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.

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.