Electronights

I borrowed my Uncle's copy of "Mortal Engines," by Stanislaw Lem, and this is a sketch from the first short story. I may make this into a full project, if I can find where I put that book...

Shade Monsters

Here's a quick bit of something I'm working on.

Fall 2009 Quick Paintings

Just the small panels I did in oil... I finally started getting more comfortable with my water-mixable oils in the top painting, which is most recent.

Here is some current work (some in progress) from my most recent project at SJSU, based on John Steinbeck's book Cannery Row. The objective was to make 4 interior layouts, which I treated as animation backgrounds. I decided to try and work differently from my previous school projects, and more like the last two personal projects I did over winter break.

This is the first piece I did. I made this to test the style and mood of this world, looking at Golden Books and artists like Charles Harper for inspiration.

The next two are interiors of Doc's lab. Doc is a self-made marine biologist, and he supplies marine (and other) animals and supplies to universities and labs to make money.



The next two below are Lee Chong's grocery store. The top one is more "in progress" than the rest of the project.

Society of Illustrators!!

Woo! I'm very pleased to say that one of my pieces was accepted into the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Competition, and I won an award! I'm very grateful for the instruction at SJSU and the generous feedback from my friends in the process.

Here's the piece in question, from my "Decameron / Leonardo World" project, entitled, "City Escape."



Depending on the color and brightness of your screen you may or may not see some of the changes made to the earlier version, or the correct palette overall. Thankfully, I made sure they showed up in the print. I also figured out what was happening on the right side of the piece and added some tightness where I thought it was needed overall. Neato!

Peter Pan

I made this piece for a prompt on another blog, Creation Engines. I wanted to continue the illustrative cut-paper style I experimented with in my Christmas cards. It was a lot of fun, and it's still a new way of working for me.

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...