Been working on and off on these two images for the past two weeks. These are for the first annual Cock-A-Doodle-Doo invitational group gallery show, opening this weekend at TCSB in Santa Barbara. The dots in the background on the top piece just about killed me, but I’m overall happy with how these turned out. If you’re in town, please stop by the opening on Friday night!

Everyone’s favorite Scottish art director, Christine Morrison, called me back in December to do a cover for Stocks & Commodities Magazine. These articles tend to be dense, complex financial reports, so we always look for a hook within the text to base the illustration on. In this case, the writer made note of how the trader needed to wait at a certain point for the market to “tip its hat.” That starting point led Christine to the notion of an old-time 1920s banker, which I then added my own spin on by suggesting we make it the Monopoly Man, but fully realized in my representational style. Who knows how many readers will catch that nod, but it was fun to paint. The issue is on stands now, so it was time for another process post.

Initial thumbnails, done with ballpoint pen on Post-It notes.

The refined sketch, done with prismacolor on vellum paper.

I originally had the notion of painting this traditionally using acrylics, scanning it, and then adding color digitally. It didn't go the way I wanted it to, so this idea was scrapped and I painted the piece digitally from my initial scanned sketch.

FInal piece, painted with a Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Detail shot of the final piece. I wanted to give it a vintage look, so I added a layer of antique noise to the top of the entire piece.

Hitting the stands tomorrow—this cover for the latest SF Weekly. Always a pleasure to work with AD Andrew Nilsen.

Detail shot of a magazine commission I just wrapped up last week. Probably my last post for 2010, so happy holidays to all, and I hope you’ll visit the blog again in 2011. I’ve already got my first post all planned out: a tour of my studio with amazing photography from my good friend Brad Elliott. Cheers!

It’s taken me a long time to finally post these images! Last summer, I spent an incredible morning studying several key J.C. Leyendecker Saturday Evening Post paintings up close and in person, and was able to take the following detail shots of a few of them. I’ll keep the owner’s identity anonymous to preserve privacy, and will just state that it was a incredible pleasure to have had this wonderful opportunity. Leyendecker is one of my all-time favorite artists, and a huge influence on my own work, and so I’m grateful to have been able to take these shots in order to continue to study his brushwork. Click on the images to see even larger versions, where you can revel in every detail of the canvas texture and each brushstroke. Enjoy!

My favorite part of any gig is when the printed samples arrive. It’s especially gratifying when I get to do the design on the piece as well as the illustration. I’m always given complete creative freedom on the Westmont Christmas Festival collateral, and it’s a fun challenge to come up with a design theme that works across the invitations, posters, tickets, and programs. While I could nitpick the illustration itself to death, I think overall this one turned out alright, and it’s been getting a nice positive reaction so far. Thanks as always to Michael Shasberger for this great yearly gig, I’ve already got ideas for next year!

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!

Just a quick note for any of you on Twitter—after seeing how many illustrators are conversing and sharing their work there, I figured it was time to jump in. Come follow me over at http://twitter.com/scottdraws. I won’t begin to tell you how long it took for me to find a Twitter username that wasn’t taken; every derivation thinkable of Scott Anderson got taken already. That’s the price of being a late adopter.

Last week, I had the opportunity to illustrate the cover for SF Weekly, for a story about Nancy Pelosi. It’s almost a cliché these days for illustrators to publicly praise art directors on their blogs, but in this case, I really mean it: Art Director Andrew Nilsen was amazing to work with, and his excellent direction really made this cover all the better. If all my gigs went this smoothly, I would be a happy man indeed.

Working with an uncertain headline (due to last-minute attempts for the writer to wrangle an interview with Pelosi) meant that we had a strong chance of revisions or tweaks to the art, so digital paint was the way to go for this one. Done entirely in Photoshop CS4 using my well-worn Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. I’m doing enough digital painting these days that I’m getting sorely tempted to buy one of those new Cintiqs. Maybe someday…

The Gallery Nucleus show was great! If you haven’t been before, it gets my highest recommendation. A wonderful, open gallery space run by Wade Buchanan, with an awesome bookstore in the front. Someone was taking photos of the show and got this great shot of my Knight piece, so I’m reposting it here. Thanks to Wade and co. for a great opening reception.

And kudos also to the board of this year’s Illustration Conference, I really enjoyed it. The “big tent” approach to the panel schedule was perfect and really kept everyone on the same page.