Working w/ Flash!

Well i've dropped my pen and paper for a bit and picked up my tablet and stylus instead (I have been drawing on the side). I've been using Corel Painter and Flash. Flash b/c I really want to animate something,  and painter b/c I'm not that big of fan of photoshop painting. I've been meddling around trying to see what a final product might look like.  

don't ask me why, there is no finished product or anything commenced. I needed to fill the space and that was all I could think of. 

I don't think that programs like Flash should be used by themselves. They need the enhancement or accompaniment of another to really make it look convincing. Flash has SO MUCH potential, yet I rarely see it. 

sigh~

There is hope though.

John K. and Nick Cross do excellent flash work. I'm sure there's more out there.

John Singleton Copley Study

Well. It's good for a first attempt. There is quite a bit wrong though. First being the mouth which is much too far out. The contour of the nose is a little off, also the edge of the face furthest away needs to come out more. Copley's self portrait is just filled with beautiful subtleties and it's hard to transfer the gorgeousness of this painting into a crummy graphite sketch. Oh well, i'll just have to try again. 

Ugh... the more I compare the more disgusted I am at my capabilities as an artist.

For any of you unfamiliar with Copley, he was probably America's first great painter. Sadly once he reached success and fame he moved to England and stayed there until his death. Though he had many of your standard portraits some he was allowed to play with and they had a charm and humor to them.

This painting is filled with suspense for me, look at her devious expression, with the bird and the dog everything seems to lead to her hand grasping the ribbon as if she were about to pull it at any moment releasing someone in a vat of molten lava. The pose is also really unusual to me, for a portrait anyhow. kneeling in front of the chair, it adds to the playfulness of the whole picture.

For any American history buff's you'll probably recognize this gentlemen above, it's none other than Paul "British Are Coming" Reveere. This painting is again strange, it's as if he started a standard still life and turned it into a portrait to have someone interfere with the objects. Now, I don't know much about Paul outside the famous tale, but maybe he was some sort of silversmith? not entirely sure, but this painting is just about as curious as his expression.

This is a fantastic group portrait. With children climbing all over the elders, I think my favorite is the older man on the left with the little girl looking at his wife pleading with his eyes for assistance, all is futile for she has two girls already crawling all over her. The man in all the way in the back is the artist himself, the reason why this painting takes so many liberties is the fact that this is his family and this is how he see's them. I wish I had a painting like this.

"The Sitwell Children," brilliant!

This is probably Copley's most famous and respected works. It was highly controversial at the time it was exhibited, but to me the crazy part is that this is a depiction of an actual event! The man in the water did survive, at the cost of one of his legs. 

Caricature!

Sorry it's been a while since my last post. I've been making a painting in Corel Painter, which I am still trying to get the hang of. It's coming along nicely and it's about halfway done, it's just very time consuming. In the meantime here are some sketchbook doodles to share, mostly caricature. 

Let's see well on this page we have Cilla Black, Nancy Sinatra (a badly done one and a decent one), Dovima, and Suzy Parker. The one in the top-right is unknown and the other two are made-up... Well the one red head does resemble a lot like Lois Griffin from "Family Guy" but that was unintentional. 

Matt Damon's with Hugh Grant!

Unfinished Calista Flockhart, forgot the one on the top-right and bottom-left, Katie Holmes and Katie Couric. 

Tim Gunn's, Nina Garcia, Jay Leno, Johnny Depp, and Will Ferrell.

FRUITS!!!

Just some weird looking model I found in Elle magazine. 

Dovima, I need to do more full body drawing, I rarely do them. 

Weekend Inspiration!

Every couple of years an author will bestow upon the public a work of literature that is a milestone, a work that is new and radically different from it's predecessors. Works like "Ulysses," "Atlas Shrugged," "The Catcher in the Rye," and "Slaughterhouse Five."

Andy Griffith's "Zombie Butts From Uranus" the long awaited sequel to his New York Times Bestseller "The Day My Butt Went Psycho" is one of those books. I was shocked to find it at my neighborhood Goodwill for the trifling sum of 10 cents!

Book cover

British cover

And just for you and the rest of the world, I've decided to give you all a sneak peak by posting the warning page and the entire glossary.

In case your inept at detecting sarcasm, I was being just that; sarcastic. The warning is not far from off from the truth, it's a very difficult read. Not in the sense that "Ulysses" is complex, "Atlas Shrugged" is enormous, or "The Tropic of Cancer" explicit. This book is just stupid, painfully stupid. It's not like a short Dr. Seuss book either, it's 258 pages of absurdity. However, i have to say I am pretty inspired by that glossary and am thinking about illustrating some of them over the weekend so look out for that.

Butt-Papermate (n.): The same as the blog Papermate, except browner, and smellier. Avoid.

Famous Ladies!

These first two pages are from another blogger account. Double Takes features lots of lovely ladies of today and the past, very good for caricature.

(top to bottom left to right) Bridget Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day, Clara Bow, Joan Craword, Julianne Moore, Joan Crawford, Joan Crawford, Imogen Heap.

I forgot who the top two are, one is a model the other a French actress(?) the ones i know are Wynona Ryder, Bette Davis, Twiggy, a horribly done Louise Brooks, Twiggy, and Christina Ricci.

Isabelle Huppert dominates at the top, then Verushka, Nico on the left, gestures of my cat Peepers, Dee and Charlie from "It's Always Sunny...", another Huppert, a weird Raymond Scott guy.

My lil' sister and her boyfriend Mitch, my favorite is the Mitch all the way on the bottom left-had corner.

People on the bus, I'm very proud of the back of the hipsters head, those are very hard to do. I also got some black people! A very uncommon breed of person here in the state of Washington so I love drawing them. But nothing compares to my love of drawing obese people!

People at a restaurant. 

more sketches!

People in Elle magazine

Taylor Swift is all the way on the right

     Recently I've discovered two websites, one from Kristen McCabe called They Fight Crime. TFC generates a hilarious Duo of oddball characters that fight crime together. The other I found is called Fellow Humans and has pictures of many many people from different locations, this is great for caricature. I've only done two, the other caricatures was in a diner.

     

      Waffle Woman however is my own creation, yet it wasn't till 2 days after creating her that she was very reminisant of Powdered Toast Man, except she's a vigilante spy but she's inspired by an Abbott & Costello joke and TFC.

This page just has some random stuff, Ruby Poolcue is of course the symbol
of affection from Lou Costello, and Leslie Beanbag is his shrewd neighbor.
I got some Bavarian architecture, and the first drawing of Waffel-woman and Pizza-face!

All of these are based of TFC, the top two I adjusted for my own tastes, an opera singer that becomes obese and a black woman from the 1970s with her Disco Fortune Ball.

Sketches of Marc Anthony from Chuck Jones' "Feed The Kitty"

Strangers with Candy bit players and Shawn White caricatures

more to come!

New Drawings! Caricature Studies.

My deepest apologies to those who follow the blog for not uploading very much. But not to worry, i have many, many drawings ideas, and sources of inspiration to upload that i will try and do more often (how many times have i said that one?). In the mean time here are some sketches to hold you off.

Caricatures from watching Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" 1980

try and see how many times Milton appears.

Yearbook photo page 1

Caricature studies of Brenan

Yearbook photos page 2

Caricature study of Kelsey, gouache on paper.

Character study, application of features from selected caricature of lovely French film actress'