Random Painting #1

While I'd rather title this "NUCLEAR CHICKEN/COCK", it's a random digital painting I did back in March of this year for a draw daily thread on a forum. Not sure how long I spent on it, but the legs make me think I was watching a lot of Futurama at the time.

Minimal as it is, the background still shows more purpose than some of my earlier works, an ongoing struggle of mine caused by being a character doodler first, painter/illustrator second.

That's it for tonight. This dilapidated blog has just been given a handful more updates, in burst form as usual, but hopefully I can start updating this thing weekly or bi-weekly.

A digital painting that's dated late September '08. The painting went through a series of problems and successes, as can be seen by the guy in front, who doesn't look half bad, and the guy behind him, who looks more like a rigid joke. This piece is important because it was my first post-college painting that really highlighted my need to think through my environments better. You'd think that this would be something I wouldn't want to show off, but really, I find the opposite effect.

Truth be told, even "Random Drawing #4"'s environment needs work, but that one, admittedly and sadly, wasn't an afterthought.

Pixel Monkey

A friend wanted a company logo for a side-project of his, and he was fixated on the following citeria: 1 monkey, 1 apple and 2 sandbags. Preferably with said monkey sitting on the sandbags. The bite taken out might not have been a requirement, but I ran with it from the get-go.

It took me a week or scribbling on my tablet and in my sketchbook to even angle myself towards putting the elements together into something cohesive. I even spent a few hours just searching over Google images for pictures of monkeys and chimps while trying to decide what to do.

T-Shirt stencil

A little over a week ago I decided I wanted to try stenciling, and spent an evening flipping through my old sketchbooks trying to find an image that was thought out enough that I'd be able to re-draw it digitally and vectorize it instead of starting from scratch and having to spend even longer figuring out the light/dark details. Early on the original drawing (not pictured) popped into mind. It then took me 30-60 minutes to find which sketchbook it was in, since I couldn't remember what year it was originally done (SP06), or where over half of my sketchbooks were (garage in a filing cabinet). I spent about a day re-drawing, polishing and vectorizing the original into the above. Then I got some feedback from some friends, most of which liked it, but changed it to below when two friends had very strong opinions about not liking the simplistic background.




This became the final design when I realized the bullet holes looked better as snow, and that the black background was more dramatic. As you can see two sheets were used: 1 for the guy, and 1 for the snow/breath. Here's the first printing of the stencil on 25lb. normal printer paper--something I will never use again, it barely avoided melting when it got wet. The slipping of the registration was actually caused by the whole issue with the paper nearly melting.

Run for the Billions

Requested logo for a programming project for someone I know on EFnet. He didn't want a total rip-off of the Monopoly mascot, but he did was it to be inspired by that visual aesthetic.

This is actually not the version I submitted to him just over a year ago. That one is as follows:




You can see that the "RUN" is emphasized instead, and that was a grave mistake on my part and solely based on not wanting to warp "BILLIONS" at the time.

Thinking about whether or not it was used, I'm quite sure I actually missed his submittal deadline by nearly a whole hour. So here's a tip: if your pro bono logo artist does everything last second, don't figure that the artist will do the piece any sooner if you refuse to say when the deadline is and assume this will make he or she take it as initiative to do it hours or even days sooner.

Random Drawing #4

Drawing done mostly at a coffee shop. 2B pencil, .5mm black ballpoint pen (non-waterproof) on 9x12 60lb. sketchpad. The rough pose of the character had been done a week or two prior, but was tossed aside until earlier when I was at a coffee shop and itching to do some cross-hatching. No rulers, just an eraser pencil to guide the edges of the light beams, which is why the rest of the lines drift and change angles so much.

Photographed, 256-greyscaled and brightness/contrast adjusted.

(Was photographed because my now-ancient scanner has no Win7 drivers.)

"Ahead of it All"

A self-portrait painted digitally. Done achromatically, the second image is the color overlay used on it. While the second layer looks far from refined on its own, I still like the look of it and posted it along with.