Luke Skywalker's Hand

So what ever DID happen to Luke Skywalker's hand and lightsaber after being severed by Darth Vader at the climax of The Empire Strikes Back?  Perhaps they're just floating in deep space through asteroid fields.  What are the chances of surviving that??

Or perhaps we'll find out in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens!

I had a blast inking this illustration live on the air with Jedigoddess Presents, on Deep Ellum On Air.  Stay tuned for today's recorded episode to pop up on the site!

"Don't Feed The Reaper" - Daily Line Art #1

On October 13th, 2014, I began a challenging new routine of waking at 5am to coffee, heavy metal, and two+ hours of traditional line art illustration.  This is where we began.

Cinco de Mayo Red Bull Posters

Happy Cinco de Mayo!  While I'm finishing up my graduate illustration thesis, I'm eager to get back to making regular blog updates.  But rest assured, I've been busy!  In the meantime, here's a sampling of some illustrated poster commissions for Red Bull.  It's an honor working with them, and a great opportunity to play with some wild color schemes and hand-lettering, which I've been anxious to do more of.  Stay tuned for some other fun commissions!

Sketching Anatomical Reference

Today I made a spontaneous trip to Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum to collect reference and sketch some of the awesome sculptures and paintings by Remington and Russell. I recently discovered how much I love that place!  With free admission every day, it's quickly becoming my favorite destination in DFW to research illustrations.  It's proven invaluable as I'm starting to really dive into my thesis.

The Black Moriah 'Casket Prospects' Thrash Metal Album Cover Illustration

I recently had the pleasure of developing the cover art illustration for The Black Moriah's full length Casket Prospects album release.  

As a DFW metal band with serious black/thrash chops and a brutal western theme, they're arguably the perfect client.  They're talented, professional, and a pleasure to work with.  In fact, the process of discussing concept with them and working up dozens of thumbnails lead me to want to expand upon the idea for my graduate illustration thesis through Hartford Art School's low residency MFA Program (see my 'Spooked' post below for a glimpse at the new body of work).

For those with a taste for Slayer and dare to be thrashed, they'll be playing with Nile at Trees in Deep Ellum, TX / March 30th, 2013.  Snag a ticket while they're available here.

Follow The Black Moriah on Facebook, stream tracks, or purchase the album from TheBlackMoriah.com.  

Holiday Show Poster & Illustrated Frame

In the spirit of supporting small businesses and local art this holiday season, Kettle Art is kicking off its 8th annual Holiday Presence show!  It's a great place to buy some affordable gifts from your favorite Dallas artists.

When I was asked to put together a show poster for the event, I wanted to experiment with designing a custom frame while also applying a softer, seasonal palette to my typically stark black linework.  I had a good time plotting which artistic media to embed in the frame itself, and how to create a quick read that the Kettle Art gallery provides a framework for local artists to play and exhibit.  Oh, and I also wanted to cleverly hide the #8 in the shape of a snowman.  See what I did there? wah wah.

Holiday Presence #8 opens at Kettle Art, Thursday, December 6th at 7pm, hope to see you there! Feel free to RSVP @ the Facebook Event Page

Alien & Jonesy - iPad Sketch with Jaja Stylus

Starring my favorite movie monster, here's a quick time-lapse video of my first real attempt on the iPad with my new Jaja pressure sensitive stylus.  I've been fumbling around getting the hang of the Jaja and identifying the quirks in both Procreate and Sketch Club apps.  I'll always love my Wacom Cintiq for serious work, but this seems to be pointing in the right direction for a portable option.  I'll post again with more in-depth thoughts on it.

Tentaskull Shirt Design for Socialaundry

Check it out... my "Tentaskull" shirt design is now available at Socialaundry.com!! They're a very cool and socially conscious American brand, with portions of every sale going to both charity and the original artist. Definite thumbs up!!

Tornadoes and Turkey Vultures

I was compelled to take my fascination with scary looking birds to the next level on my Fort Worth reaction project for The University of Hartford's Illustration MFA program. A native Dallas / Fort Worth artist myself, I took this opportunity to collect some exhaustive reference material from the Fort Worth zoo and do a fun pen & ink piece in LP dimensions with just a hint more color than usual.

12x12, pen & ink on scratchboard.

Oh! and here's a 3D anaglyph version for red/blue glasses!

 

Lastly, 2D and 3D prints with glasses are both available in my store

Art Prints in Archival Sleeves

I've just stocked up on archival, resealable sleeves and backing boards to better present and distribute art prints through my Etsy Art Shop and fairs/shows.  I'm pretty excited about the slick new presentation, and ready to get them out into the world!  I'm also sneaking a random bonus print on the back of every piece (shhh!).

Jim Moriarty Portrait Illustration

I love the BBC's modern day version of 'Sherlock'... largely due to their brilliant and hilariously menacing version of evil mastermind Jim Moriarty as played by Andrew Scott.  

I thought I'd try my brush-pen hand at a quick caricature, so I looked at dozens of reference photographs and drew my own (it's always better to form your own version of a subject than slave yourself to or infringe on the copyright of a particular photograph).  

I put the original drawing up on Etsy for kicks as well.

Skull on Plaid

In keeping with my effort to stay loose and lively, here's another whimsical skull in brush pen.  Isn't he fashionable on plaid?  I pulled out a gray prismacolor marker to help push the pattern back a little.  This would have taken me a few extra hours if I'd done it with a technical pen, but I'm thinking once I get the hang of this brush stuff it'll be great to blend the tools together... using brush for the fat and flowing outlines and pen for fine detail and hatching.  Lot's to play with there!

On a side note, as a metal fan I'm well aware of how cliche skull art is... yet that allure is always there!  Must be some kind of primal fascination in us.

Pocket Brush Fun

My Pentel Pocket Brush continues to be fun to work with on quick whimsical sketches.  I'm starting to get a feel for what it's capable of and how to control it better.  I'll look forward to coming back to these to compare after I've gotten another 10 or 20 hours under my belt.  Most notably, getting those instant fat outlines that would otherwise have taken me 10 times longer to get with a fine-tip pen... those are really fun.

Dreamosaurs in Technicolor

It's not often that I feel compelled to do color work on my black and white drawings, but something about Dreamosaurs just called for some color play.  The original idea was to do a sepia tone over the full image just to add another layer of value, but once I got going on it I felt like a deep dreamy blue made more sense.  Photoshop makes it so easy to play with variations and layers of value.  The 'replace color' option is invaluable for me during this process, as I can drag the slider bars and see different palette options in real time without doing any permanent damage to the original.

All that said, I still have the itch to do a sepia version of some of my other black and whites.  In so many words, I'd like to push my illustrations a little further without making a jarring switch to full-color. Monochrome is just too beautiful to me!

Prints of these are available at my Etsy Art shop

As an aside and in the interest of scary children's media, I have to repost a quote by Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) that my good friend and illustrator Aja Wells shared... 


"...from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustration as best they can.  And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis.  It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things." - Maurice Sendak

Dreamosaurs / Dinos & Dogs

Norman Rockwell said "if it isn't working, put a dog in it."  After my menacing 'Tar Pits at La Brea' piece, I wanted to do something a bit less intense and generally more accessible.  There's definitely an interesting, different energy juxtaposing the massive menace of a T-Rex with the cute and cuddly west highland terrier.

At 18"x18", this is one of my bigger pen & ink efforts.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that, with 3 or 4 coats of gesso as a base, I can use my scraper tool much like I would on a claybord piece... pulling up ink to make corrections or value adjustments.  It takes more time on the front end to get the board prepped, but it certainly offers a versatile alternative to pre made scratchboards.

Donkey Kong Un-Tied - self-promotional illustration

This is a self-promotional piece that I drew up as a companion to my Donkey Kong sculpture for Vinyl Thoughts 2 in Dallas.

With sculpture and vinyl toys being new creative avenues for me, I thought I'd take the opportunity to tie it all back to the line art drawings I consider my primarily discipline and make double impressions at the show.  So while I worked on my Donkey Kong sculpture I also drew this up in my signature pen on scratchboard style to print on self-promotional postcards and hand out at the show.  I had a lot of fun with this one!

For The Love of The Artists - Show Poster

 

Just finished up the show poster for Kettle Art's "For The Love of The Artists" group gallery show.  Don't miss it, soft opening Sat Feb 22nd & Grand Opening Saturday March 3rd, 7-10pm.  Hope to see everyone there!

The original drawing (below) is pen & ink line art on 5x7 scratchboard, finished in photoshop with hand lettering and additional grey tones.

Balancing Values in Black & White Line Art

In the seven months since beginning my Low Residency MFA in Illustration at Hartford, the biggest personal change I've witnessed beyond multiplied creative output is a new found sense of focus and confidence in my individual style. In the 6 years from undergraduate work til now, a number of techniques, media, and approaches took hold of me. In that experimentation, I lost a sense of confident direction in my work... and my output suffered as well. Whether it was the final decision to take responsibility for my growth through graduate work, or simply being surrounded by massively talented classmates, almost instantly in the first days on campus I could see with a new clarity which piece best represented me as an artist. 

'Survival of the Biggest' had been an experiment in process, using technical pen on blank white clayboard as opposed to scratching into pre-inked black scratchboard (something I went back and forth about multiple times over the years). Claybord's unique flexibility for sculpting values in ink combined with additional compositional prep work on my part brought the piece to a certain level of style and finish that I continue to be proud of today.  I decided that between my enjoyment of that process and satisfaction with the final product, this was the vein I would continue down for the foreseeable future. 


Since that moment seven months ago, I have held true to the process and started building a new portfolio of work that feels genuinely 'Albright,' for all intents and purposes. Now I've come to a point where I feel a comfortable enough distance from the pieces that I can evaluate the body of work as a whole, and am more able to improve upon the formula in small but significant ways. For example, using what I'd call thumbnail evaluation some images are more effective than others when viewed from a distance or reduced to a small preview on screen.  Viewing an image at this greatly reduced size helps you ignore the subtleties for a moment and instead judge the overall composition, clarity, and impact.  

Using quick thumbnail evaluation, I've recognized that my drawings with larger areas of heavy blacks are more immediately effective and easier for the eyes to process than drawings with even contrast through the entire piece.  Case in point, both 'Sabre Skull Valley' and 'Pterodactdinner' (above) are rather tonally even throughout.  Intending to provide the viewers dense jungle of information to explore, all areas of the picture plane are handled with equal contrast and no large areas of heavy black aside from 'Pterodactdinner's frame. But in comparison with 'Lava' or 'Post-Apocrowlyptic' (below), both of which contain large areas of black to counter evenly balanced hatch work, I'm finding the two latter examples are more successful and give the eyes both a resting place and an easier point of entry.  And by that virtue, they both perhaps appear more 'finished.'

Long story short, moving forward I intend to pay closer attention to having areas of heavy black as a resting point for the eyes.  I also suspect this will lead me to make more complete use of the claybord medium in the sense that these black areas will require that I use my scratch tool for white detailing, rather than building up values with the pen and using the scraper tool for corrections alone.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more!

Cosmic Controls - Gallery Benefit Piece #2

Here's my second piece for Kettle Art's For The Love of Kettle benefit show on Sat, Feb 11th.  Follow the link for details.  Again, everything in the show is a steal for $50 and goes 100% to keeping the non-profit gallery afloat.  

I've been wanting to do a piece like this for quite awhile and hope to do some more on my usual scratchboards, possibly integrating color.  This one is nib pen on 9x12 primed masonite board.  This and the 'Empty Nest' piece were a good excuse to get used to working with a dip pen instead of technical fine tip pens.  Naturally I'm most comfortable on scratchboard and still feel they're the most flexible medium for me, but I enjoying playing with new materials!

Empty Nest - gallery benefit piece

Just finished up this piece for a benefit show at Kettle Art ("For The Love of Kettle") on February 11th.  I'm told every year there's a line down the block of people waiting to get their hands on the work, all of which sells for $50.  This is a major steal, by the way, and there's a huge group of talented Dallas artists showing work.

This piece was a challenge for me in the sense that I was working on a primed piece of wood instead of my super smooth claybords, which required that I use different tools to contend with the rougher and more absorbent surface.  I went through a large handful of pens, sharpies, markers, brushes, and finally settled into a comfortable use of a dip nib pen.  So far all of these new gallery opportunities are forcing me to really stretch out of my comfort zone, material wise, while retaining a sense of my usual aesthetic.  All good things!