Celebz

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I noticed I haven't done any portraits in quite a while so last night I had the urge to draw some celebrities I found interesting. For me, when doing portraits, the feeling of exultation or of utter despair is determined solely on whether or not a likeness is achieved. And having not practiced in months, I had a bit of difficulty. Nonetheless, these were still really fun to do. I definitely plan on doing more of these, and I've got a small list of names I'd like to draw.

Stanley Kubrick

Yoni Wolf

Tilda Swinton

Terry Richardson

Spike Jonze

The RGB

Here is my piece for the Secret Service show at Rotopol Press. Due to my schedule as of late, I ended up doing this digitally, although I still found ways of experimenting and having fun with it, playing up the camp factor, hahah. Check out Sam Bosma's kick ass piece on his blog.

mooo

A drawing I did as a birthday / going away present for Martin Kau, a great friend and artist.

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr

I think this is one of the coolest things ever. If you haven't seen it, you should definitely check it out. It's a site conected to Flickr that lets you choose colors from a swatch and tons of photos with that color show up. But unlike the color swatch tool in the google image search, you get to mix and match multiple colors. You can get some really beautiful arrangements of thumbnails too.

Hello! For the past week or so I have been revamping my site completely and I'm proud to say I'm liking where it's headed. A much cleaner and simpler look than before, and also, it looks the same in all browsers (i think). With my old site, I would cringe whenever I had to look at it on a friend's computer or in a different browser. It should be up and running in the next couple days for sure.

In the meantime, here are a couple of sketches.

Versus

This next Friday the 5th of June will be the opening for the Versus exhibit at the Wind up Space in Baltimore. I will be one of about 15 artists participating. Please come out and see the show if you're in the area!

Here is my piece. I think the show title for it will be Wrath Vs. Serenity. Haven't come up with the real title yet. This was a lot of fun to do, and I hope it shows. I used some reference for this one, which made the process a lot smoother. I will definitely be doing that more often. Watercolor on paper, 16 x 20.

A couple progress shots.

Jab Strong Fierce

So tomorrow is the opening for Nucleus Gallery's Jab Strong Fierce show in L.A. I was invited to submit a piece for it, which I was super excited about.

Here is the piece I did for it, depicting Dhalsim and Fei Long. Watercolor and acrylic, 18 x 24. Just trying to have fun with it.

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In other news, the new and improved Illustration Academy site is now up, with tons of awesome images and videos. Check it out! This past summer, I did an art trade with George Pratt with the Hester Prynn piece I did during Academy. I was watching a podcast of George Pratt doing a demo, and saw the piece lovingly placed in his work area. Do you see it? I've sort of been imagining it under a pile of papers somewhere in his storage closet. I must say I was very flattered and humbled to be a part of his collection. Thanks George!

Spectrum

I thought I'd make a post to thank everyone for their overwhelming support and congrats. Recently, I found out I won a gold medal in this year's Spectrum annual. I've been getting a lot of emails lately, and they all mean a lot to me! The piece that won the gold was the koi fish piece I did while at the Academy last summer.

Now, I'm just waiting to see if any of my other entries (4 in all) made it into the annual. Good luck to everyone else who entered as well! Saw some damn good talent this year.

On Monday I went to Dr. Sketchy here in Baltimore and a good time was had by all. Also, I saw Annika there for the first time since the Academy last summer. The model was Lady Vile, who was awesome and definitely gave us some great poses.

This one was for the first contest which was to draw with our opposite hand (my right hand). Martin and I were both chosen the winners and got free shots. It was pretty exciting, and definitely a nice way to start the evening, especially since it was my first time at Dr. Sketchy.

I'm definitely gonna try and go to every class. It feels great to finally get some life drawing in again.

Weekend Sketches

This past weekend, I went and bought myself a bunch of new art supplies, which in turn got me all amped to do some new work. I started a self portrait in oil, which I'll hopefully be posting soon, as I get further along. I also did a couple drawings.


Also, digging through some older stuff, I found a pencil drawing I did while at the Illustration Academy in Florida last summer. It's an illustration for the story The Tortoise and the Hare. It was sort of a secondary piece for a double-assignment week, which explains its unfinished state of being. Not sure if I'll go back into it or not. I kinda like it as is. Anyway, thought you might like to see.

more powdered graphite

Hey you. I did this the other night in the cold with that good stuff they call powdered graphite. There's still a lot of experimenting I've got left to do with it, but it's incredibly fun. Especially switching back and forth between dry and wet. I'll try and post some illustrations soon enough, but for now, I hope you guys enjoy this! Added some quick washes of color in photoshop.

Portraits

Here are a few recent sketches. I've gotten back into drawing faces again. Faces are just something I've always been interested in. These are portraits of no one in particular.

This one has some tones added in photoshop