Pon Pon Pon

Here's a drawing of J-pop singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu from the music video for her song "Ponponpon." I should hate it, but I don't. In case you think this is a reflection of Japanese culture, be relieved that it isn't. When my friend from Japan saw this she said that she was embarrassed for the entire nation of Japan. 

This was done with mostly gouache with some color pencil and sharpie. 

Preliminary drawings below. 

I really wanted the finished drawing to look more like these caricature above, but i didn't work out that way unfortunately. It's hard to paint faces like these on a smaller scale. 

Poster

For a friends show in Iceland.

Sketches behind the poster!

The earings are inspired by this video (see if you can find them).

The silhoutte in the sketch below is much stronger. I regret not adopting it. 

My Foist Gig!

Oh boy, oh boy!!I got my first creative gig. The publishers finally put the video up on YouTube so I think I'm free to talk about it without consequence.



So all the images were done by me, and it was animated by another individual named Brady Hall. He also did some work to the images provided. It was fun, all the illustrations were completed in about a weeks time. There are only two things that i don't like about it: the way I drew Julianna's big smiles creeps me out, and the other thing is that the backgrounds required the most work, and you don't see all of it. So to correct that I have all the backgrounds provided below.

 The barn and the city are by far my favorites. These had the most work put into them, it shows obviously.

 The dress-shop (above) is my least favorite. It was hard to find any kind of reference for a dress shop in the early 1800's.

 The large fireplace is the one you see the least of, I like this one a lot too.

I haven't used photoshop that much before this, and now I've gotten a lot better and am trying harder to figure out how it works. If you have any good book recommendations or blogs, etc on photoshop painting please let me know! Also if you like books with lots of kissing in them, pick up a copy of "Eleven Scandals..." you won't regret it I'm sure.

A House in Seattle.

For me, this is a study in perspective and making cartoony settings. Both of which are fairly difficult for me. This painting took me a long time to complete, I'm fairly happy with the finished product, but there's still some things that need to be refined! 

Below are the other drawings that were made in order to get to what you see above. 

This was the original concept for the house. The house is flat and therefore not very enticing to look at.

As it turned out to put that house in perspective was really difficult. So i made some sketches of a different but similar house, then i put that into perspective. The perspective drawing was actually made into a painting, but it turned out horrible. Why? The composition was very sloppy and didn't make sense. So all that was scrapped and had to be rethought. 

So I made some thumbnails trying to figure out the composition and try to get the house the attention it deserved. I moved it from the base of the hill to the top. I didn't really want to do it, but it made the most sense to do so.

Once that was done I made a rough drawing. 

That rough was scanned and i made a digital color key to figure out how it would be done, and to give me an idea if the drawing would work. All this while checking my email.

Once I approved the color key the rough was traced onto thick paper for painting.

A base paint coat was added to make sure everything still made sense.

Then i just kept painting and that's how I got what you see on the top of the page. I'm not a 'painter' by any means. But if anyone has any suggestions on improving my painting methods or would like to share their process please feel free to comment!

Having A Blast!

Make-believe time with Billford!

gouache on paper, colored pencil for detailing.

Kid

Just your standard, red-blooded, all-American boy!

Another Billford Space Thing

"Keep looking up!" -- Jack Horkheimer.

Americana

My stepmother will become an American citizen tomorrow morning. To celebrate her immigration from Mexico to the U.S. of A. I made this card of her as the statue of liberty reinterpreted as a Mexican Folk Dancer. In the corner is her dog Baldo as some kind of mini-Uncle Sam.

color layout and preliminaries.

Via Comet

Sorry I haven't uploaded in such a long time. I have been doing lots of doodles but I'm becoming more nit-picky about what to post. I'm going to try and have nice "finished" looking drawings like the one above. I realized that i'm not that fantastic at painting, it's something that I really need to work on.

Who Lives In a Pineapple Under the Sea???

Why it's Spongebob Square Pants of COURSE!!

Oh lookie there! It's his next door neighbor SQUIDWARD!

I just got gouache 2 days ago and boy is it fun. People say that it dries too quickly but i haven't had a problem with that at all. I hope to post one of Patrick soon, i might do one of Mr. Crabs but not completly sure, I'll probably do one of Mrs. Puff instead.

Lost in an Ocean of Umbrella's

I'm going to do some more with a theme of umbrella's, but for now this is it.

new doodles. new media.

I've been playing with color and media lately (I don't paint much), it's something i should learn to do considering i don't really have a portfolio.

One thing that i have been doing that is really fun and interesting to me is mixing media so i can get a nice contrast of texture (or create a new one!). I've been playing with perticuarlaly colored pencil and water color, occasionally i'll bust out my inks too like the picture above but not often.

This one above is just colored pencil (ugh... i badly screwed up on that nose). The thing that i didn't really care for about the pencils is that alone they create kind of an ugly texture if you want them opaque, that texture though is great for hair! Yet skin is a different story, also they can get a little muddy after a while and because it's so waxy if your on that top layer and you make a mistake that color has to be blended in but it won't go away, you're basically left with a smudge. I draw pretty loosely and this is a very, very bad thing for me. This happened a lot when you were in an area with very contrasty colors, look around the eyes and you'll see what i'm talking about.

I tried something different. Instead I only outlined in color pencil. I created a thin watercolor base of colors and gradients, next I used some pastel chalks to darken and smudge, and THEN i went in with color pencil. The nice thing is that I didn't have to apply it very thick as in previous drawings, which meant that nasty textures and unwanted smudges could be easily averted.

I'm still playing around with this, so I'll hopefully find new ways to color drawings.

Christmas Illustrations.

For Christmas i gave my Older Sister an illustration of her boyfriend, and her boyfriend a picture of her. I had them framed and then presented them.

This one i think is my favorite, it has a strong silhoutte and good framing with the use of the concertina, good colors too. 'Nuff said.

this one i ran out of time so i wasn't able to color in the rat and fully color in the books a nice opaque color. I tried to use the books to lead your eye to the top like a pyramid. The silhoutte in this one was trickier but i think i got it, also using the book and arm to frame the face worked out nicely.