"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.

Triceratops Brush Pen Drawing & Time-Lapse Demo

Tried something new this morning and took a time-lapse video of the above Triceratops ink drawing in process.  I thought it might be fun to share the actual process of laying in different line weights and shading the form, set to some classic Ren & Stimpy music.  The color was later added digitally with a wacom intuos tablet.  Take a look below!

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

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.

Animated Movie Poster Illustration

Just finished up this poster illustration and animated gif for Broken Heart Disease, a short film being directed out in good ol' Los Angeles.  Learn about the film and "Like" the movie page on facebook!

Beyond the fun drawing itself, it's like visiting an old friend working with animated gifs, and I think I'll make an effort to find more outlets for it.  This piece would also make a fun anaglyph for retro red/blue 3D glasses.

Here's the raw drawing on its own... 5x7, pen & ink on scratchboard, followed by some of the initial doodles to gain my bearings.

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!

Plesiosaur - Dinosaur Illustration

Here's a plesiosaur working on a snack!  I recently drew this illustration for a dear friend, being her favorite of our dinosaur ancestors.  It was fun to transcribe my prehistoric obsession underwater for a change!  Good opportunities here for gritty grey tones and squiggly shapes.  This is something I'd like to explore further down the line to really push the textures and lighting some more. 

Cats con Crows - scratchboard pet portrait

Today's drawing is a scratchboard portrait of my dear friends Kyle and Christie's cats Spyder and Maverick.  As we're all fans of crows, it seemed fitting to replace the couch from the original photo with something more ominous.  Now I find myself wondering, who's the predator and who's the prey?!

Since we last spoke I've created a new facebook page, so stop by and say hello!  It's a little easier for me to make minor posts there with images and links, so if you happen to be stopping by the blog and wondering where the action is... well, now you know!  The new page is also linked to my twitter, so that gives you a couple added ways to keep up.  

Something new I'm doing via facebook/twitter (but not here on the blog) is to provide links to exciting things that I'm finding... other creative themed blog posts, tutorials, and anything else I suspect would benefit or interest you guys.  Despite all the distractions that the iPad brings, it does offer some fantastic methods of directing you towards relevant articles while cutting out the fat.  I highly recommend the ZITE app, for customizable content that updates constantly.  Most of my links are coming from there.

David Lynch Portrait Illustration

click to see detail

Here's the final scan of my David Lynch scratchboard portrait.  I found myself taking a different approach from last week's Stephen King.  Rather than scratching with a heavy hand and the intention of making bold white shapes, I opted instead to very delicately mark the surface with small lines that add up to a lot of gradual tonal shifts and a softer focus.  It's a slower process, but one I enjoyed quite a bit and plan on exploring further.  


I spent some time in photoshop testing red velvet curtains in the background and some eerie coloring throughout, but couldn't decide if it benefitted the image enough to justify.  Sometimes it's hard to beat a plain old, bold black and white drawing.  Although admittedly, seeing the small version below I certainly don't mind it.  Who knows, maybe I'll keep tinkering with it.  


The scratchboard itself is an 8"x10" and took two or three hours in preparation, and maybe seven to nine of actual scratching.  Here are some thumbnail sketches and a color test...

Crows & Twitter

First off, I'd like to invite you to follow my Twitter posts.  While I tend to use the blog for more formal posts (finished pieces, generally), I do use Twitter a bit more frequently to post doodles, sketches, and other work-in-progress drawings.  So to keep up on what I'm doing, head over to My Twitter Page!

Today's drawing is of, well, as you can see... crows!  

On one hand I suppose crows might be considered cliche or low-brow.  But alas, like skulls, there's no denying their strength as gothic, otherworldly icons.  I might attribute my fascination with them to watching Hitchcock's The Birds as a white-knuckled child.  In any case, those of you who have read my book Stressed Out West: a nervous wordless graphic novel know that crows aren't anything new to my work... just something that's been lying dormant.  I've had the itch to get back to drawing them, and I suspect this might be the beginning of a new body of work.  Again, many more crows are up on my twitter page.  

Happy snow-day to those of you in North Texas!

Self-Portrait with Sister & Snow

Today's drawing is a 5x7 self-portrait with my sister Lauren!  


Based on the photo below, I used micron technical pens (.35mm & .5mm) on claybord with scratched highlights.  I tried a few different things with the background but wasn't really happy with the direction until I decided to shade it black.  Once it was mostly filled in, the thought occurred to me that being a holiday photo, it made sense to throw some falling snow into the mix.

 

It's been awhile since I've done a realistic self-portrait... always weird staring at yourself for hours on end, wondering "What's wrong with this thing... my drawing or my face?!"

Dog Portrait - Scratchboard Tutorial pt 3

SHADING TECHNIQUES

click to enlarge for detail

Before we start scratching into your board, let's take a moment to look at some basic shading techniques.  These are important not just to scratchboard art, but to drawing in general!  I sketched up some examples for you to check out above.  I drew these in black to get the ideas down quickly, but the approach is exactly the same whether you're using pencil, pen, scratch tool, marker, crayon, etc.


Hatching

• Hatching is your most basic shading method.  Similar to scribbling, but with a tad bit more control.  It's basically the use of parallel lines to imply value.  The closer together your lines are, the darker your shading will be.

Cross-Hatching

• Cross-hatching introduces perpendicular lines to your first set of hatched lines, taking the values even darker.  You can also angle your lines beyond the standard 90 degrees for different effect.

Stippling

• Stippling is the use of small dots to build up value.  I tend to use stippling for shading skin tone because it's less distracting than lines and can be built up more gradually.  It's a time consuming process, but has a beauty that's hard to match.  Check out my 'Potty Training Portrait' post for a great example of this technique.

Broken Hatching

• Broken hatching is my favorite, and can look really elegant.  This is where you start with basic hatching technique, but then go back in to break the lines up with perpendicular marks of the opposite color (via pen on scratchboard, or via scraper tool on claybord).  This is useful when you want your hatched shading a bit softened or faded out at the edges.  The background in my 'Potty Training Portrait' makes a lot of use of broken hatching.

Combinations

• Don't be afraid to experiment with combinations of these techniques.  Each is good for different things, and bringing them together can have a great effect!  Have fun with them, and practice all the time!  (I draw little boxes and play with shading techniques while on the phone, etc.)

Now let's get back to our scratchboards!

SCRATCHING THAT BOARD (vrecka, vrecka!)

Now that you've got your image transferred and you're happy with your shapes of value, go ahead and grab your scraper tool of choice and go at it!  If you're hesitant to proceed, the best place to start would be the center of a highlight where you have some wiggle room to test your technique.  Remember the shading methods that I outlined above, but don't be afraid to experiment!  Try slow deliberate scratches.  Try fast and sloppy scratches!  Try parallel lines for grey tones, or add perpendicular lines to go even brighter (hatching & cross-hatching)!  You can even make quick little pecks at the surface to make small dots of value (stippling).  

A word of advice--work the whole surface evenly and don't spend too much time in one place.  Make sure you're moving around and addressing the whole image, gradually bringing those highlights out together.  That way you won't find that you've overworked your image or dug too deep into the surface. 

I broke my own rules, getting a little gung ho on the dogs while ignoring the background... oh well :) 

Keep on alternating your area of focus, always referencing your original image to make sure you're getting the values right.  Try looking at it upside down (remember, this tricks us into really SEEing the values as they are, not as our brains THINK they are).  And make sure you stand up every few minutes to look at it from a distance.  It's easy to get tunnel vision and get overly hung up on the fine detail without seeing the image as a whole.

NEXT UP:  

On the next and final entry of the BigDumbAnimal Scratchboard Tutorial, we'll look at some more techniques for refining the image and how to fix those boo boos that inevitably will happen.  But don't worry, it's only art!

... Continue to Part 4

Dog Portrait - Scratchboard Tutorial pt 2

Welcome back to the BigDumbAnimal scratchboard tutorial!  While I don't profess to be an expert per se, nor do I mean to suggest there aren't more exhaustive scratchboard tutorials out there, I am an enthusiast with a desire to teach!  And so long as I'm posting my own personal work on this blog, I figure I might as well leave some interesting or useful information about my process for those who choose to read beyond the pretty pictures.  Now, let us get back to the good stuff!


TRANSFERRING THE IMAGE


Now that you have all of your materials, we're ready to start transferring the image to your board!  (if you don't have your scraper tool handy just yet, no worries.  You won't need that until later) 


Make sure your image and transfer paper are both cut down to the size of your actual board.  Be careful handling the transfer paper, as it has a tendency to leave a fine residue everywhere!  But don't worry--like I said before, it will wash out of most everything.  And if you want, you can take a tissue and wipe off any excess graphite from the paper.  A little bit goes a long way.


Now you're going to make a sandwich with your board, transfer paper, and source image.
First off lay your source image, face up, directly on top of the scratchboard.  These will be your two pieces of bread.  Now using a strip of masking tape folded over the top of the board, hold the image in position.  Now, place your transfer paper face down between the board and your image, using a strip of masking tape along to bottom to hold it all in position.  The tape should now be touching both the face of your image and the backside of your scratchboard, not necessarily the transfer paper and ideally not the black surface of your scratchboard.  The reason I suggest getting your image in place before the transfer paper is to avoid shifting which may leave some of the graphite residue in areas you didn't mean for it to.

Before you start transferring your image, keep in mind that when working on scratchboard you want to draw the highlights, not the shadows or outlines.  For that reason, I'm hesitant to use the phrase 'trace your image'.  If you need to leave a dark line to define a shape, you'll want to focus on the areas surrounding that outline.  The best tactic here is to try seeing your image as a series of shapes of value, tracing around the highlights rather than defining outlines.  In my case, I followed the shapes of bright white and patterns within the dogs' fur.  My favorite trick, both while transferring and shading, is to turn my drawings upside down.  This helps to trick the mind into looking at the actual values instead of relying on our preconceptions of what we're drawing.  You'll find you're much more likely to focus on highlights and shadows than outlines.  Now get out any old pen or pencil and get started on that transfer!  A gentle touch will work... again, a little bit of graphite goes a long way!

Once you feel you've identified the major shapes of value, go ahead and peel the tape back from the bottom.  Gently lifting up the transfer paper and source image, you'll see your marks transfered to the board.  Check to make sure you didn't miss anything important.  If you did, go ahead and lay them back down and rework those missed areas.  Otherwise if you're comfortable moving forward, go ahead and toss your transfer paper.  I tend to keep my source image attached so that I can easily flip it up and down for comparison, but you can also keep it to the side of your board for reference.  In fact, I tend to print a couple extra copies of my source image to have around just in case.


NEXT UP:  
Scratching that Board (vrecka, vrecka!).... Continue to Part 3

Potty Training Portrait

A coworker friend commissioned this 10x8 portrait of her twin 2 year-olds.  Having drawn the boys once before (and always a fan of toilet humor), I was excited at the opportunity!  

We agreed that instead of the same old paper, claybord might offer us something special to work with, and I took it as another great opportunity to explore shading techniques.  If you click to enlarge the full image or detail shot below, you'll see that the boys themselves are primarily stippled (shaded using small dots, individually 'tapped' on the surface), whereas the background is hatched (shaded with lines).  In the case of their hair and the rug, I shaded with curves and squiggles.  All in all the process took about 9 hours.

detail click to enlarge

My favorite detail of all is where, at the last minute, I took my scraper-tool and re-introduced those highlights on the left edges of the boys' skin.  Every project seems to find me trying something new with the materials, and I'm wondering how I ever survived without the ability to push and pull values like I can here, alternating between pen and scraper-tool on the claybord.  Can you tell I love Ampersand products?  I should be sponsored, wink wink!

Mastodon vs Sabre Tooth

Greetings!  Here's an 8x10 claybord... my first in fact!  It was inspired by the legendary metal band Mastodon, something that I'd been plotting for months before I finally got to work on.  I was originally going for vicious and violent, but as is typically the case, a bit of my cute and cuddly cartoon style crept in.  Regardless, I'm really happy with the movement in the composition and the consistent texture throughout.  This was really fun to work on and definitely kicked off my new claybord obsession!

To those of you who may have seen these already, I promise to start uploading NEW drawings as soon as I'm back in my apartment and have a scanner handy!