Been a while since I’ve done a process post, so here are the steps for a job done two weeks ago for art director Todd Bates at Creative Loafing Tampa. The cover story was a fairly straightforward one: the Republican National Convention is coming to Tampa Bay next year, and the city is already looking ahead to it.

In total, I submitted six sketches for consideration. The one above and the chosen sketch below were my favorites of the bunch.

The chosen rough sketch

First step: thumbnail sketches. Todd sent me a jpeg of the cover template, and so I did my thumbnails digitally to ensure I was working within the exact confines of their layout. The reverse-L live area created by their logo proved to be tricky to work with, as I wasn’t sure how comfortable the client would be with me partially obscuring it. Todd asked for an elephant lumbering powerfully towards the viewer, and my additional concept was to color the elephant to look like a living version of the RNC logo.

With the concept approved, I gather up photo reference and get to work on a tight drawing that will serve as the foundation for the painting. I like to do my drawings in drafts on tracing paper, lately using Prismacolor pencils. The orange drawing is a loose, rough first pass and the blue drawing is the more finished drawing. This second draft gets scanned at 400 dpi and then I’m ready to work on the digital painting.

Work in progress. Here you can get a glimpse of a typical layers setup for my paintings, which is pretty straightforward. The legs and ear have been rendered, but the rough block-in can be seen on the head and trunk of the elephant.

The final illustration, painted in Adobe Photoshop CS4 and completed in about a day and a half. Thanks again to Todd Bates for a fun gig!

If any readers of this blog will be attending this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, then please come find me over at the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles booth, #2616! I’ll be doing an oil painting demo on Thursday at 2pm and a digital painting demo on Saturday at 2pm right at the SILA booth, located across the aisle from the Dark Horse pavilion.

In honor of the Captain America movie opening during the convention, I thought I’d do Cap characters for the two demos. Above is my demo sketch for Cap’s nemesis, the Red Skull. Come by and watch me turn this drawing into a full-color rendered piece. Hope to see you there!

For the third year now, I had the pleasure of illustrating and designing the poster/theme art for the Westmont Christmas Festival series of concerts. Yesterday, they experienced a new record: two of the three shows completely sold out the day the tickets became available!

It all begins with the sketch. Ballpoint pen on post-it note. You can see that I labor for hours over these initial thumbnails.

From there, it’s off to shoot reference and then do sketches from the reference to get a feel for where I want to go with the piece. I was fortunate to get my hands on some great costumes and props from thespian friend, Miller James. Lately I’ve been doing all my prelim sketches in a large moleskine sketchbook with Prismacolor pencils—I love how the Prismas glide on the moleskine’s slick paper.

After a number of prelims, I finally comp the best sketches together in Photoshop. The lines here indicate the live area of the art as well as the bleed. This gets printed on cheap bond paper at the size I want to work (roughly 14 x 14″ for this one), and is coated on the back with charcoal powder to transfer it to the gessoed masonite panel.

Detail-2

Some detail shots. I had the most fun painting the gold fabric and fur cuffs on the primary figure. The plan had been to send the piece down to ArtScans in Culver City for their one-of-a-kind top quality scans, but my pushing the deadline to the limit prohibited that luxury this time around.

Thanks as always to Christmas Festival Director Michael Shasberger for this ongoing commission!

Time for some art. Recent painting done for fun, a few brushstrokes at a time over the course of several months. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 8×8 inches.

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

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.

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.

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