First Sketchy of the New Year

The first Dr. Sketchy of 2009 saw Metro Detroit's Art Monkeys congregate once again at Blick's Art Materials in Dearborn. Our model this time: the lovely Regina Sweet of the Tickled Fancy Burlesque Troupe. This was her first time, so we were gentle, hopefully convincing her and her friend to come back again with more of thier troupe. Below are my watercolor and ink sketches of Ms. Sweet, along with Azucena in her red hoodie, Matt Feazell's profile, and a pencil sketch of Suzanne Baumann drawing an impromptu stand-in model while we were waiting for Regina to arrive.

Ellie Squared

A self promotion postcard idea.

Himself & Herself

My favorite song this week is Why Do You Let Me Stay Here? by the duo She and Him, comprised of M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel (who was the female lead in Elf and the craptacular Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy). Their album, Volume One, was on many best of '08 lists. Good stuff.

Tattoo Youth

I was asked by a friend of mine to design a tattoo for her to give as a Christmas gift to her daughter. The girl wanted something with big wings featuring the word "Mom" in the middle to cover her back. Her mom suggested that she might not want to have motherly love emblazoned across her back for the remainder of her life so asked if I could make it less obtrusive. Here is the resulting design. I understand she liked it!

And here's an artist's interpretation of what it might look like in real life. Photo, minus the tattoo, swiped from somewhere on the internet.

New Year, New Look!

Well? Whattaya think?

I was getting tired of looking at all of my artwork on a dark background so I thought I'd switch things up a bit. All of my favorite sites have a nice white backdrop to show off all of their colors. Makes everything look all fresh and new. Plus I switched to hosting the blog here at Blogger.com as opposed to my own server. There were features that I wanted to incorporate that just weren't available otherwise. The old blog is still there, but will soon be replaced with a link to this site.

In other news, over the past year I've been doing most of my artwork on my Motion Computing LE1600 Tablet PC. It's a fine piece of equipment that allows for an endless amount of experimentation and is very flexible to work with. One drawback to my mighty tablet I discovered upon reading Danny Gregory's book An Illustrated Life. Gregory put together a book about other artists' sketchbooks and why they do what they do with them. And the one thing they can do with their sketchbooks that I cannot is take them off the bookshelf without having to plug them in or make sure the batteries are charged when they want to look at them or show their moms.

To make up for what was lacking I called on Blurb.com's services once again. I previously used them to put together a little 80 page hardcover book to use as a portfolio. They're very reasonably priced, so I put together a two volume sketchbook from the past year. Each paperback book is approximately 260 full color pages comprising over 700 individual electronical pages from my tablet. Now they can be looked at anywhere, even the bathroom.

Below Bijou languidly poses with my tablet and its literary progeny.

Whoah-oh, here they come...

I caught Hall and Oates making an appearance on Jon Stewart a week or so back. Man, they're getting old.

Special bonus is this characature I did of Anne Hathaway after seeing her on The Daily Show as well. I have to say, she seems a pretty well adjusted, down-to-earth kind of chick.

Merry Holidays!

grunk.

More still...

The Times, they are a Metro

Here's another cover for the local Detroit alternative paper, the Metro Times. The story centers around Chaldean refugees from Iraq making a new home in the Motor City. Pick it up tomorrow at a newsstand near you!

See? More Ellie.

Sketchtronic!

A few drawings from my tablet pc:

Ellie Evolution

My one ever evolving project is Ellie on Planet X - kind of an internet comic/children's book thingy in the works. It's been an epic in the making, with its natal beginnings over ten years ago, still waiting to see the light of day. Ellie's character didn't even show up in the story until late in the brain storming process and has gone through many changes along the way. Partly because my style over the years has improved, but also because I can't make a decision on how I just want to do the art for the story. But the idea behind refining her character design has always been to simplify Ellie and come up with a formula to draw her the same every time.

Originally Ellie was going to be a little girl in a space suit, but for the practicality of the plot line it made more sense to make her a robot girl instead. The above drawing was the very first sketch I did of her. She already had antenna on her head to represent pony tails and a solar panel skirt. I went from drawing to 3D models, back to drawing, then to vector illustrations for simplicity (which only made it more complicated), then back to drawing, all the while trying to make her design more and more simple.










I found that having a permanent smile made it difficult to show different emotions on her face - having to cover it up with an arm or a shadow - so I dropped it. And I continued the simplification process by limiting the colors too.





I'll spend hours drawing Ellie over and over again just to work out problems I have with posing her or the kind of emotions I'm trying to portray.

And just when I thought I had it figured out I started at it again. I don't know if I like where it's going, but I thought I'd simplify her head some more and make it easier and quicker to draw. If ever the story makes it to the light of day I guess I'll have to choose.