Morning warm up for February 9- Pig on the Run

I'm trying to start doing a daily warm up piece of art although I don't want to put too much pressure on myself because I want the drawings to be spontaneous and fun and not be a chore.
This one let me experiment around with Painter 2015's brushes and digital watercolors. I increased the texture of the paper so the watercolors would show a watercolor paper type texture.
I love the look of the line quality here. Very spontaneous and loose, just like I like it.

Oh for heavens sake! I haven't posted since March?! Well, I have been busy on a few paying projects I guess  that's somewhat of an excuse.
I've been playing around with the new Corel Painter 2015 and trying out some new techniques. Painter is always fun to play around with and you can discover some really wonderful new things if you just sit down with it and think "I wonder what this does?'.
These drawing are for Inktober where artists try to do an ink drawing every day and post it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. I don't have time to do one every day so I thought I do a little play on words with  Inktober.
I was experimenting here with using just one or two colors besides the black line and I really like how this came out.
People keep asking me if this is a story and I have to tell them no, not yet anyway but as I do more drawings a character and a story seems to be developing.

These two drawings have to do with the weather that's going on across the country at the time. Cold and snowy in the middle and eastern parts of the U.S. and dry drought conditions here in southern California.
I had a good time making these using the pastels, inks and croquil pen tools in Painter and doing a lot of experimenting. In the background of the drought art it was fun to make cacti in agony.
There is something about a limited palette that makes your brain work differently and I kind of like it. I think one of these may end up on a postcard mailer in the future.

Seriously, I used to do this to my poor cat and drove it half mad. Drove my mom totally insane and she use to rush into the room yelling at me to stop making all that racket.
I'm trying something new here style wise. I love the line quality of Edward Gorey and David Small and I was trying to be inspired by them and incorporate that wonderful line into my own style.
The palette I'm using only has 25 colors and 10 of those are greens so it's really interesting trying get the colors I want but in a way it's also freeing to be so limited in a way and it requires more creativity on my part to color a scene.
And so the experimenting continues....

First Love First Rejection.

Well, back to the blogging thing I guess. It's been way too long since I've posted anything on my blog and I swear I will try to more consistent in my updates from now on.
This artwork was created for my self promotional postcard and tells the story of a boy...OK, it was me in the fifth grade,  the schoolyard artist who created the most fabulous love letter in the history of the world and presented it to Celeste, the prettiest girl in school only to have her crumple it up and throw it on the ground right in front of everybody!
She and her friends spent the rest of the semester "A.T.W." as she called it, which stood for Avoiding The Weirdo- which was me of course.
So obviously the second picture of Celeste going back later and picking it up never happened.
But we weirdo artists always create our own reality don't we?

Power Out- No Computer ARRRGGGHHHH!

Had a two hour scheduled power outage today in our neighborhood so the power company could fix a transformer or something. I use the computer exclusively to do my art so I was out of business.
Unfortunately it stretched into a 4 1/2 hour power outage so I had to do some sketching for my new postcard with a pen...on paper....in a sketchbook. Oh the HORROR!!!

"One Day In The Park" Artwork

Well, it’s time to do a mailer promo piece again and this time I decided to do something a little different with the imagery.

Putting out a mailer is difficult because you have to keep in mind that the editor or art director who’s looking at the card is going to look at it for about three seconds or so before they A: pin it up on their bulletin board for future reference or B: toss it in the circular file because it isn’t relevant to any current or future projects they might be working on.  As an illustrator you figure that pretty much 95 percent of your beloved postcards are going into the trash.  That’s not being pessimistic, that’s just the way it is. So whatever you send better be darned interesting.

Starting off, I had this image that flashed into my head of a boy feeding dinosaurs at the park. What it needed was someone to react to this bizarre scene so I imagined a woman, looking a bit alarmed, feeding pigeons sharing a park bench with the boy.

Here’s my first sketch of the idea. Done quickly, I just wanted to get the image out of my head and down on paper…or the computer screen as I use program Corel Painter 12 from sketch to completion for all my art.

First try vertical format

Somehow the vertical format just wasn’t working so I tried doing the sketch horizontally. Compositionally this seemed to work out better and made it not so cramped looking.

Originally I had the perspective drop off so you could see the end of the park with trees and the city in the background, but I wanted to focus the attention on the woman, boy and dinosaurs so I made it a winter scene and cropped in on the main characters.

Sketch version with city in background

At first I thought that would do an ink line version and then do the color on the layer underneath, like painting animation cells. I think the ink line version looks pretty good actually and I loved using the dry ink pen in Painter 12. 

Ink line version

But in the end I decided to make it look like a painted piece using Painter’s Artist Chalks. I tried make this art look more painterly and less digital by not using most all of the layers and digital effects in Painter 12. I’ve found that by doing this it gives the artwork a nice naturally painted feel to it. Since nobody really knows how the dinosaurs looked and what kind of coloration they had, I could really use my imagination and try to create some fun creatures there. The pigeons, honestly, were not as much fun to do, but at least I tried to give them some character.

Here is the finished art, ready for my postcard and website.