So, here’s my first post in a while, and it’s regarding some bummer news. Any of you watching the news around the beginning of this month probably heard that Santa Barbara suffered from some terrible wildfires, specifically the Jesusita Fire. Well, we live within about a mile and a half from the origin of the fire, and were evacuated for six days. During the panic of preparing to evacuate, as we were packing up our most valued possessions, a well-meaning relative took all of my paintings off the walls and threw them in his car trunk.

You don’t want to leave art in a car trunk for a week, because bad things can happen to them. Such as the eyescrews from the back of one piece gouging into the front of another piece:

These are details from a poster I had illustrated for Ensemble Theatre Company, for a play about the final years of Zelda Fitzgerald, entitled The Last Flapper. Below is the image before it was damaged.

I painted that image five years ago, and while it has its faults that I see every time I look at it, I still have nostalgia for this particular image, as it was for a great client during a fun season of life. I’ve been assured by my good friends at the Fine Art Conservation Lab that they’re going to be able to restore it with no problem, and I hope they’re right.

I’m happy to report that my house is still standing, but it was a close call. The hillside just two and half blocks up from our house is completely scorched, but the firefighters made a stand there and save our neighborhood.

…little blog of mine. I started this thing a year ago with the hopes of posting twice a week, and have managed only a measly 30 posts so far. While I’ve managed to avoid the crash-and-burn of posting twice and never again that occurs with most blogs, it’s not like I’ve set a record for posting, either. So for those of you who are RSS subscribers, or who just make a point of checking in, I renew my commitment to providing more content on a regular basis. I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with digital painting lately and as soon as I finish one that doesn’t completely embarrass me, I’ll share the results.

And now a question: for those of you who are faithful readers, what’s the stuff you like the best? The ridiculously long and in-depth process stories? Or the quick-hit sketch posts? I’m basically trying to write the kind of blog that I myself would want to read, but I’m open for feedback. If you’ve got a preference, let me know in the comments section.

The sketchbook project with Peter Cusack moves along, albeit at a snail’s pace, and it’s my fault it’s taking so long—I had a busy February and finally got to work on it just in the last few days. I know I keep saying this, but I’ll get to it quicker next time, Pete!

Last time, I riffed off of Peter’s walking couple and came up with a different kind of walk. Peter took that idea and came up with a different idea for a leash. So for my turn, I decided to riff off of his man with a fedora, and in honor of the Watchmen movie finally coming out, painted a portrait of someone else well known for wearing fedoras, the vigilante Rorschach. This was painted with acrylics, which I am slowly getting more comfortable with.

My students with Margo outside her studio, which is in a converted office building that still has the original pesticide signage. Margo's in the middle with the black shirt, and I'm the guy on the far right squinting in the bright sunlight.

I’m going to shamelessly name-drop here for a moment. Two Fridays ago, I had the privilege of taking my Publication Design class at Westmont down for a visit & talk with Margo Chase of Chase Design Group. If you like graphic design and are not familiar with Margo’s work, you need to be—she’s recognized as one of the top designers in the field today. In addition to being a truly original and profoundly inspirational designer, she’s also a warm, friendly and charismatic person to be around.

I first met Margo back in 2004, when she graciously accepted an invitation to deliver a lecture at Westmont, which was quite literally the finest lecture I’ve ever heard to date. This past summer, I had the pleasure of getting to hire Margo for the re-design of the Westmont Athletics Department logo, and it was a real lesson in design management to watch how she deftly handled a tough audience of administrators and managed to finesse a logo through the various chains of command while maintaining the artistic integrity of her design concepts. It was a formidable assignment, but Margo and her team (including key personnel Shannon and Clark on that particular project) handled it beautifully.

So naturally, I boldly asked if I could bring a class of aspiring print designers down to meet her and tour the studio space. Not only did she say yes, but we were treated to an over two-hour visit, which included meeting all of the staff and viewing a slide presentation by Clark and Shannon which was truly inspiring. Margo and the entire team were incredibly friendly and accomodating, and extremely generous with their time on a workday. The students, needless to say, were pretty blown away. Thanks Margo!

The issue containing this illustration has now seen print, so I can now show it in its entirety, as well as show the process steps. Above is the final illustration as it saw print.

The article was simply about reversals in the NASDAQ market. With that basic concept in mind, I set about trying to figure out an effective way of showing it.

My initial thumbnail sketch. I was trying to show two businessmen trading money, each giving it away as they received it. I knew I would eventually come up with a better composition for this, but this at least established the concept that the AD chose.

A detail from my photo reference. I was the model for everything in the illustration, with my ever-patient wife assisting me with the photography.

The final tight sketch. Since the deadline was very tight at this point, I decided this would be another one to attempt to paint digitally.

My next step was to set the sketch layer to Multiply, which renders the whites transparent, and paint in flats using a hard-edged brush on a layer below. Once my basic values and colors were decided upon, then I could go in and begin to render.

At this stage, the figure has been rendered using Photoshop’s charcoal brush, and rays have been added on a layer underneath, with a radial layer mask added to make the rays gradually fade out.

While I felt reasonably good that the figure didn’t look expressly “digital,” the background most definitely did and needed some texture to humanize it. I dropped in a scan of old textured cardboard, desaturated it to convert it to gray tones, and then set it to Soft Light at 62% opacity. I then added some shadow gradients in the four corners. Once this was done, it was a matter of dropping in the arrow graphic (meant to reinforce the idea of the flow of money coming in and going out that is referenced in the article), and a little glazing on the flesh tones to warm them up just a bit. The file was created at 400 dpi so I have the flexibility to print it larger if needed.

And the very last step is seeing it in print! I’ve been pleased to find that my digitally-painted pieces are reproducing fairly accurately in terms of color, definitely closer then when I send scans of traditionally-painted work.

I was asked by friend and colleague Mitchell Thomas at Westmont College if I would create the poster for their next production, a play written by one of our own college students, Diana Small. Muéveme, Muévete (Move Me, Move You) is written in the tradition of Latin-American magical realism, and concerns a young woman and her connection to a peach tree that has served as a kind of protector for her family for ages. I chose to fuse the girl with the tree, in order to hint at the magical aspects of the play, as well as to speak of the dependence between the tree and the family for mutual survival. The play is intended as a gift to the Latino community of Santa Barbara, and as such will have performances in both Spanish and English.

The initial rough thumbnail sketch

The model for the piece. Thanks Cara!

Sketch with underpainting wash applied in Photoshop

For this image, due to a tight deadline crunch, I was looking for new ways to speed up my usual work process. I decided to print my final sketch (with a wash of midtone color applied via Photoshop) onto Epson Watercolor Paper via my trusty Epson 4000, seal the print with 2 coats of acrylic matte medium, and paint directly on top. This was definitely a significant timesaver, as it allowed me to skip the tortuous process of transferring the sketch down to final board, but it had its drawbacks as well. Despite the matte medium, the surface still absorbed more of the paint than I liked. I managed to get it to work for me, but doubt that I’ll return to that methodology in the future. Which is a regret, because I very much liked the fact that I didn’t have to bother with transferring my sketch, which always loses some of the vitality of the original drawing. So if anyone has any solutions I’m overlooking here, let me know in the comments.

A detail of the final image

A sneak peek of a detail of an illustration finished this week for my favorite Scottish art director, Christine Morrison over at Stocks & Commodities Magazine. I’ll post the full illustration and process story once the issue sees print. And yes, I served as my own model for this one.

So, I’m pretty late to the game here with an Andrew Wyeth tribute, but I’ve been thinking about his work constantly since his passing on January 16th. I had literally been talking to my students about his work just hours before he died.

I didn’t care for Andrew Wyeth’s work at first. His subject matter was uninteresting to me, his palette was uncomfortably earthy, his brushwork seemed obsessively tight, and he suffered from the inevitable comparison to his father, N.C. Wyeth, who has long been an artistic hero of mine.

And then during my college years, there was a retrospective of his paintings held at the Portland Museum of Art, and it drew enough media attention that my good friend Jen Hess and I decided to go check it out. It was at this exhibition that I realized what my problem with Andrew Wyeth’s work had really been: I simply had never seen it in person. Wyeth painted relatively large—large enough that reproductions in even the most generously-sized art books simply cannot do justice to the work. The obsessively rendered tempera brushstrokes can only be appreciated when seen up close, because it’s when you see the work in person that you see the wild, expressive watercolor underpainting that lies beneath those tightly controlled brushstrokes. It was a revelation to me. A year or two later, I bought the A.W. biography by Richard Meryman, and was absolutely fascinated by the ferocious art spirit of Wyeth. There’s a memorable passage in the book where someone (can’t remember if it’s the biographer or someone else) recounts being in the studio with Andrew while he was painting, and his artistic process on that particular piece involved literally kicking and chasing a watercolor around on the floor, yelling at it the whole time and attacking the piece with fury as he worked. Not the process one would suspect from looking at reproductions of his paintings. But when you see them in person, you can see that chaos and fury peeking through the refined outer layers.

I prefer his watercolors to his finished temperas—they’re far looser and more expressive. Still, one has to respect the patience of his tempera technique and the kind of dedication it takes to meticulously create these paintings. This dedication to his craft was further proven by the creation of the infamous Helga series—in order to keep the creation of the works a secret, he upped his output from roughly four finished paintings a year to an average of seventeen in order to produce the more than 200 pieces in the series. There’s been much suspicion (and understandably so) as to whether he had an affair with his model, but if he did, he certainly was quick and efficient about it, because the fact remains that he more than tripled his normal output of work!

Wyeth has been dumped on by art critics for so long that it’s a knee-jerk reaction to many in the field. The most laughable has to be Hilton Kramer, who audaciously claimed that Wyeth “can’t paint.” It doesn’t bother me that some critics don’t like his work—taste is too subjective to ever be forced on someone, and it’s fine if someone doesn’t care for his particular brand of realism. But it rankles me when Wyeth isn’t shown proper respect for his prodigious, haunting body of work. Whether you are drawn to it or not, there is no question that he was an artist of tremendous originality, ability and power. For a great write-up on Wyeth, check out Charley Parker’s excellent Lines and Colors blog, where he posts an excellent tribute. Charley and I have essentially the same take, but he’s far more eloquent in his defense of Wyeth’s legacy.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wyeth. Thank you for the work.

For me, my favorite part of an illustration commission is going to the local Borders or Barnes & Noble and seeing the work on the stands. There’s something very gratifying about knowing that your work is communicating on a mass level. It occurred to me today on the way to Westmont that my cover for Stocks & Commodities Magazine was likely out now, so I stopped by Barnes & Noble, and there it was:

Okay, so it wasn’t really right out in front like that, I staged it for the photo. It was tucked in the upper right corner with all the other finance magazines. But still, it was there! I remember Greg Spalenka telling me back when I was a student that for an illustrator, the finished piece isn’t the completed painting, but rather the actual published version of the job.

I’ve been experimenting with digital painting for a while now, but this was my first published job that was painted digitally, using Corel Painter and Photoshop. It’s a technique I’ll keep in mind as a viable option for quick turnaround deadlines like this one, and seeing it in print reminded me of a few things I need to remember for the future: it’s so easy to get soft edges using Painter that I need to crisp up a few edges to make sure the whole image isn’t too diffuse, and I also need to watch out that my values don’t get too dark, because what looks vivid on an LCD monitor is going to dull down quite a bit with the dot gain that happens with offset printing. All that said, I was fairly pleased with how it turned out, and the nice thing about working digitally is that you don’t have to worry about any color distortions being introduced during scanning, as so often happens with my traditionally-painted illustrations. Overall, this was probably about the most accurate reproduction I’ve seen yet for my work.

Can’t show the full illustration since it won’t print for another two months, but here’s a detail of a job I turned around on a tight deadline last week for Christine Morrison over at Stocks and Commodities Magazine. Always a pleasure to work with Christine. Since the deadline for this one was unusually short, there wasn’t going to be enough time for me to paint it traditionally and get it photographed, so I opted to paint this one digitally using Corel Painter. I still have a ways to go with learning how to digitally paint, but this one felt like a step in a positive direction.