Paintings, drawings, and other useless scribbles.

Here are three pieces that I feel are pretty representative of my work as of late. All three are pretty recent drawings/paintings, and I have not grown sick of them just yet. Rest assured that will happen soon.

The first one is a painting I did for Painting II. The assignment was to do a still life. While I was going around my house looking for things that I could use as subject matter, I found my hammer and started putting it in different places to see what would work for an interesting composition and also start an interesting dialogue about a plain boring hammer. My solution was to put it in a window sill. I was pretty pleased with how it turned out despite minor set backs here and there.

The second drawing is a caricature of John Mccain. I've been doing caricatures for a few years now, and I can't really get enough of it. Over the course of the last year or so, I have been really trying to push some extreme exaggerations. I've had some success here and there, but I think this one worked out pretty well for me. Some of my biggest influences in the realm of caricature have been Sebastian Kruger, Joe Bluhme, Court Jones, and Jan Op De Beeck. These artist can push their caricatures into grotesque monstrosities while maintaining a great likeness to the subject. In this drawing I was also trying to use cross hatching to describe the forms. It's something I haven't really gotten control of yet, but I'm getting there.

And lastly, I did a little illustration of four charecters from "The Office": Micheal, Dwight, Jim, and Andy. I love the show. I have been fortunate enough to land several freelance illustration jobs over the last year, and I did this drawing to use for promotional postcards and samples to send to potential clients. For this one, I first did several studies of each charecter, then sketched out my composition. After that was all done, I inked it with a ink nib pen similar to a comic book style. Then the final stage was painting the drawing using photoshop. It's a process that I enjoy, but I'm starting to lean away from the digital coloring and moving more toward watercolors. Anyway, this has been the style that I've used with all the illustration jobs I have gotten thus far.

In the future I'll be doing a lot more watercolors and acrylics. They are a bit more time consuming and more costly than using photoshop, but there is something about the hand made look of actual paintings that I enjoy much more than digital. Not to mention at the end of the day I have an actual product of my labors, not just a computer print off.