Hugh Dancy

August 1, 2007: I updated this painting tonight after looking at some more pics of Hugh Dancy. I thought his hair looked too perfect and wanted to lighten his eyes (among a few other small changes). I think it looks a little more like him now.

Here's a new one that I did today. It's Hugh Dancy--a gentleman that was most recently in the film "Evening." While Mr. Dancy may be alarming, the film is not. Anyway, this was fun, and I feel like I'm really getting to where I want to be. I'm most happy with the how I'm getting more expressive with brush strokes and willing to let that show in my work. (I'd still like to let it show more, but I think that will come with time)

Madge II

I was so inspired by Madge that I gave her another go--this time with intention of success, and not just fun. I'm really happy with the turn out, and I combined an effect that I use in my line art (separating and recombining the CMYK channels) to unify the colors as well as give a slightly offset-print feel.f

This is probably a little more Philip Burke than it is me, but that's all right. I think that the best way to learn how to do something is to copy a success story, and then use that knowledge next time. So that's what I'll do!

Classic Madge

It's not very good, but that's okay because I was playing around and having fun! The whole story is that...

1. I've been listening to Madonna's full record collection on loop for the past week.
2. I went and saw a Phillip Burke art show. He does rock-star portraits and is very famous.
   

Day Job

Here's a drawing that is an expansion on something I drew for my day job where I design cute things to be made into metal. Everything has to be very simple and take into account different metal finishes and other production values, so you can see how the finished drawing is changed from the original sketch. She's kind of ugly, but fun anyway!

Piazza Sempione

Here's a little sketch I did based off of one of Piazza Sempione's 2007 Spring/Summer ads. I think it was in Vogue. This shows the new direction that I'm trying to move in with my stylization. Something about the wide-eyed, squash-headed female is really speaking to me right now. I'm enjoying the play with exaggeration. The sketch was done with some micron pens and then I threw some quick photoshop on it just for fun.

Fashion Chickadee

Here's a portion of a painting that I did of one of my fashion designs. I didn't finish it, and don't think I will, but I really liked how the face came along and how the rest of the piece was starting to become "3D". I've since decided that it would be anti-fashion illustration to be so laborious with a single design, so I'm going to try something else for what this project was meant to be.

Oh, and here's another one that I had started.

This should be getting easier...

...But it's not! Here is my portrait of my friend Maggie, which may conclude this series of elemental portraits (I suppose I could still add earth and/or wind, but I'll have to wait until I find something inspiring to run with on that one.)


As I'm teaching myself to paint with Photoshop, I'm trying to learn from all of the mistakes and missteps that I took on my last project, but it seems that rather than doing that I'm just trying to find shortcuts. With the past two pieces I've painted and repainted areas with numerous glaze-like layers and a lot of complete redo's and rethinks. With this one I wanted to get straight to the source with a more "direct application" approach. Unfortuneatly I spent more time trying to fix my errors from this approach than I did really enjoying the painting process. Perhaps my method is long and tedious, but maybe that is the road that I have to ride to achieve the level of success that I want. I guess I'll have to see how the next project I do turns out!

Another, slightly less convenient.

Self-Portraits are convenient.

I wanted to do a sketch and play with the oil-paint look in photoshop (because the last couple times I've tried to, I end up using the chalk tools and mess up the whole illusion.) I really enjoy smearing the paint around, it's a lot of fun to play around. I'd still like to get even more expressive, but I'm afraid to make mistakes. For shame.

Copycat Photoshop Wizard

I was bored (which is amazing since I really have 5,000 things I should be doing) and saw that Havana Street Retro Clip Art had a logo that seemed like it would be a fairy simple but satisfying Photoshop exercise. And thusly I created this logo. PLEASE look at Havana because they did all the design work. I just did the technical magic to reproduce it. I was thinking about using this on this page, but it's a little tacky. And not me. Also you can see a drawing I did that no one has really seen from a Jem and the Holograms revival that I was working on last summer. I should whip that out....