Busy busy busy

Wow, another unintentionally long hiatus from posting. Until recently, it has been chaos in the studio working as fast as I could on all kinds of fun, interesting projects. Now, it's quiet again and I'll have a few days before the panic sets in that I don't have any work. "Gee, that looks like a good dumpster to live out of."

Four months ago I was approached by Eat n Park Hospitality Group to do some safety posters for in-house use. They sent me some samples of the style they were looking for and asked if I could do it. The pieces they sent were all 80s airbrush work and it took me a while to figure out how to pull them off in Photoshop. The fun twist is that they wanted the faces of their various VPs on the posters. It's a fun series to work on and I can't wait to start the next one. They are so popular amongst their people that VPs are vying for their own poster.

Another fun project I'm still working on is another book for Penguin Random House, Who Was Nikola Tesla. Who doesn't love Nikola Tesla?

This comic book project was insanely fun. A lot of it had to be drawn so as to be animated, which made for quite a chore keeping layers labeled. Can't wait to see the animations and printed comic.

This was an oil painting commission for Christmas. The client wanted a portrait of their deceased dog in a copy of Wyeth's Christine's World. Quite a challenge since Christine's World is a very large egg-tempera painting and this is an 11x14" oil on paper. Still, I'm very happy with the finished painting. And so is the client, which is what matters.

I somehow found time to squeeze in this full-page illustration for a gardening magazine. Some stuff is just too fun to pass up.

And, finally, I attended a WPaSCBWI event on picture books and spent the day listening to interesting lectures and doodling. It's what I do.

Holy cow, it's been a long time since I posted anything. Just goes to show how busy I've been in the studio.

One of the projects keeping me cranking was a book project for Penguin about ancient Pompeii. Currently, I'm working on a book about Bruce Lee for them.

Another project I've been working at is this painting for the Day of the Dead. It's oil on panel, about 24x28". It was actually inspired by the frame which was given to me by a friend. I knew it needed a painting that was dark and dramatic. Here are some stages and details:

I apologize for these being out of order, here is the progress for this illustration.

This was the finished line art, done in Photoshop after scanning my tight pencil rendering seen below. It's so much easier inking in Photoshop, especially if I decide I don't like something - the undo button is a godsend. I decided that a brown ink line would be more in keeping with the old storybook feel they wanted, so I changed the line color to brown in Photoshop.

I took the pencil drawing, scanned it and threw it on top of a parchment layer to get rid of the stark black and white, which I find hard to work with when coloring stuff.

This is the crazy-tight pencil drawing done on parchment. It's big, around 16" square.

This is the crop the client will use. The color is all rendered digitally in ArtRage. I sent them this version, but wanted to see if they liked a more aged feel, so I sent them the version you see in the post below this. Still torn as to which version I like better.

Some pen and ink sketches from last night's figure group. I really like drawing with a fountain pen and this Namiki pen is awesome. I haven't used it for over 4 months but it fired right up and worked great. Unfortunately, it ran out of ink before I could finish my last drawing. Oh well.

I still love the look of these little warm-up drawings.

Took a couple of the Sharpie drawings from Tuesday night to a more finished state. Sharpies and white pencil, who'd a thunk it?

Some fun with a Sharpie at this week's figure session. I was totally burned out after several days of cranking out storyboards as fast as I could and had no expectations at figure session, so just grabbed a Sharpie to play with. Pretty happy with the results.