Angelina Jolie

I am starting a caricature series of celebrities to build up the number of pieces in my illustrative portraits portfolio. For some reason I chose to start with Angelina Jolie, not sure why. As I spend the next month or so working on the portraits, my hope is that my conceptual skills will improve along with my technique.

Finches

Here are some works that I created for a crab feed fundraiser for my son's class trip to Washington DC. I completed a total of 18 pictures which will be raffled off. I worked into the wee hours finishing the drawings, making it quite the marathon drawing session. I lost track of how many hours I put into this project. I'm glad it is a 3 day weekend so I can recover! Now I just have to mat the pictures. Ugh!

Storyboarding

Things have finally settled down after the holidays and celebrating our anniversary. This morning I was able to do a few hours of storyboarding for the prologue of my graphic novel. I still need to work the text into the design but these pages are a good representation of how the prologue will flow.  I may add a little more to it. Once this section of my story is done, I was thinking about offering it as a free download to promote the story as a teaser of sorts.

Make-over

Here's a quick illustration for my website that is under construction. With the big change in my life of getting a new job, I am having to rethink some of my goals for my professional art work. Instead of trying to do a wide variety of things with my art I am finding the need to have to focus on just a few things. So I need to make sure that whatever I do, it is something I find worth my time, energy and expertise. The great thing about having a "normal" job is that it will allow me more flexibility to work on things that I am more passionate about, and not just things to pay the bills and put food on the table. So with that in mind, my website, and how I present myself (dare I say "branding"?) are going through a makeover for the next several months. In that time I hope to have my graphic novel ready for publication and have a good body of art to display for my fine art/gallery work.

Saturn's Moon: Supporting Material

Here's a couple of sketches of ideas for my graphic novel, which will be called Saturn's Moon. The first is a futuristic car, called a "mobile" in the story.  My son made a comment about it not being able to fly.  Good observation.  The reason for this is because the story represents a post apocalyptic society of sorts, where society has restructured itself in a way that even though it is technologically advanced, it is also technologically repressive to the common citizen.  The use of "higher technology" is a crime and the penalties for its use and possession are severe.
The second sketch is of a space transport.  The transport takes qualified citizens  away from oppressed Earth and allows people to start a new life in a massive space station colony near Saturn's moon Titan.  The station exploits Titan's natural resources allowing its colonists to live independently from Earth's population.

Illustration Friday: Sink

My first two studies for this week's topic focused on the idea of a sinker that is used for fishing. Though I liked the imagery that was starting to take shape with this idea, I decided to let it sit for a couple of days to see if I could come up with anything else. These two studies were drawn with a ball point pen.

After asking my family what they thought of when they heard the word "sink", my wife suggested imagery that included a kitchen or bathroom sink fixture.  Again, that got me thinking of fish, however, how water life my be affected by the things some in society dispose of through our sinks.  This illustration was created with pen, brush and ink, with ink and watercolor washes.

















This may be one of the last Illustration Friday challenges that I'll be doing for a while, though I may get a couple of more in after the New Year.  After a long time searching, I have finally been able to find employment in a non art related field.  This is a bitter sweet life change as it means I will have to restructure my time for my art pursuits and readjust my goals as an art professional.  It is a good thing, but I obviously won't have time to do as much art as I would like.
So as the New Year begins, one of the art projects I will be focusing is my graphic novel.  I have already started outlining the story and sketching out the breakdowns for the storyboard.  I plan to publish the story by June, but it may take longer than that. I also want to complete my Avengers fan art series.  I have only finished one character, and so I want to finish all the other characters before the movie hits the screen in the summer time.

Montage & Trailer

Here is a montage of my 30 Characters Challenge. The characters created will be used for the development of my digital graphic novel called Saturn's Moon. Also included is a video trailer for the work in progress that shows all the illustrations from the challenge.