Beagle Watercolor Sketch

I've decided to try and bring my watercolors and sketch pad with me more often as I find myself away from the studio more and more these days. In my adventures with my fiance I've been in all sorts of places I would have loved to sketch or paint whether it be up in the backwoods on her four wheeler overlooking a beautiful farm scape at sunset, out on the water in kayaks observing the natural beauty of waterfalls and the powerful arched gnarly trees that lean out over the water, snowshoeing through snow laden forests and fields, or the long road trips that have carried us into many wonderful sunsets. I've seen more wild animals with her in the past few months than I have seen in my entire life here in Vermont. Moose, deer, foxes, raccoons, peacocks (well on a farm), rabbits, beavers, geese, fish and the like. So finally after many years as a practicing artist I've decided to get better at sketching. Here's my first go at it!  This is Biscuit who was kind enough to pose for me Saturday after a long day of helping Barbie at her weekend job. I'm thinking this was about a fifteen minute sketch, 4"x6" watercolor.

American Milking Devon Bull

  
Over the past few weeks I started work on my second assignment for The American Milking Devon Cattle Association.  I did some finished drawings and oil illustrations of the cows last year. This year they need illustrations of the Bull. The ones along the bottom are from last year and along the top are what I have so far for this year. I'll likely still need to make changes before going to finals.

As you can see, the bulls have more muscle on them, their heads are bulkier, their horns are designed more for damage than for elegance and their legs are wider and stronger. The females have a large pouch to hold the milk while the bulls . . . do not.

          My main art director while working on these is the farmer who got me the gig in the first place. He's a large part of the association and knows Devon cattle and bulls like the back of his hand along with many other subjects that he's been involved in over the years. He's owned a number of businesses and has spent hours on end telling me of stories from his life. When I told him about my girlfriend he immediately rambled off "Women are a kingdom, men are a fool, take away his senses and wear away his jewels". The pic below is one I just realized I accidentally caught of him in the background as I was taking pictures of the bull. I wanted to do a sketch of him while he talked but I'm still a bit too shy for that.

He went on to tell me why the bulls have such wide legs, making sure I made them strong and straight like a piano. He wanted the neck long to indicate a healthy beast that could reach the grass, Strong necks, heavy brisket, and he had me move the horns up. I think the horns will still need lots of work to get them looking big, powerful and heading in the exact right direction. I've found the horns to be the most difficult part to illustrate on both versions. I even made a clay model to try helping with that. From this angle the horns would be in a  weird position in which the horns fold back over themselves but it doesn't look good when I draw it that way.  I must have spent over an hour on the horns alone. So I may need to go have a better look at the bulls from various angles in person now that they are outside of the barn. Wish me luck!

Watercolor Landscape: Calm before the Storm

There was plenty to be done in preparation for Hurricane Irene. In particular I was concerned simply because I had no idea what to expect, so I didn't know if I needed to put boards over my studio windows to protect my art, should I pick the rest of my tomatoes even though there are about thirty green ones? should I put sandbags at the base of the garage door to protect my fathers camaro that we just had brought up to this house?, or the 48 oldsmobile that has been sitting here for years? In the end I just picked up the larger objects in the yard and didn't worry too much about all the extra stuff. I did however find myself at the church helping the nights of Columbus cut down a bunch of brush and trees and tear down and old fence. There's nothing quit like a gathering of ten men with trucks, chainsaws, weedwhackers a heavy duty chain and an old wheathered fence. Whoever put those fence posts two and a half feet into the ground, to insure they wouldn't fall over, certainly didn't have us in mind as the ones who would be ripping them out!

     Before all of the fun began, I found myself with an hour or so of quiet misty morning light in the church parking lot alone, as I had to drop my mom off to work early in the day. So I brought my watercolor sketching supplies along and did the image above. As this was one day before Hurricane Irene I'm calling it "The Calm Before the Storm". It was an interesting feeling to be working on such a calm scene a day before destruction and chaos was predicted to hit the area.

Illustration Friday- Bicycle

My third Illustration Friday post. I found out that TONS of folks stop by the blog from Illustration Friday so now of course I'm hooked! Plus I just happen to have another preconcieved concept that goes along with this weeks word, "Bicylce".

    This was originally a very quick pencil sketch I did in a sketchbook. Not sure what brought it on as it was  a few years back. Now for this weeks IF I decided to make it a bit more of a finished ink line drawing. May color it someday if I ever find the time and may find a way to put it on some zazzle products. For the original sketch I wrote BORN TO BE WILD in some fluid large type, reminicent of John Handcock's signature. If I make this into t-shirts or something I would probably put some kind of humorous saying along those lines in there.

Illustration Friday, "Duet"

This is my first ever Illustration friday submission! Lately I've seen artists everywhere participating in this websites weekly drawing exersize and have wanted to participate. I thought I would never have time to do so, but when I saw this weeks word "duet" I immediately had an idea come to mind and decided to stop all else and just sketch the idea to paper as fast as I could. Here's the result. I wish I had time to color it but maybe will do so later. Enjoy! (click for larger image)

Monster Character Designs

click to enlarge

Please vote at left on which monster design is your favorite. These are just the very first rough draft of monster samples for my new book "Allegra, Friend of all Monsters". I will be narrowing these down to about three and then experimenting a bunch more with those three to get interesting variations and really push the design to it's fullest potential. Actually I'm hoping my client will narrow it dow to his favorite but none the less I would love to hear other peopl's opinions.

        I do intend to play around more with all of the features, the eyes, ears, nose, mouth  etc. placement on head, size, style.  look like but want to narrow it down to a rough body type first. Then I will also probably play around more with the size relationships of the body parts. Maybe he will have huge arms dragging on the floor, or  a tiny head with huge body or huge head with tiny body. But obviously I don't have time to try those options out on all of these samples. So help me narrow it down. The monster in the book is supposed to be about three feet tall, green, friendly and fuzzy. Some of these look too much like actual animals rather than monsters and some may get close to known charcters without me being aware of it. So please feel free to mention that as well in the comments.

To see the final character desing click here

Art in the City

For the past ten days I went out to Boston and New York for business and pleasure. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet with publishers as I had originally intended but I did get quit a bit done. I started off in Boston where I had the awesome opportunity to speak with the massart senior illustration class about what life is like after graduation. I was lucky to have three other graduates at my side telling their stories as well. I had plenty of time in Boston to meet with friends and work out some illustration ideas while also leaving myself time to celebrate my birthday and holy week. Luckily I had some amazing friends who let me stay at there places over the eight days. Below is a sketch I did of the Boston skyline.

Then I headed off to New York. Below is a sketch I did in New York’s China town and a sketch of my accommodations at the Bowery white house hostel for two nights. It was basically like sleeping in a closet with a latticework ceiling and each room up against each other with very thin walls. Since it was only two nights, it was actually a fun experience. The showers and bathrooms in general were definitely a bit shady for me though. It reminded me of this one time I went to another school with my wrestling team in high school. They warned me not to drink the water there but I didn’t listen and ended up with the worst stomach pains. Then I found out that the bathroom stalls had no doors, in order to keep kids from doing drugs etc. Let’s just say that was a very uncomfortable night for me, LOL. For my second nights stay at the bowery in NY I came back from the Art Gallery in a dress shirt and dress pants. So there I am with my huge luggage and all dressed up staying in this tiny closet for the night. I swear they checked out my height before I came and made sure I got the room that was one inch too short. If that doesn’t say starving artist then I don’t know what does.

While in New York I met with more friends and attended a gallery show with my “Graduate Pinball” illustration featured in it. All I’ve got to say is that the show was awesome and exciting to be a part of. My painting won second place out of 35 artists, yeah!!! I’ve posted some photos of the show below.

character designs

I thought maybe some of you would enjoy seeing the initial sketches for the characters I have designed for variouse projects over the past few years. A great book on character design is "Creating Characters with Personality" by. Tom Bancroft. Some of these are influences by the clients and others are influenced by other artists and objects. For example, some of these robots were inspired by a cd player I had.

This hippo character was my own design but the guidlines put forth that he had to be a hip hop hippo, a male, an adult figure, not necisarily dressed, kid friendly.

My initial Rudy sketches were my own design with very little input from the client. They needed an anthropomorphic saftey dog who loved donuts. These are a couple of the sketches I did. This is basically the first character I ever designed for a client. I used to draw stuff like this all the time in grade school, mostly aliens though.

Then with more guidance and sketches Rudy eventually evolved into this little guy. The clients were fairly specific about what they wanted but getting it right took tons of work.

Clara was a cartoon character but not quite as anthropomorphic as Rudy. She stay on all fours and talks to other animals. She does have a bit more facial expressions than a typical pug though.

This starfish actually took me a bit of time to develope as my original sketches were fairly stiff. Now he's one of the first things people comment on in the final images.

These are princesses from variouse lands of different times in history. It was a bit of a challenge for me to develope there costumes and facial features to make them easily recognizable as having a particular land of origin. They needed to be very distinct from one another and yet all have a sense of beauty about them.

And last are some seasonal characters I sketched for variouse projects. The witch was for a pumpkin carving design contest with "Pumkin Masters" which took second place in the faces category 2008. I don't typically draw characters that are meant to look evil. I have noticed in the past though that evil characters seem a lot easier to draw. I think it has to do with there imperfections. Sometimes when I draw children I have a hard time making there smiles look real. They often look angry. The Santa Clause is just a sketch I did for my sketch book. Maybe I'll develope him more next Christmas. I suppose I will probably go for more of a Saint Nicholas feel than a mere santa clause. The snowman was designed for a Christmas card. This character really humbled me because it was one of the first few I designed with no one elses ideas. I thought how hard could it be to draw a snowman? Really really hard. But for me it was mostly tough because I wanted to get an original feel. I also wanted him to have a spark of life to him. I tried variouse size snowballs, a pot for a hat, vest, variouse eyes, with and without ear muffs, etc. A detail as small as adding or leaving out eyebrows makes the biggest difference.

Drawing Children

I don't know exactly when it happened but at some point in my days as an art student I decided I wanted to illustrate children's books. As strange as it may seem, it took me much longer to realize this would include drawing and painting children. Not only should these children look healthy, non scary, happy, loving, normal etc. but they should depict an age, an ethnicity, and flow rather than be stiff. Publishers often want to see illustrations of children in action. I had no idea how hard it would be to achieve this outcome when I first started but I enjoyed the challenge. I first realized how hard children are to depict in my Senior year portfolio class. I brought in a painting of some children playing in the snow and a few people pointed out that the children looked stiff and even a bit retarded. I've often heard it said that an artist is there own worst critic. As an artist I tend to criticize my art so drastically that I don’t want people to see it until I’m happy with it. There have been times I worked on an image for hours and think it looks fine while someone else will come in and immediately spot problem areas. This happens when I look at individual parts of an illustration but don’t take the time to step back and look at the work as a whole. One good technique to help see problem areas is to either turn the drawing upside down or look at it in a mirror.
Over the past couple of months I have tackled what I feel is the most crucial element of any children’s illustrators portfolio, the children. I worked a bit on drawing children and plan to continue this process until I feel confident drawing children in any pose, and ethnicity, any age, gender, perspective etc. without reference. I will be happy to receive any advice or techniques that people have discovered in there own art making process. Some samples on the right.
These are all under one hour sketches and they are freehand drawings from photos. Click on the image to enlarge.

Just a few quick things I’ve learned to keep in mind. The younger the child, the rounder the face. Children have bigger eyes, ears and mouth in comparison to size of face than adults. Children have bigger foreheads. Children’s heads are bigger in proportion to their bodies than adults, often having four to five heads height while adults are seven to eight heads tall. Their eyebrows and hair tends to be very light and thin, particularly on young children. The line under children’s eyes tends to be less pronounced. Teenagers tend to have longer faces with more chiseled features, not so round. Younger children have short necks.