Fortunate Son

Another day, another project. This latest illustration was a pretty fun one. We had to take a 60's song and illustrate it in some way, using influence from another artist or illustrator. Well, CCR is probably one of the biggest bands of the 60's, and I love Fortunate Son, so this was my first choice. I decided to take the song lyrics literally and do an illustration of a boy who's drumming with "silver spoon in hand." He's supposed to be one of the fortunate ones that's in a well brought up family, and playing the drum simply for fun rather than leading the troops (a bit of a throw back to the 19th century). I decided to use Edward Manet, one of my favorite painters, as my reference for the idea. I wanted to make it obvious that I was inspired by the Fifer for both subject matter and composition. When I was in Paris about three and a half years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the Orsay and seeing this painting. It's really breathtaking to see in person (image of it after the jump).

For the actual painting, I decided to go with oils since it's been a few months since I've used them. I unfortunately had to rush it a bit more than I would have liked, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with it. I did want it to be a bit more impressionist, but it'll do.

Reference: Edward Manet's The Fifer

IlluXCon 2009! - Part Two

Well, back again to bring you the rest of IlluXCon 2009 through my eyes. This demo was done by Dan Dos Santos. He seemed like a pretty down to earth kinda guy. He did this oil painting over a pencil value sketch, and I think the technique ended up looking amazing! I've gotta try it sometime. I snapped the image below when it was about 90% finished. He went back in afterward to add some highlights on the shoulder and in the hair to tie everything together, but I unfortunately didn't get a shot of it completed.

And finally, I can't even begin to explain how detailed these bigger-than-life figures by Tom Kuebler were. They were actually scary to get within a foot or so of, especially the transvestite figure below. I felt as though she was gonna spring to life and cut me.. no joke! These were, of course, finished pieces and not demo's done in two hours like the other images I uploaded.

Overall, the show was great! I ate some amazing food, got relatively lost with my friends in the hilly city of Altoona, and learned a helluva lot about painting. Some other great illustrators I didn't get any shots of that I met were Ian Miller, Justin Sweet, L.A. Williams, Volkan Baga, Dave Leri, and many more, including CCAD's own Joe Kovach and Eric Fortune. Check them all out, it'll be worth it! Now back to reality, where my in-progress works all look like crap compared to these pros!

*None of the work published in this post is my own. I merely took the pictures.

IlluXCon 2009! - Part One

So this weekend was really busy and tons of fun! Quite a few friends and I drove over to Altoon, PA for the 2009 IllXCon (an illustration convention with some of the biggest names in the business). I'm not typically drawn to too much fantasy illustration, but seeing all this work in person was just breathtaking. They also had some great demos, which all of the pictures in this post are part of. The one above was a collaborative demo by Jordu Schell and Tom Kuebler (pictured). They were both pretty interesting guys, and Jordu was hilarious! I've got some more pictures of Tom's work that I'll post in a second post. His stuff is just incredibly realistic.

This was a great oil painting demo done by Donato Giancola. I'd never known him by name before, but some of you might recognize his work, especially if you've seen the cover of Spectrum 13 (one of the best issues to date in my opinion). He had a model from the audience pose, and in the last five or ten minutes of his demo, he threw in the space-themed suit like it was nothing.

These two pieces were part of another collaborative demo, this time done by Michael Whelan and Christopher Moeller. Half way though, they switched boards and finished the other's work.

Here's Jordu at his both just working on a project he felt like making up. The demo at the top of this post that he and Tom worked on was actually his Face. Tom had a great picture of him grinning like crazy, and they decided to go with it. More info in the next post...

*None of the work published in this post is my own. I merely took the pictures.

Bike Mechanic Sketch

Here's another sketch from figure drawing class. I meant to throw it up here with the others last Wednesday, but guess I overlooked it. It was too big for the scanner, so I had to take a picture of it, so sorry for the bad quality. It's supposed to be pretty bright green. Just another day of playing with colors!

More Figures!

Lately I've been playing a lot with color in my figure drawing class. I bought this great 12x18 sketchbook over the summer that has five or six different toned pages throughout it, and I've been on a real "toned background" kick lately. Almost all of these were done in colored pencil (with the exception of the graphite one of James toward the bottom).

For each of these, I typically only picked up three colored pencils that I thought complimented the lighting and skin tone for the pose. The only "problem" was that I kept finishing these before class was over, so I'd grab a few more and chroma the hell out of it (can chroma be a verb? I'll say yes). So far, I've liked each sketch more once I revisit it with more color options, but I really should start limiting my palette a bit on at least some drawings.

More images after the jump!

CWS Brochure

This brochure came out of my advertising & graphic design class. We were to make a brochure for the law firm, Chester Willcox & Saxbe, and were given a few stipulations such as colors, logos, and body copy. The rest of the layout was up to us. I decided to showcase it as a very professional firm, while grabbing attention with both the shape of the brochure and the bold use of type on the photographs.

Antler Prejudice and New Layout!!

Well another week down, and a little more work done. This piece was my first real Photoshop painting. I've been wanting to do a painting where a person has antlers for a while, so this was a long time coming. I decided to have it be designed to go with a magazine article about different types of prejudices. I still need to tweak it a bit, probably by adding some reflecting yellows and blues in the actual characters rather than keeping them completely grayscale.

Next project for the class is to do an illustration to go along with a song from the 1960's. I'm fairly certain which I'm going to do, but the two that I've narrowed it down to are CCR's "Fortunate Son" and the Beatles' (and Joe Cocker's) "With a Little Help From My Friends."

Also, the big news is about the blog. I finally got my updated layout up. I'll still be doing some tweaking over the coming weeks, as well as adding a link to my new site, which will be up within the month. Let me know what you all think in the comments! Also, some details of familiar faces after the jump!