I’m heading down to ICON later this week, and am excited to be part of a group show that is tied into the conference. The exhibition is titled ICON 6: A Labor of Line, and features a great lineup of illustrators. The knight painting above is my contribution to the show, and it is for sale. Contact Wade Buchanan at 626.458.7477 for inquiries.

The show opening is this Friday, July 16th, from 7 to 11 p.m., and I’m planning on being there. Gallery Nucleus is located in Alhambra at 210 East Main Street. Come on out!

Finished this over a week ago and just forgot to post until now. The latest entry in my “dialogue” with friend and fellow artist Peter Cusack. Peter’s last entry was of a farmer with some cows, so I answered with this little Halloween cow (my daughter in her first trick-or-treating costume).

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

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.

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.

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.