New Beginnings

I've spent the last month moving from Raleigh to Columbus to start teaching full-time as an assistant professor at CCAD. So far Columbus has been great - lots of good food, good people, cool stores (can you believe there is a stationery store just blocks from my apartment?!) After four weeks, my belongings still haven't been delivered to me thanks to those bastards at American Van Lines, but that hasn't stopped me from buying all new art supplies and making some paintings to adorn the many many walls in my apartment. Feels great to use traditional media. It's been such a long long time. These were modeled from vintage photos of Catherine Deneuve and Alain Delon that I googled.

Jon Snow

As portrayed by Kit Harrington in Game of Thrones.

Melisandre

As portrayed by Carice Van Houten from the new season of Game of Thrones.

One more with the red hair.

Florence Welch from Florence & the Machines. Also a nice way to celebrate 5 years of my blog. Here are the previous red haired boys and girls.

1. Red-Haired Girl
2. Jessica
3. Man in White Suit
4. Handhearts
   

Witch of Snake Mountain

A little He-Man fan art, Evil-Lyn is simply the best.

The Boss

Here's a little drawing I did of a "photograph" of the Boss character from my detective project. My very talented classmate Michael Delaney is setting these stylized drawings up in a 3D city and it looks amazing so far! More to come soon.

(He unintentionally but hilariously looks kind of like Conan, huh?)

Lady in White

Here's a quick study for an expansive project I'm working on. The plan is to make a little story out of three illustrations drawn & rendered in Maya. (Kind of like Ray Caesar) I want to do something retro/futuristic with spies and robots. Have a big plan and lots of inspirational images but don't know exactly what it will look like yet...

On another note I was afraid that I was forgetting how to digital-paint, as it's been several months since I've tried. I'm glad I haven't completely lost it!

Character design.

Dear blog, sorry to have neglected you. I'm in school and it's just a lot of work! I have been creating a lot, check out my little explorations on vimeo.

I'm currently working on a 1-minute animated autobiography. It's going to be Richard Scarry animal-style. This is the puppet I created of me as a little boy. And no, I don't remember being dressed like a hipster BUT that's a real shirt! I wish they made things that awesome now. Capped sleeves, diagonal arrows, great color combo. If I had a time machine I would make go back and get that shirt.

80 Dlist Boys: Clavicle & Reed. THE END

Here's the last two. It feels great to be finished with this project, as it's been a year and a half in the works. Some times it was like a weight on my shoulder, calling me to finish it and others it was a great way to express some creativity on the fly... I started it for a couple reasons:

1. I wanted to practice mark making and become more confident in my marks.
2. An opportunity to play with portraiture and test the limits of distortion against recognition. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but because this was a sketchbook project it was easy for me to not get hung up on the guffaws.
3. Playing with beauty... how is it that these 80 men can all be beautiful but all be so very different looking? As my friend Maggie said about the difference between faces, "it's all about the spacing."
4. A productive time waster: when I started this I had a hole in my schedule everyday that I needed to fill.

80 Dlist Boys: riverwestchi, trippppp, ibader, mmaraaron

The end is near...

80 Dlist Boys: glowstars, pw417, ikuku, slopehead

More more more. This is an interesting group because I've met all four of the gentlemen in question. Here are some notes:

1. Glowstars is a dear friend of mine from Milwaukee. He is also an artist/designer and has a blog.
   
2. pw417 is a cool guy from Chicago that I met several months ago and humorously bumped into recently.
3. ikuku is far more handsome and masculine in reality. Somehow the drawing got a little squirelly. He's from Poland and I had the pleasure of sharing a few drinks with him while he was in the US back in April.
4. Slopehead was possibly the first dlister that I met - he gave me free lodging (and an amazing welcome to Brooklyn with a homemade steak & asparagus dinner) a few years ago the first time I went to NYC.

80 Dlist Boys: awesleyc, johnny_bebop, jperkins, sloc0898

4 more. Kind of wish I could have gotten johnny_bebop & sloc0898 on adjoining pages because of their tall hair!

80 Dlist Boys: xelamonster, BenPhilBeck, OshKosh, ralowe

4 more as promised. A few comments:

1. I've been looking forward to drawing BenPhilBeck for about a year now, carrying around a little picture of him in my sketchbook and really muffed up the likeness. In his photos he's got a really fantastic Don Draper chin and an optimistic look to him. Somehow I ended up drawing him really devious. Rats!
2. The reason ralowe is upside down is because his DList photo is upside down. I actually drew him upside down, as well, for an extra challenge.

80 Dlist Boys: QueerRocket, Serpentine, thebenjamin, bikeculture

Here's my next batch of four (still have a couple up my sleeve and only 8 left to draw for the entire series). I decided to start drawing in the people from DList that I've actually met in reality. Thebenjamin is a cooky fellow from Raleigh and bikeculture is one of my favorite people up in Madison. (although I really missed the point with his portrait, he's much easier to look at that I have drawn him)

80 Dlist Boys: heartbeat_city, javad, socialwhore, dizeek

I've been lagging behind online, but not in reality. I've got 10 more dlist boys ready for action after this post. Keep looking for more.

Clavicle

Here's a painting I did, meant to be the third in the set with Handhearts & XYZach. I don't think it fits, though, so I'll do something else!

80 Dlist Boys: yeehaw83, bluelines

The latest two drawings. I wasn't ever planning on drawing myself into this project, but then I did. Doing a self portrait proved to be very difficult within the context of the rest of the drawings because I have been attempting to capture the beauty in each Dlist boy from a single photograph by carefully focusing on proportion and scale of features. For no. 53, it was hard to draw what I saw as opposed to what I know.

80 Dlist Boys: bw12343, zaceman, brahm, berkhippy

A few more in the sketchbook. I'm pleased with these 4... I think the combine the confidence and expressive mark-making that I started doing in nos. 37-40 with the exactness and refined qualities from the first quarter of the book. Berkhippy's hair was a nice challenge after drawing so many wavy wonderful haircuts.

Unity Mitford

Here's a little study I've been playing with of the stone cold Unity Mitford. She's from a British family of 6 sisters that lived the entire span of the 20th century and were rather famous socialites in the 1030's. Unity in particular was an avid Nazi who shot herself in the head the day Britain declared war on Germany. I've been working on traditional paintings of the more wholesome sisters and this was just to get in the mood.

80 Dlist Boys: hashlover, spanishguy, parklife, perquin

Some more... Tried to do a chubby pen/minimalist thing with parklife and was disappointed with the results. To add insult to injury I wrote the wrong name on his page... sad. I'm so close to finishing this project, I can taste it.