'Lava' Volcano Illustration

Following my asteroid and prehistoric valley illustrations, I wanted to do one focusing on the erupting volcano.  This one is a 5x7, pen & ink on ampersand claybord (uninked white scratchboard).

This was a fun start to my day over coffee and heavy metal, and I thought I'd share an animated gif of the rough sketch, tighter sketch, and final inked version.

Pet & Baby Portrait Drawing

I thought I'd share my most recent commissioned pen & ink portrait.  Thanks Beth!

This was my first time rendering an infant, and I wanted to retain my familiar hatched shading technique without her appearing wrinkly, aged, or otherwise distorted (as the hatching sometimes can do).  All in all, I think she looks consistent with the rest of the image and I'm happy with how everything turned out.

I really love doing pen & ink pieces like these for clients. While I primary work less realistically and from the imagination, it's so enjoyable to work from a photo and explore basic shading techniques. I find the process meditative, and affords me the freedom to study value and play with texture. And ultimately it's just awesome hearing how happy people are to share it with their families.

Pterodactdinner... yet another dinosaur drawing

Yet another dinosaur drawing... 8x10, pen on scratchboard.

A delectable dino dinner for drawing dorks like me, with color and 3d versions to follow. In fact, I have a feeling I will soon be starting an spin-off blog featuring my 3d drawings, which can for now be seen at AlbrightIllustration.com and facebook.com/albrightillustration.

Thanks, as always, for looking!

Flying Spaghetti Monster / SquiddySkull

While working on some tee-shirt concepts for a favorite metal band of mine, I deviated for a moment from some more lofty and original ideas and went with a more stereotypical skull graphic.  The thumbnails actually looked pretty sweet so I thought I'd do a small 6x8 inked version, ballpoint on bristol board. 

It took just under 2 hours to do this while sitting at my local coffee shop during their weekly open mic night.  Towards the end, as I was making the background a nice and evil black, an epic solo performance of 'Jesus Loves Me' provided a lovely soundtrack. Probably not the inspiration they were going for, but the lord works in mysterious ways. Or flying spaghetti monster, whichever.

Sealion Gig Poster - Process Diary 4 - The Finish!

And finally, here is the finished gig poster!  I happily took some direction from the band and toned down the font choice to something a little less distracting than the cowboy font I used on the original mockup.  This version lets the image carry more of the weight, and is more legible anyway.


Regarding the drawing itself, In typical form I had moments of sheer terror where I got sloppy and took the values much too dark.  As you could see at the end of my last post, the bottom right of the image was getting a bit too dark for the rest of the composition.  Fortunately, Ampersand's Claybords are extremely forgiving and allow me to scratch away layers of ink to bring white back to the surface.


A lot of artists make tactical use of these un-inked scratchboards by laying down black areas selectively and then scraping back into it for texture and pattern.  But for me it's worth the price of admission purely for the flexibility to draw like normal and then sculpt my values until everything feels balanced.  In the end I was able to save the image, and I'm really happy with how it turned out!


Here's the final drawing in solo form.

I loved the process of developing such a large piece, and ultimately seeing it hang on the wall gallery style (the 12"x24" board came cradled with a 2" wood backing, resembling a thick canvas).  I'm also thrilled to be working with the tight knit community of local musicians who were hiding right here in Dallas.

I'm looking forward to doing more pieces at this scale for both gallery display and for use on gig posters, and I'm excited to have rounded a new milestone.  It will be pretty awesome to see it pop up around town!  To anyone who'll be at the show on the 20th, we'll be selling 11x17 prints on the cheap.  Again, check out Sealion's new CD for free streaming and pay-what-you-want download at their Bandcamp page.

Thanks for reading along!

Sealion Gig Poster - Process Diary 3

Alright!  On to transferring the drawing to Claybord!  I'm going to include Blick Art Supply links along the way here so you can look further into any of these materials, should you be curious.  Feel free to write me if you have questions beyond that.

Once the Ampersand Claybord arrived at my door, I was ready to roll with finalized pencil outlines on newsprint.  Fortunately, my roll if Saral graphite transfer paper was 12" wide, exactly the right size for the claybord.  So I laid it down quick without needing to trim anything, facedown, with my newsprint drawing over it facing up.  I then layered some tracing paper over that, which is totally unnecessary, but does help to identify if you've missed any spots while tracing.  With some strips of masking tape to hold everything firmly the the board, I was ready to start.

Any hard tipped writing utensil will work here, but I used my favorite ballpoint pen, a uniball vision micro... these are the darker grey barreled pens that you can get at any office supply store.  They're super fine, cheap, and totally reliable in my experience.  They lay down great on bristol board or any paper for that matter, but unfortunately, they don't lay down quite so well on smooth hard surfaces.  


My claybord inking is done with handful of Micron pens.  A lot of people prefer the super fine tips (005 or 01), but I'm most happy with the 03 generally.  I also have some 05 and 08 sizes for doing fatter outlines, but I find I'm happiest just going to town with the 03s.

finished tracing the original pencil drawing

At this point, I'm basically just tracing the drawing as closely as I can.  I might make tiny adjustments here and there, but for the most part I fixed the stuff that was bothering me in the pencil stage.  Once everything's been traced, I can tear that sucker off, check my transfer, and start tracing THOSE lines with my micron pens.

starting to ink on the actual board

After all of the outlines have been inked, I start shading the forms directionally with hatch lines... which means short strokes in the direction of the form (around curves, across flat shapes, etc).  From the minute I got home yesterday at 5, all the way to midnight, I was constantly tracing and shading.  All in all, the inking process here has taken me about 15 hours.  


Here's a sneak peak of the almost finished drawing.... it got a little dark in the bottom right, which I subsequently fixed.  But more on that later...





Next Post: refining outlines, balancing values, and tweaking the poster design,

Sealion Gig Poster - Process Diary 2

After toying with compositional thumbnail sketches to my general comfort, I cut large sheets of newsprint to the exact size of the final drawing and began roughing in the shapes. Because I normally work between 5x7 and 8x10, I would typically scan my thumbnail drawings, tweak them in photoshop, and the print out a copy to transfer directly to an Ampersand Claybord. But given the oversized scale of this piece, I went at it freehand for a change.  This was a challenge, and the lack of control caused (allowed?) me to modify the composition from it's original form.  

Call me neurotic, but I'm now on a 3rd pencil tracing of the full-scale image (1x2 feet) on newsprint.  As I continue to make adjustments to various details, such a hand poses, angles of the background elements, size and texture of the crumbling concrete, etc, I've found it necessary to continue transferring to a new sheet in order to retain the paper's fidelity and most importantly, so I can see the image as closely as possible as it will be when I finally transfer it to the claybord.  In all honesty, had the board already arrived at my apartment, I surely would have started transferring it by now.  But it's a blessing in disguise, because I continue to make improvements on the image that will be worth the delay.

Lastly, here's a rough mockup of the poster with text.  This is more about testing the composition than it is getting the values correct.  But ultimately, I'm enjoying the monochromatic presentation, and imagine I'll be doing something similar to this in the end.


By the way, you owe yourself a visit to SealionSounds.BandCamp.com to stream the new album "Keep The Camera Rolling", or pay-what-you-want download.






Next Entry... transferring & inking...

Sealion Gig Poster - Process Diary 1

I was thrilled to be asked by Sealion, the skyrocketing Dallas indie/surf/punk band, to design a gig-poster for their CD release show on August 20th, 2011.  Being friends with them for years and having played fill-in bass recently, I have a strong investment in their music.  That said, by the time they came to me for help, I already had a concept and early rough sketch on the back-burner ready to go.

As Sealion is a surf-rock band, but hundreds of miles from the coast, it only seemed fitting to illustrate a hipster wiping out on a wave of crumbling concrete with the Dallas skyline looming behind.

I've been itching to challenge myself with a larger piece for awhile now, so I ordered a 12"x24" claybord, which more than doubles the size I'm accustomed to working at.  Consequently, I'm devoting a remarkable amount of time getting the details worked out before even touching the final board.


I've spent 6 to 8 hours in preparatory pencil stages, sketching compositional variations, figure poses, and texture studies.  The inking stage could easily take an additional 10 hours, but I'm psyched to get down to work and would like the final piece will be a crucial addition to my portfolio and something I'll be proud to show for years to come.

Next Post:  refining and full-size pencil roughs...

Stephen King portrait pt2: Scratchboard

Somewhere along the preparation lines I decided my Stephen King piece might make a nice scratchboard, and thus afford me a good opportunity for self-challenge.  I'm always more comfortable laying black ink on a white surface, but given the light source in the image, it seemed appropriate to 'draw in' the light by scratching white into the black scratchboard surface.

After reworking my photoshop roughs with the blacks filled in, I had a pretty good sense of where I wanted to take it tonally.  It was both a blessing and a curse to have so completely refined the image in the rough stage, because I found myself both challenged to continually improve the final scratchboard, as well as frustrated to have set up certain expectations that were hard to let go of in the rendering stage.

In some ways I find the digital mockup more satisfying, whether due to the spontaneous handling, the smoother edges of the photoshop brushes, or the way I ended up handling the lighting on the body itself.  I'm almost tempted to do a second final drawing, this time drawing in black on claybord.

digital mockup