Christmas Cards

I decided to make a couple Christmas cards myself this year; one for my uncle Ed and one for my Grandma. It was a nice opportunity to try and get a paper cut-out style in Photoshop and look at some cool Golden Book illustration to inspire me.

This one was for my Uncle. I wasn't expecting the lettering to take as long to paint as the rest of the image, but it did. I also looked at some 50's art blogs and John K for inspiration on this.


And the rough lay-in done in Sketchbook:

And this one was for my Grandma. I wanted this scene to be a bit friendlier.


I couldn't decide if I wanted to make the lighting more consistent, or cheat it to make the colors bright. This is how it would look if I stayed more true to the light source (back lit). It makes the bag o' toys eaiser to differentiate but adds more complexity to the picture overall...

DS Paintings

Just for fun! My girlfriend got me a DS loader cartridge thing for my birthday, so I installed Colors on it. Here's a couple paintings I did at my Dad's house this week.

BFA Work in Progress: Leonardo / Decameron

Our current project is pretty interesting. We're supposed to design a group of characters escaping a plagued city, in a world that makes heavy use of Leonardo's technology.

In my version of this, my characters escape ~1650 Italy via airship and flee to New Zealand.

We have to work in the style of another artist as closely as possible, ideally to the point at which the difference between them and ourselves is indistinguishable. This is a lofty goal, but it's been a fun challenge to try and work in the style of Carter Goodrich. Here's an example of his work from Ratatouille.He's a great designer, and his work has a lot of personality and gesture. I've been trying to capture the energy of his drawings, and keep to simple / strong shapes. It's also been brought to my attention that he uses his pencil-work to create volumes out of tone rather than outlined shapes, and I've been trying to mimic that.

Above is a servant and bodyguard named Parmeno. He has a fur blanket and fish-jaw axe because he gets indoctrinated by the Maori to a certain extent after arriving in New Zealand. I was thinking about Patrick Stewart's "Gurney Halleck" character in Dune when I designed him. The middle image has him wearing a Spanish-style Brigandine.

This is Neifile. She's from the upper class, and is curious and tomboyish (for the time period). For this reason I gave her an outfit that had something similar to pants. I'm still working on getting poses that really show her personality more clearly, but keep the appeal of the china marker drawing I did (center).
This is Dioneo. He's the "Charles Darwin" type of the group; a member of the inventor's guild that carries on Leonardo's legacy, and has high social status but poor social skills.

Below is my mechanical Falcon. Right now he's a reference model, but I'm going to redraw him more in keeping with Goodrich's work. I was finding it pretty difficult to pose him out and still try to make the drawings clear, especially with all the ellipses.


And this would be the rough size of my characters together.

The above painting is an establishing shot for the Plagued City. I based most of the architecture on the Italian city of Siena, and the palette I used is supposed to help connote the sick and dreadful feeling of the plague. Warm light hitting a greenish, thick haze, with red darks. I thinkI need to bring back some of the far background elements, which will include some super-scale gothic architecture. If Leo's technology runs wild, I'm pushing for many of those advances to be in construction and architecture.
Line work and thumbnails. The thumbnails below show some closer, more intimate shots which I feel are more like something Goodrich would do, but they don't show enough to be cinematic "establishing shots."

And finally, below are my designs for the "Country House" which the group escapes to. I've been pretty indecisive about this, but as it stands now I pulled way back on the technology and tried to give the house a bucolic, welcoming feeling. I was looking at Carter Goodrich's illustrations in Dickens' Christmas Carol when I decided to present the house in this vignette.

Thumbnails and more extreme/wide establishing shots.

Gnome Invasion

Apparently, I've decided that this is what it would look like if Gnomes invaded my home. That was a prompt for an environment assignment in Viz Dev class, and I was certain that my cat would cause trouble for these poor creatures. In fact, I figured they may have heard about a "horrible monster" dwelling in my home from some of the local rodents, and felt it was their solemn duty to take a stand against it.

Figure Paintings - Post 1

So I'm in my first-ever figure painting class. Whenever I say "figure painting," it sounds like I'm saying "finger painting." I think it's because my sinus is always congested. In any case, we finally started painting in color this week, so I thought it was time to post.

Color: A little under 60min each


Monochrome: 45-60 minutes.


For the first three weeks, we were restricted to India Ink and acrylic gesso, which explains the image on the bottom right. It's also done on plain paper, where the other 3 are on canvas paper with oils.

I'm really trying to focus on modeling forms, simplification, and hitting color/value. So basically, I'm trying to focus on everything. I'm just trying not to noodle or get stuck in details anywhere.

Cintiq Practice

So, this is one of the first drawings I made with my new Cintiq 12wx. It's about a month old now, but I rediscovered it and decided to post. It's Liz, watching TV!

Figure Drawing Post 2: Fight for Freedom

Figure drawing is back, after having been cancelled for 2 weeks. It's an hour long, all short-ish poses. But, I got a couple that I liked! Also, I'm not sure how I finally got multiple images on the same line. The mysteries of blogger...

Drapery Study

Here's a drapery study I did this weekend, using Prismacolor pencils and an HB. I recently started an internship, which has drained a large portion of my time (including the commute), but I was reminded of my need to work harder and to keep drawing by an artist at my workplace that I greatly respect.

The Donut Shop

The interior:
The exteriors:

This is this final project in my Viz Dev class this semester. It's a donut shop set in San Francisco, in the same world as my locksmith character. I had to do both interior and exterior shots, and the exterior needed two lighting scenarios.

After some thumbnailing, I decided I was more interested in putting the shop in an unique space than designing a particular theme/gimick for the shop. I wanted to make the shop a little more believable, not something one might see in Las Vegas.

Here are the thumbs I worked from:


And here's the pencil drawings. I arrived on a new working method during this project, which in retrospect was completely obvious. I blew up the thumbs I liked, and taped them down on a pad of tracing paper. One sheet above that, I drew the perspective grid. Afterwards, I drew each level on a new sheet (foreground, middleground, background). This was EXTREMELY helpful in keeping everything clean.

Locksmith project

This character is a whimsical version of "The Locksmith" in my Viz Dev class at SJSU. The back-story: He's a jazz lover from his old days, but had to stop playing when he lost his arm in Vietnam. I tried to space out his proportions to keep his body from having "the ladder" (even) effect, and I tried to cluster the features in the face to keep the interest there, and repeated the triangle shapes in his vest/hat to frame his face. Next up I'm going to turn him and get a lot more poses out (the ones I've done thus far are pretty similar and don't work as well). He also needs to look more like a locksmith, but I don't just want to tack on props...