Art Battle Studies

I'm not doing the Illustration Friday topic for this week. I've been too busy with starting up teaching for the school year, and I am also participating in a fundraiser called Art Battle 2010. The Art Battle will raise funds for an organization called Jagged Lines of Imagination (JLI) which strives to educate the community in the arts for affordable rates.

I just found out about the fundraiser a few days ago and decided to be a part of it. Talk about a hasty decision! I just started yesterday with planning my design. The event is tomorrow, Friday the 13th (Yikes!). What happens is that a group of artists get together at Stockon's (California) downtown area (where the monthly Artwalk is held), and they have two hours to create a scene of Stockton's Waterfront area which is to include two characters from a selected list. After the art is created, spectators vote on their favorite art design and the winner wins a prize. The runners up also win prizes too. Though I wouldn't mind winning a prize, I am mostly doing this for exposure to possibly drum up business; oh, and of course support JLI!

Upon reading the list I at first felt very intimidated. But since my strength is drawing people, I thought drawing Ozzy Osbourne and Michael Jackson would be interesting. What an odd couple!

Here are some studies of me just brainstorming. This first is of Stockton's movie theatre area, seen from the water. It is done from a reference pic that I got from Google.















Here's one of Ozzy. I used a few reference pics to come up with this study.


















And one of Michael. I mostly used reference pics for the head shot, then made up the rest of the pose on my own.


















This next one was done after I decided to take my own reference photos of the downtown area. Sometime (if not most) the Internet is just too limited to give an artist a good understanding of his subject. In the background is a stage that is sheltered by a "sail" cover. Pretty neat. This study pays homage to Manet who is one of my favorites from the Impressionism period.

Included with Ozzy and Mike is Jackson's pet chimpanzee Bubbles. This last study is the basis for the design that I will do at tomorrow's Art Battle. Now I just need to clean up the design and plan it for a larger sized paper which will be 16" x 20".

These were all done with a Sharpie. I plan on using Micron pens and watercolor to create my final design.