heavy. (Speaking of which, I will have some new Star Wars stuff coming also!) But I had watched this show and never thought to draw any of that characters. Funny enough, this was originally supposed to be some random character sketch strewn about the page. Then I finished it as a single composition. We'll see if it ends up as a painting...