Creepertins -June

After a two month hiatus, the Creepertins is back in the Delaware County Magazine. I missed drawing these little creeps on the break, but I think well be back on schedule now.

Saturday Self Portrait

Iere is a quick self portrait that I painted last night--or early this morning depending on how you look at it. I was really disappointed in the painting I did in Al Gury's class this week, so I watched the movie clips I took of him painting again last night and decided I would try again the do a painting with his bolder approach. I think it turned out much better than the painting I did in class and I hope to do a much better one this week. 11x 14 in oil.

Work Station

This is a plien air painting I did yesterday with the DPC group, you can read more about it on the DPC blog.

Claire's Room

This is a quick little painting I shot out today 12 x 8 on MDF in oil. While I am working on other things art wise and on bigger paintings I still want to do smaller studies and paintings. one of my goals is to try and do at least 20 paintings over the summer. Doing smaller paintings also helps keep me loose and focusing on the bigger shapes.

This is a painting of my friend Claire who's bunking in my spare bedroom over the summer, she was sitting writing a letter and the light coming into the room made it really appealing to try and capture. My dog Shazam also decided she wanted to be in the picture and the contrast on her vs the light on Claire was fun to try and capture.

Final Commute

Well here is the finished commuter painting I've been working on for over the last week or so. It's not the best photo, there is too much glare, so i will try and shoot it again later and see if the glare dies down. I'll also let it sit a few days and then see if there is anything that starts to bug me. I already have to ideas for the next two paintings in the series which I'll start in the next few days. This is by far the most complicated painting I have ever attempted and there were many issues working from the photos I took on the train. For instance I had to add the woman on the bottom left as i didn't have a complete picture of her and some info was just too over exposed or fuzzy, but in a way that also helped me to be too tight. This is still fairly tight but I wanted it to loosen up as we receded further into the car. I also added the city outside as I feel that really helps make this piece. the pictures I took with my cell phone were while we were still underground so there wasn't anything to really see. By adding the city I feel it opens the painting up and gives it atmosphere and more motion as well.

Saturdays Done

Here is the inked and colored cover for the book for Random House featuring the Secret Saturdays. I should have more progress on the paintings and other comics stuff to show by the end of the week.

Commuter Painting-Progress

here is the painting a little further along, the picture isn't the best as I was getting too much glare, but this is after two days of picking away on it. one of the things about using the pictures from my cell phone is that the color range is kinda wonky, so i can't rely upon them 100%, and here is a case where I have to really adjust and do things the painting needs vs what the reference says--or shows.

I have some other freelance work to do now so I will probably only work on it in the evenings or early mornings for the next week or so.

Commuter Painting

Now that I'm all done with school I am starting my summer schedule around here which includes many things like cleaning up the studio, getting rid of lots of old stuff like old worthless comics and paper---so much dam paper-the bane of the artist!

So I have tow big art projects this summer, the Martians Go Home comic and doing as many paintings as I can, and I'm starting with another paintings in my commuter series.

I snapped several pics with my cell phone while riding back and forth on the Market Frankford line on my way to and from school. I got pretty good at being very stealthy about doing it too, because if people see you taking their pic they get weirded out , self conscious or even mad and annoyed. You never know when A triple murder parolee escaped and is on the lame and doesn't want his picture taken.

I also like the distortions the phone makes and think that helps with the feeling of the paintings or atmosphere. so i combined the info from three different photos i snapped into this one drawing and had them open in photoshop and then sketched from them as if i was actually sitting on the train, that way I think I avoid one of the drawbacks to the use of photos which is the ocular vision of the camera and it's distortion of space. This also requires me to do more drawing "in the round' as opposed to tracing the flat forms of the photo, I can alter and fix shapes as needed.


the next step was to do a ink wash over the drawing like I did in the Vincent Desiderio workshop, the difference is I didn't then cover he whole painting in Shellac like we did in the workshop. So now that the warm Grisaille is done I can now start the actual painting with oils. I'll post the progress as I go along.

Random Saturdays

This is the cover pencils to a kids book featuring the Secret Saturdays I am working on for Random House. I had to tone it down a bit for the network as they don't want the kids to be scared reading the book, or scared away by the cover, so the show is more scary and violent that the book will be.

Warner Brothers Animation Background Style Guide

In cleaning up and sorting through a lot of old junk in the studio I came aacross this quickly aging and fading fax from George Stokes the head of the BG Dept. at WB Animation back during the Batman/Sueprman/Batman Beyond era.

In between seasons when the storyboarding was done I switched over to doing back ground designs for a while on the shows. When I started George sent me this fax breaking down how they did it at the time and the 'essence' of their style which owed a lot to Paul Rivoche's great work on Mr. X in the 80's.

George was a great guy to work with and made the long distance relationship with WB being off site here in Philly smoother. So I thought many animation students, fellow artists and fans would find this an interesting read and peak behind the scenes on how we worked.

Animation***I just got an e-mail tonight from Paul Rivoche saying these were his notes to himself about his approach to doing the backgrounds which George Stokes passed on to me.***

Break!

Some guy blowing bubble last Friday night on 69th Street. I guess it was that kind of night.


Today was the first day of summer break for me and I have spent the last several days chilling a bit from the whirl-wind and cleaning up the house and the studio. Amazing what gets shunted aside, or piled into piles while one is running full tilt. I am about the head full gear into my next project the martians go home book, which will be my main gig for the next several months, but I need to get the studio rearraged abit before I settle into the cockpit later this week. below are some pics I snapped on the last day of school while I waited for a few freinds to have lunch.

SCHOOLS OUT! Goodbeye Spring Sememster 2009!

Hurrah! I am now completely done with the Spring Semester at PAFA, my last crit was yesterday morning in my Intaglio class. I haven't posted much of what I did in the class this semester due to the fact I had to do all the work in school. Lisa Hamilton my teacher was really great, she had a great knowledge and love of this medium, which as a painter I found to be at times exceedingly tedious and frustrating.Don't get me wrong, you can do amazing pieces with this medium, but te process means that so often you have no idea of what result you will have from some step or process for a while due to the way this medium works. You have to do something to the plate, then drop it in the acid, clean it, ink it and then print, only then will you see if what you just did yielded the result you desired or had in mind. it can be to dark, not dark enough or any number of thing as this isn't a direct medium like painting. It really requires lots of time and lots of patience with learning how these techniques work and how to manipulate them and yourself to get something you want on the plate. Even simply wiping the plate the same way each time to do your edition of prints is very demanding depending on the image you have.

I decided that the last image i would do in class would be a totally abstract one to just throw caution to the wind and explore the medium in a different way: mark making,non-figurative, letting a randomness happen and then to try and react to what I just did in another random way in a layering of textures, paint blobs, soft ground, etc.

This is a print I did over a dozen proofs of as I developed it, it's based on a picture I snapped in Dali China. I used lots of aquatint, open bite, tape, tush, etching, in short, everything but the kitchen sink on this one.
This is one of my monoprints based on a recurring nightmare I would have as a kid when I was sick.
Our class crit.
I'll miss some of my classmates like Jeff who's returning to Chicago for family reasons and won't be back next fall, and I do want when time allows to try some more prints in this medium, but for now I really just want to be lazy for a few days and sleep more...