Working on varying my female types a little bit more. Been studying some Leyendecker and Elvgren. Need to work on the gestures but having fun with these.
















Where's Russel Crowe when you need him?




I was totally shocked to see my name on a window! That was pretty damn cool. And as you can see, my artwork attracted people of all ages. (The baby seemed to enjoy the show. I love that picture!)
I was so happy to see everyone enjoying the pieces and I had a chance to talk to people who have only seen my art work online; it was a big treat! O yea, I was selling prints at the show and there are still a few left. If interested just shoot me or the gallery an email if you wanna know prices.
Big thanks to all my friends and family that showed up. My high school art teacher, Fred, even dropped by. That was especially cool because I like to think I have come a looooong way since my days of drawing really bad unproportioned figures.



















Pascal is one of those rare artists that bursts with life and imagination and at the same time is a very kool kat! He has always lent me great advice and has been very supportive of my artistic career and growth, thanks buddy! Click here to link to his site.
Octavio is just one cool mutha. While visiting Pascal, Octavio was chilling out in the wee morning hours. He looked at my portfolio and we struck up a conversation. He currently works at Lucasfilm Animation (I throw my fists in the air in a rage of jealousy..ha ha) and he is just one badass. ClickHere to link to his site.
I first saw Paul's artwork on the Character Design Blog and was BLOWN AWAY! Luckily I was able to talk to him in person and got to chit chat a bit on the industry and his journey as an artist. More of his great art can be seen here. We asked him the secret to art and he told us.




Here is a link to the gallery's website and show details:
Alright, well this week is gonna be super crazy but I know it will be a whole lot of fun. Like I said, I hope to see some of you at the workshop and most especially at the art show! Thanks again for stopping by.



Now, I love the weight I got in this guy and I am starting to like what is going on with the arm, but I am still not happy with the overall shapes, I want a little more contrast and flow pushed throughout the forms....ah...now on to.....







Below are the sketches for the piece.Each time I do an illustration I always do several iterations and try to work out the composition before I go with a full head of steam into the drawing. This is the phase that counts the most. Taking the time to do little studies and work out the details of the piece can save you a tremendous amount of time when you go into the final. Now some of you may ask, well doesn't that kill the spontaneity of the drawing i you plan everything out meticulously? Not at all.....what that helps you to do is to train your hand to get used to those rhythms and shapes, so that when you do go into the final drawing your mind and hand are working in unison making the final image easier to get out. Hope that makes sense.
This next page I am working on new compositions and value schemes in ball point pen. I eventually decide to go back to a composition on the first page which I later flipped horizontal for the final piece.












This is a character I have been working on for a story I am developing. This is round one of him and will probably go thru a few more revisions. He's the leader of a ghost hunting team.
Next up, part of my Peter Pan remake, this is TIC TOC CROC. Pretty self explanatory, he is basically a charging, vicious time bomb...literally.
So for the finished Shear Ends (image in the previous post) I did a lot of thumbnail sketches for my composition as well as the stylization of my characters. I probably spent the better half of the day working this out on a few pages in my sketchbook.
1) Get my final line art down, scanned into Photoshop at 400 DPI and cleaned up with levels to get rid of some of the debris.
4) Use a color layer in Photoshop to lay down washes of color over my grayscale tones.
7)Finish rendering the hands and the white background was bugging my so I laid down a quick gradient.
So my friend Cecile helped me with the title of the piece which is the same as the blog post title, SHEAR ENDS. The theme for the art was hair inspired and of course I had to depict the most awesome hair stylist I could think of. Hopefully, you can guess who it is, if not....WHAT"S WRONG WITH YOU! I kid, I kid. I knocked this out in about a day but in the next post I will show you how much work went into this before I actually attacked the final composition. I did pages of thumbnails sketches and studies to get the right attitude I wanted, you will see all of this next week as well as some insight through the various stages of this piece.




Click here to go check out the site!







Above are a few process shots showing the evolution of Sgt. Hook. Most of my costume references were taken from images of soldiers in uniform similar to the one on the hook reference page. I used a lot of shapes and colors that I saw in them. Again, if I did not have these references to borrow bits here and there I would have been drawing "generic" uniforms that would not help me place my character in a context or time period.
Finally, he's done in all his glory--Sgt. Hook! I hope you enjoyed this; forgive my talking too much, I'll make sure to post more work next week to compensate for all the words you had to go through.







Above demo for an actual class.
Above work in progress sketches for character designs in development.








Alright, I will have more stuff to post soon including some storyboards I did for a friend's music video pitch as well as some comps for a few commissions I will be working on. See you all soon and thanks again for waiting for me to return!





I did a Karate Kid pose on this last shot, but I did not hold it for long because although you can't see it here, on the other side of those rocks is a loooong way down, say about 4000ft.


