Sinking Mastodon Illustration & T-Shirt Design

I did this illustration towards the end of the summer and never got around to posting it.  Inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, I wanted to do a piece illustrating the murky decline of a mastodon.  It's a bit more graphic than my usual work in the sense that there's no detailed background, instead letting the black literally swallow the image down.  

I ended up adapting the drawing into a T-Shirt mockup for one of my favorite metal bands.  We never made it to production, but it was a valuable experience communicating back and forth on the design and playing with color for a change.

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. 

ArtHash Open Salon Show

Last night's gallery opening of the ArtHash Open Salon Show at Kettle Art in Deep Ellum was a total blast!  Incredible turnout and so much great art.  Thanks to everyone who came out to say hi, have a drink, and look at everyone's work.  Great to meet so many new friends and fellow Dallas contemporaries.

Happy Friday the 13th, Campers!

Happy Friday the 13th, Salute Your Shorts fans!

'Lobotomunny' - Custom Vinyl Munny

I recently took part in my first vinyl toy show, celebrating Atama's 1 year anniversary at Strangeways in Dallas with 'Show Me The Munny 2'.  Being my first first foray into customized vinyl toys, it was a great opportunity to meet some very talented Dallas artists and stretch beyond my usual territory of pen & ink illustration work.  

'Lobotomunny' in context... some serious talent around here!

I had fun working in an unfamiliar medium while retaining the tone of my drawings.  Our challenge was to start with a blank Munny doll and customize it in any way we saw fit, be it through paint, sculpting, deconstructing, or any other wacky method that came to mind.

Somewhere along the lines I decided to crack its head open and sculpt a removable brain using Sculpey polymer clay, followed by sharpie drawing on the head, and finally a custom fabric hospital gown.  I had fun putting together the wooden sawblade base as a final touch.

show flyer with shots of the removable brain and gown

The show was a fun and valuable experiment for me, and I'm now getting involved in Vinyl Thoughts 2: The Next Level, a video game themed toy show this March... in which I'll be sculpting my piece entirely from scratch!

'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.

Rear Window Hitchcock Illustration

Here's another pen on scratchboard 12x16 piece, illustrating Hitchcock's classic Rear Window.  Between Rear Window and Vertigo, it seems Hitchcock took sick pleasure in throwing James Stewart out of windows, and offered prime caricature material. 

While I had planned on keeping Stewart as the focal point, after doing dozens of thumbnail drawings it just wasn't quite working.  I had one that cut Stewart out of the drawing almost completely, focusing instead on Hitchcock's enjoyment of dumping him out of the wheelchair.  Much more interesting!

Finally, here is a version done up as a mock MAD Magazine cover for the Hartford Art School MFA in Illustration program.  I haven't yet published a magazine cover, but wouldn't MAD be an incredible place to start?!  (wink, wink)

Screen-Printed Scarves

While learning the screen-printing ropes and testing some shirt designs, I got the wild hair to design some scarves as well.


I managed to pull those together faster than the shirts, which are soon to follow.  I'm really excited about these and had to share...

I'm always impressed by the high quality of what other artists are selling on Etsy.com, and I've been itching for a long time to have a product worthy of my own shop.  And that's a large part of what finally nudged me into screen printing.  

Check out the Etsy Shop and dress to depress!

DIY Screen Printing

keeping it DIY... my hand-made one-color press

I'd been itching to design and print my own line of shirts from age 10, and now as a late-twenties illustrator, graphic designer, and MFA student with a curious energy to spare, the timing felt right.

I spent a couple weeks initially researching the logistics of doing this from my one-bedroom apartment while making up lists of materials and processes. 

Screen printing is deceptively complex... a massively multi-step process and an art in and of itself.   Much more akin to darkroom photography and traditional printmaking than making a quick digital copy, there are multitudes of steps and variables to account for within each piece of the broader puzzle. Very involved, in so many words.  Fortunately I am a very process oriented person and enjoy subjecting myself to masochistic projects. It's strangely meditative for me.

a small sample of supplies

A benefit of my working in black and white is that the drawings translate really well to one-color printing. As my aesthetic and process have gotten more consistent this year, it suddenly occurred to me that hand-printing shirts and posters would be a natural creative outlet for me (with added selling power) that would harken back to my undergrad foundation in photography and printmaking.

With a couple hundred bucks in materials and a handful of hours reading forums and watching YouTube, I got myself off to a good start, more or less.

The experience hasn't been without forehead slapping failures, but the learning process has been so rapid that any expense in ruined shirts is worth the price of admission. The way I see it, if I'd be willing to pay for a class, why not eat the cost in materials and teach myself on the job?

So after some early failures I pulled plans off the Internet and built myself a new one-color press out of 2x4s and plywood.  So far so good!


Check out my ETSY shop as I continue to post new items... 

Screen-Printed Scarf Concepts

A great thing about my propensity for working in black and white is that my drawings translate nicely to red/blue 3D and to one-color screen-printing.  

While teaching myself to expose the screens and print on textiles, I'm (sloppily) building myself a new one-color press that should really speed things up and cut back on misprints.  I'm doing all of this out of my one-bedroom apartment, so keeping it clean, organized, and in consistent quality are all high priorities.  This is easier said than done between the full-time design job, graduate studies, hobbies, social life, and down time.

So in the middle of all of this, I've been plotting scarf designs. I'm excited to get everything under control and organized for the launch of my web-store, which will feature hand-printed shirts, scarfs, and posters of my original illustrations and designs.

The end goal is to turn a fun DIY project into a consistent, high-quality outlet for my illustrations and designs... something I can be confident bringing to the public through the web, art/craft fairs, and beyond.

Branding Ideas

Playing with different branding ideas for an illustration-based webstore and apparel line... hand-printed shirts, scarves, prints, and originals.  

I'm far too indecisive about these things, but I can say that the skull itself is definitely going to reappear on a shirt or scarf or two.

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!

Revamped Portfolio Site!

Quick update!  I've revamped my official website and portfolio, highlighting my latest pen & ink illustrations, adding a print store, and even more exciting... a 3D section!  I've got a nice batch of 3D glasses if anyone needs them, just drop me a line and I'll mail you a pair!  Check it out! www.AlbrightIllustration.com

Drawing Process - 'Sabre Skull Valley'

 

Greetings! Today I'll to explain the process of developing my latest illustration--a prehistoric landscape on 12"x16" Claybord (Ampersand brand uninked scratchboard).  You can click any of these images to see them enlarged.

Most of this will look pretty rough and scrappy, and I guess that's kind of the point.  It takes a series of steps for me to reach the final state of what appears to be a controlled drawing.  Despite the mass of detail in the final image, I honestly don't have it all just sitting in my head ready to go.  It comes out of a lengthy process of continually refining the composition and values through a series of thumbnail drawings, rough full-size sketches, refined tracings of those sketches, and ultimately the clayboard itself.  

It sounds like a masochistic process when you think about how many times the image gets redrawn, but I've found it's actually the most reliable way for me to come to a final image that makes me happy.  So in that sense, I quite enjoy it!

I begin with a vague concept that I'd like to explore, in this case a dense prehistoric jungle with the key elements of a dragonfly and sabretooth tiger skull in the foreground with a volcano in the background.  These tiny sketches aren't meant to lock down any real detail, but simply explore different combinations of the elements in a composition that leads the eye around the page in an interesting way.

Once I have a thumbnail that I'm reasonably comfortable with, I'll cut a sheet of scrap paper to the size of my final board and do some rough sketching to explore my options.  Here I've used a light blue pencil to start, followed by a regular pencil to lock in some of the elements.  As you can see on the left image below, there's a lot of sloppy sketching going on where I'm trying different things and making intuitive compositional decisions.  

After the first rough starts to come together, I'll cut a second sheet of newsprint paper and lay it over the first on a lightbox, tracing and refining the shapes yet again.  At this point I'll still have areas that I'm not totally happy with, in which case I'll do my best to erase or just redraw over them.  You can see with the dragonfly that I'll sometimes use tracing paper to clean it up some or try variations without wearing through the paper.

I'll then do yet another tracing of the image on the lightbox to double check everything and form a template of the outlines.  This version get's laid down over the final board, sandwiching graphite transfer paper.  Using a ballpoint pen, I trace over the outlines, which leaves a light carbon copy on the clayboard that I can then finalize with micron technical pens (I prefer the 03 (.35mm) width).  

Here's an animation of the final board as it's outlined and then shaded.

I'm always singing the praises of Ampersand's Claybords, and yet again I have to say how much I enjoy working on them as opposed to paper.  Having the freedom to scratch away at the ink for texture or for corrections has truly liberated my process.  The flexibility to draw the values from light to dark, and then scratch them back again from dark to light has allowed me to literally sculpt my drawings until everything feels balanced.  It's removed the fear of going to dark and ruining hours of work, and made the whole process a lot more fun.

I've been working so much in black and white lately that my next experiment is to do a colored version of this to include in my portfolio.  Stay tuned for that, as well as a series of 3D illustration for your retro red/blue glasses!