It was a pleasure doing this pro-bono job for my buddy & colleague John Blondell at Westmont College. When John asked me if I would be interested in doing the poster for a series of six short plays by Samuel Beckett, I had only one condition: as long as it could be a portrait of Beckett, I was in. He’s got one of those fascinating faces, with an intense stare, and I had a great time drawing and painting him.

This piece was a departure for me media-wise: acrylic and pencil on watercolor illustration board. It was also done at a scale I would have never thought would be comfortable for me, around 18×24. Much to my surprise, this one went quickly and easily.

The thumbnail sketch concept for the poster, drawn with ballpoint pen on a Post-It note

The tight sketch, drawn with pencil on vellum

The full original art, sans text

The finished printed posters

Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by David Starkey for his local cable show, The Creative Community. David asked great questions and it was a pleasure talking with him. For those who are interested, the video is below!

The Creative Community: Scott Anderson from The Santa Barbara Channels on Vimeo.

This is the second time I’ve painted Picasso. While I’ve got immense respect for the man, especially the enormity of his artistic output, I don’t't really consider myself a huge fan of his work. He’s simply got a great face to paint.

This began life as a guest demo for the VADA program at my old high school, and is an attempt for me to branch out a bit in terms of the range of my work. While the drawing and style of painting is exactly the same as how I always approach my usual work, this one is a bit of a departure for me in terms of color palette. I honestly had so much fun with this one that I’m sure I’ll be doing some more portraits with this kind of muted grays-on-color approach.

Been a while, but it was a decently productive holiday break for me, so there should be (knock on wood) a couple of posts in quick succession here. First up is a still-life which will be a gift for a faculty colleague whose home was burned in the Tea Fire a year ago.

Well, at least I have a good excuse this time to explain for the lag between blog posts. I’ve been working round the clock for the last few weeks putting together all the final touches on my show, Illustrative: Graphic Arts by Scott Anderson at the Santa Barbara Arts Fund Gallery. This was an exhibition of both illustration and graphic design done over the last several years, but definitely with an emphasis on my design work. The opening reception was last Friday night and was a great event. Below are a few photos of the work along with some commentary. For a far wittier recap of the night, check out my friend Chris Mundell’s post.

Theater posters done for Ensemble Theatre Company. The original oil painted illustrations were exhibited next to mounted prints of the posters.

More poster illustrations

CD designs

Panels explaining the process of two digitally painted illustrations

Posters that I designed that feature the work of other artists

Various invitation designs

Title wall with artist's statement panel. Below the wall is a table laden with leftover copies of posters I have, which were given away for free at the reception. This was a big hit and most patrons were seen walking away with multiple posters in their hands.

Another view of the posters wall, but this also shows an iMac on a pedestal on the computer. I created a Keynote slideshow that looped a desktop recording of the creation of one of the CD covers, as well as process shots of the Christmas Festival poster. This slideshow was definitely the most talked-about part of the exhibition.

Me and my family at the opening.

The postcard for the show.

Here are a few figure drawings from recent class sessions, all of them 2-minute poses, using charcoal on smooth newsprint. I live by the Conté a Paris Pierre Noire combination charcoal/conte pencils, sharpened to a razor point with a single-edged blade. They’re getting harder to find these days, but you can still get them here.

Received a commission from Dean Welshman over at Rhode Island Monthly to paint a portrait of Red Sox player Rocco Baldelli. I had never heard of Baldelli before, but after having done a lot of research on him, I’ve come away with a great admiration for the guy. How refreshing to learn of a baseball player who is renowned in the league for being humble and an all-around nice guy. He’s been diagnosed with an illness called channelopathy, and has been valiantly fighting through it and still managing to make plays for the Sox. He’s from Rhode Island originally, so his signing with the Sox has been a special homecoming for him and his New England fans.

The illustration won’t run until October, so I can’t show the final version just yet, but this particular job had a long enough deadline that I actually completed two totally different versions, just to satisfy my own nagging feeling that the best solution is still just around the corner. The client went with the other version, but I like how this one turned out well enough to go ahead and post it.

Thanks to Dean Welshman for the great assignment. I know all illlustrators these days make a point of mentioning art directors in their blog posts, and it can come across sometimes as just kissing up to the client, but seriously, collaborating with Dean on this job has been one of the most pleasant experiences of my career, and I’d work for him again in a heartbeat.

Here’s a detail from my latest illustration for Stocks & Commodities Magazine. Thanks as always to AD Christine Morrison for the work!

Studies for an illustration I’m working on right now, done with prismacolor on vellum. I love drawing with prisma pencils, they glide on the paper in a way that is really appealing to me.

Rare that an illustration deadline will allow for the time for such luxuries as exploring different head options, but I have over a full week on this particular one, so I took the opportunity. I envy the time that artists like JC Leyendecker had, where he would do obsessive fully-painted studies of different poses of details like hands, just to make sure he had the perfect body language to convey the meaning of the picture. I don’t have Leyendecker’s legendary speed, so pencil sketches were about as much as I could allow myself before moving to the finish.

My wife’s birthday fell on the day after Mother’s Day this year, so I knew I had to come up with a nice gift to celebrate both days, and on a budget. So when you tell an artist that they’re not allowed to spend any money on you, you pretty much know you’re going to end up with a painting for a gift. I’ve been wanting to paint our daughter ever since she was born, so this seemed the perfect time to do so.

The gift ended up late because the week I started this, we ended up being evacuated due to a wildfire that came within blocks of our home. Being the procrastinator that I am, this was of course the week before Mother’s Day itself, so I was already pushing it to begin with. I finally finished the piece and my ever-patient wife thankfully found it to be worth the wait. Now that it’s been varnished and photographed, I can finally share it with all of you!

Above is the initial thumbnail sketch on a Post-It, where I came up with the basic idea, followed by the final tight sketch. You may notice that while I drew angel wings on the initial sketch, I wisely realized that would perhaps be a bit much and dropped them from the final.

Above is the final tight sketch. I drew the lines and circles in Photoshop to make sure they were nice and perfectly geometric, printed the sketch out in reverse on a laser printer, and then placed the print face down on the canvas and went over the back of it with a Chartpak blender marker. This transfers the toner down onto the panel, leaving me with the sketch facing the right side up, and more importantly, saving me the effort of tracing over my lines as I usually do when I coat the back of my sketches with charcoal. I’ll continue to tinker with this particular method of transferring my sketches, as the toner transfers on very dark, and tends to come up a bit through some of the thinner layers of paint.

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice a few differences between the sketch and the final, most notably the hair. When I first started this piece, I was already working from reference that was a couple of months old. By the time I got around to finishing the piece, Natalie’s hair had grown significantly longer as well as becoming lighter. They really do grow up fast.