Handsome Devil Sketch 01

Stylized sketch of a guy I met the other day at the bookstore. He had cool hair and a nice suit, so I asked if I could take his photo. I want to use his look as the basis for a devilish character. If he had black hair, he would sort of look like Mr. Sable from Good Omens.

Crimson Kiss Sketches

I might be working on the comic Crimson Rose by William Mitchell in the near future, based in the same universe as his RPG Imperium Chronicles.  He'll be setting up a Kickstarter to pay for the comic, and when he does, I'll be sure to post a link.  I did some basic sketches to get a feel for the characters before starting.

Ramus, the main character. He has powers that allow him to change his arms into claws.

Fugg, the mechanic.

The sketch on the top right is a cat-alien prostitute straddling a wrench. I'll add it as a tattoo to his arm.

My first attempt at GEN, a general-purpose robot. She's too sexy though.

Some more GEN designs. The final will a combination of the elements in these.

A Parvulian. They are tiny aliens that get around in large mechanized suits.

The Blood Prince. He is of a race like the Drow.

The Girls from Alcyone- Sigrid Turnaround

Sigrid character design for the sci-fi novel "The Girls from Alcyone II: The Gilded Age," by Cary Caffrey.

Sigrid is the story's main character, and what she lacks in size (she's 5'1.5" compared to the other girls' 6') she makes up for in determination and hard work. Her and Suko are genetically-enhanced girls trained to be mercenaries.

The first book is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle format.

Reference: ~legendg85

The Girls from Alcyone- Suko Katanas

Suko character design for the sci-fi novel "The Girls from Alcyone II: The Gilded Age," by Cary Caffrey.

Suko is the best friend of Sigrid. Her and Sigrid are genetically-enhanced girls trained to be mercenaries. She loves anything with a blade edge, though she's no slouch with a gun either.

The first book is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Reference from: ~Sitara-LeotaStock

Magdalena WiP

For my Printmaking II class, we are starting off with collagraphs, which is a cross between collage and printmaking.  Various textures are glued to a board and used to make prints.

We had to use a song so I went with Magdalena by A Perfect Circle.  This is roughly what the textures are going to look like.  It's going to be really tricky making dollars out of contact paper.  I am so not looking forward to that. 

I've been living in the print lab all weekend and I've only done one print.  The rest has been discovering how not to do this assignment.  I had to trace the little pole dancers five or six times before figuring out how it should have been done.  I just hope they are still recognized as humanoid in the final print.

Now onto the fun of cutting and gluing all the textures!  Yay?

Army of Toys WiP 1

For my Poster Design class, we are doing gig posters, so I decided to do Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys, who I heard back in October when I went to New York.

I was going to go with a straight-forward idea of a group of broken toys and use Tinkertoys and blocks as letters.  Then I found pictures from the Island of the Dolls and thought maybe I'd do something with creepy dolls.  Based on my professor's suggestion of just using a single doll head and maybe putting the text in the hair, I made this, combining that idea and the band's motif of squids in their publicity photos.

I'm not sure if I'm going to make the text separate using a preexisting font, or try to make the test more of the piece.

I am going to use printmaking to make the final piece.

Trick 'R Treat Movie Poster

Our assignment for the movie poster was given at the start of October, so of course I had to choose a Halloween movie.  I originally was just going to do a picture of Sam(haim) with the broken lollipop in front of his face, but I ended up using a composition based on a penny dreadful cover.  The original image of Sam was them put up in the frame. 

If you haven't seen Trick 'R Treat, it is an anthology of four interweaving stories that are all witnessed (or caused by) Sam, a cute little trick-or-treater that will make you terrified of Sackboy from Little Big Planet.  I had to sleep with the lights on the first time I saw it.

I had a lot of fun watercoloring it to look old and destroyed.  This is done in watercolor, ink, and colored pencil.

ART Cabaret Poster

I am taking a poster design class this semester and our first assignment was a musical/play/stage show.  Amanda Palmer had been mentioning on Twitter about her being cast as the Emcee in the American Repertory Theatr's production of Cabaret.  It seemed an obvious choice after three days of trying to narrow it down from Dracula, REPO!, and whatever my other idea was.
I couldn't find photos from the show, so I used stock from kirilee and wineglass-stock on deviantART for the side girls.

This was done in oil paint, watercolor, and mostly colored pencil.

Leather Pants & Riding Crop

My second piece for my summer illustration class in the style of Erik Jones.  The first piece was really of just a practice, it wasn't until this that I got the hang of it.

The Behr house paint worked really well though I'll need more practice and find a better brush for thin hair strands.  On both pictures I started off the colored pencil technique wrong but realized what I was doing so subsequent works in this style should look a lot better.

I'm really happy with this piece and really want to do more mix-media paintings like this.

Buried Treasure

For my summer illustration class, I decided to do my work in the style of Erik Jones, one of my favorite artists.  I love his blend of graphic flats and detailed skin tones.

I had managed to use the same materials that Erik uses except the paint.  He uses Behr house paint but I figured artist acrylics would give me more of a range but they ended up just being a blotchy nightmare.  It was a waste of money but now I know to use the right paint on the next one.

I had problems with the colored pencils on the skin because I didn't do large enough areas of flesh so it was difficult to blend it.  The next one should be cropped in closer.

The bottom half of the picture isn't exactly the right color.  It should be richer but I couldn't get the settings in Photoshop to match them well enough.  I'll take a new photo when I have better lighting.

Overall, a great learning experience, and I think I need to push the next one to have more design elements.

Models are Emily and Ninja.

Materials are Rives BFK heavyweight, Prismacolor pencils, Winsor Newton Acylics, Gamblin watercolors, and Copic markers with awesome names.

Dr. Sketchy's- Viva! & the Velvet Hearts!! (Mild Nudity)

It's been almost a full year since I went to my first Dr. Sketchy's.  I had the night off for my birthday (tomorrow) so Damian took me because Michael was at work.  It was at the Sazerac Lounge this time and I liked the atmosphere and the building was really cool but I ended up seated right under a blazing hot light so I didn't last the full evening and had to leave early.

Sadly I'd forgot cameras were allowed, which sucked because the models were all awesome and doing poses that would work perfectly with my Erik Jones' style illustrations for my class.  I will certainly be checking Facebook the next couple days for photos from the evening to use as references.

  I think next time I will use charcoal.

Buried Treasure WIPs

I have a summer illustration class, and my goal is to do each picture in the style and process of Erik Jones, one of my favorite artists.  I love his blend of realism and graphic shapes.

My first image is of a pirate captain robbing her first mate's purse after shooting her and probably tossing her into the hole the buried treasure had been in.

My current concern is the colored penciled areas because the flesh parts are so small compared to the closeups Erik does.  At least it will be a learning process.

Life Drawing- Tricia (Nude)

Done in my Moleskine with blue and normal graphite.

World of Darkness: Hunter- Samurai

In Illustration class, we had to decide on a market and make four cohesive paintings.  I decided to stick with art to submit to White Wolf, and I hadn't seen anything from the New WoD that had an Asian theme, so I wanted to make all four pictures have one.

The first one I chose was Hunter and created a ronin to fight oni and monsters.  I based the look of the supernatural being after kabuki outfits and make-up for a demon.  The samurai has sliced his way through the demon with what may or may not be an empowered blade.  I have a little energy eminating from it, though the wisps are supposed to be parts of the demon, though it may indeed be holy flames too.

The next one will be an onmyoji, or Ying Yang Master.

Life Out/Loud Gallery Opening

Today was the opening for the Life Out/Loud show put on by the Kendall Pride group.  This is the first piece I've had up in a show at school.

I use robots to represent the heterosexual "norm" in society. They are the traditional boy/girl colors of baby blue and pink, respectively.  Society dictates that women are supposed to love, marry, and bear children for men. This idea is retro, much like the robots.
The two human girls are shown to be alive, happy, and deliriously in love. As too many homosexual couples in history have had to do, these women pretend to be straight, to be "normal" according to society, disguising the fact that they are in a same-sex relationship.  They dress up and appear to go with society's plan, but only for appearances.  The girl on the right giggles behind her hand, entertained at their secret.  They are holding hands, a small Public Display of Affection that often draws scorn when a straight couple could get away with something less decent.  These two women are not in line with the others, they are not marching but strolling happily to their own drum, that is, the beating of their young hearts.

I will be putting this piece into the 2010 ArtPrize.

Linda Fireflies WIPs

I was recently given a commission for a cover to a romance novel.  It's about lesbian vampires called nymphomites.  The Myspace page for it can be found here.  Caution, it does have sexual content in the excerpts from the book posted in the blog.

Here's my process for it so far:

The basic idea I had was for the two women to be embracing while the vampire glowed and the others lurked in the background eagerly waiting to join them.  I cropped a pose of the vampire holding up the protagonist's leg while kissing/biting her neck.  It takes place in central park so I had the city off in the background above the treeline.

I'm currently working on the colored version.  I have Coraline playing in the background so I started looking up the original Dave McKean book and the merchandise and it's influenced my stylization a bit.

Kitsune Process

My reduction woodcut was a kitsune, the Japanese word for fox. They can disguise themselves as women to seduce men. More info can be found in my previous entry.

Out of all the processes I learned during this semester, this was my favorite. If I can get in the print lab during the summer, I think I'll do some personal work in this way.

Sphinx WIP

So it's the last weekend before the semester ends. My sphinx painting is due next Thursday, but I finally got the first coat down earlier this week. Sorry for the photo quality; I took it with my phone as my good camera was at home.

In printmaking my copper plates are etched, aquatinted, and just need to have the soft ground etched into them, which I'll do tomorrow.

I'm going to spend the next couple hours working on the Clone Your Lover storyboards.

Female Monsters Series 1

My final print for the etching assignment in Printmaking. This is part of what I hope will be an ongoing series of female monsters.

The first is a pananggalan, a Malaysian monster that detaches its head at night and drinks the blood of children and pregnant women. More info can be found here.

From here I decided to continue with a motif of heads surrounded by undulating, twisted tubes of some sort.

The second is Medusa, the Gorgon from Greek mythology that was killed by Perseus. Her hair was snakes and her eyes turned victims to stone.

The third is a Japanese yokai known as a Rokurokubi, a woman whose neck stretches at night so she can play tricks on drunk men and fools. I tried to replicate the look of a tradition ukiyo-e print.

All are copper etchings. I used Aquatint on all three, and softground on the latter two.

References:
Penangalan
Yokai

My 1st Dr Sketchy's

So last Saturday night I went to my first Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School. (Grand Rapids division.)

The model was Jacinya Sanchez. I took Maggie with me and we had a really great time. I really hope I can go again.

Warm-ups of 1 minute gestures.


More 1-minute gestures on top, 2-minute along the bottom.


Most of us didn't realize that the contests included the next four sketches, so a lot of us ended up with a Gilligan's Island character only at the end. I believe these were each 5-minute.



I really quickly tried to turn her into Mary-Ann.


The next one was "model's arms have been ripped off by zombies," when, ironically, she now was wearing an outfit that exposed her arms. Some of us decided to go with one pretty, then the zombified one.

I decided to add some pyramids since she looked like a Desert Queen. What was supposed to be a camel was drawn quite weird and somehow became a dino-camel.


I then went with the zombie-mutilated one. There had been chalk pastels there but they were across the room and the sketch was only a 10-minute one. Maggie had oil pastels, one of which I accidentally used and smeared before realizing the mistake. I decided to just go with it. Charcoal and oil pastel do not go together so well though.



The next one was our astrological signs. I thought we were going to be given two sketches, but a new contest was announced immediately, so I redrew the second one (I had just erased her so I could have it ready for the second pose,) quickly, and I won : D

The last one was running from wild animals.


The next contest was Mucha, but Maggie and I had already called our ride and had to be packed up. More pictures from the night can be found here and here.