Illustration Friday

Geek Trick: Harry the Hat

2007-07-11T20:20:00.000-04:00

Tech Talk

Corel Painter, Gouche and Blender tools

Art Speak

Back in 1982, "Harry the Hat" Anderson performed a geek trick by shoving a needle through his arm. As his blood trickled to the floor, Harry called the screaming spectators "a bunch of namby-pambies", insisting it was all a trick. Mimicing a violinist by moving the needle back and forth through his wound, Harry caused an even louder reaction by asking "Would you like me to play 'Melancholy Baby'?". IMDB | SNL Transcript

Geek: Web Trick

2007-07-08T22:25:00.000-04:00

Tech Talk

Adobe Illustrator + Painter. Screenshot from BBEdit

Geeky Web Trick: Counting Your Comrades

Ever wonder how many other iFridaynistas there are out there, like you, toiling away their talent for intangible gain? If you've got a web editor like BBEdit or Dreamweaver, here's an easy way to find out:

Click here
On the left navigation column, right-click to "View Frame Source", save to your local desktop
With your favorite web editor, open your local copy in "code view"
Search for "img src="thumbs/" (this string is unique to each artist's thumbnail)
Click "Find All"

That should do it! The search result should produce a line like "fooNUMBER occurances of "img src="thumbs/" found ..."! For an accurate assessment, do this late Thursday night or early Friday morning. Last time I tried, there were just over 500.

Geek: IDG

2007-07-06T22:01:00.000-04:00

Freshness Dating

Refurbished: Individual illustrations from the mid-1990s. Collage and background are new

Tech Talk

Vector art in pre-Wacom tablet Adobe Illustrator.

Content

Samples from my high-flying days as an illustrator for Computerworld magazine (one of my geekiest clients, under the International Data Group). Once again, real life prevented a newer posting. Hopefully the collage technique expresses a transformation of neurotic chicken-stratching into a high-tech career.

Rejection: This is Not a Love Song

2007-06-19T08:25:00.000-04:00

Tech Talk

Corel Painter IX, Gouache tool. From start to finish, this probably took 3 hours to "finish".

I'm Baaaaack ...

I've been to busy with career and family stuff to iFriday lately, but it's never been far from my mind. My trusty Wacom tablet died, and didn't get replaced until last month. And truthfully, some of the iFriday themes haven't been that exciting to me. However, waiting around for the perfect theme to roll around was sounding more like an excuse as the months rolled on.

Content

This illustration depicts a very specific breakup situation. Probably too personal to bring up here.

iFridaynista

I noticed a lot of romantic interpretations of this week's theme. Seems like I haven't been gone a long time.

Red: Killer Edits

2007-02-02T13:00:00.000-05:00

Tech Talk

Original art "pencilled" in Adobe Photoshop, colored in Corel Painter's Gouche tool.

Freshness Dating: Alt Theme

Red: Killer

2007-02-02T12:58:00.000-05:00

Tech Talk

Original art "pencilled" in Adobe Photoshop, colored in Corel Painter's Gouche tool.

Freshness Dating: Alt Theme

DVD Extra

Tried combining my current fascination of 1950s pulp-novel covers with a classy J.M.W.Turner (official | wiki) treatment.

iFridaynista

Once again, a buck short a day late. Freelance work picked up, but freelance admin got crazy. This was too bad, because I had WAY TOO MANY ideas for "red". Most of which were probably too predictable, but would've been fun to draw. Officially, my streak is broken. Then again, shouldn't some of the weeks I did multiple entries count for something?

Eighties: My Yearbook Cover

2007-01-17T09:12:00.000-05:00

The big one's the original cover of my high school yearbook, my first published illustration. The color version, which updates the 1980 cover characters, was part of a website for my 20th reunion.

Tech Talk 1980

India ink, crow-quill pen, which I'd been using for all of one week. Before then, my drawings were pic-pen renderings of Evel Knevel or Spider-Man on my term papers. Competition for this honor was intense, so if you think the drawing's shaky, you should see who they rejected.

Tech Talk 2000

Photoshop, Painter.

Peace: Shagged

2007-01-16T12:06:00.000-05:00

"To be at peace in crime! ah, who can thus flatter himself."

-- Voltaire

Tech Talk

Corel Painter, Watercolor tool. It's still not a perfect emulation of traditional watercoloring. Using faint values and flat coverage is particularly difficult. A fair amount of brush and color control was sacrificed just to produce finished art. However, I'm much happier with this than my previous attempts (My Wind | My Mask).

Content

Another example of my fascination with how war and peace are inseparable realities. Hopefully this is more than an updated Vietnam War-era "Make Love Not War" concept.

iFridaynista

So far, this week's theme "80s" just didn't grab me. I didn't want to break my iFriday streak (at least 1 per week since September '06) and had some unfinished business with the Peace theme.

Buzz: Joy The Bugaloo

2007-01-09T17:13:00.000-05:00

Tech Talk Adobe Illustrator (with airbrush blends in Photoshop), found art. Backwards-engineered album art for custom presentation. Turns out going vector isn't much faster for me than Painter.

Time Machine For those younger than dirt, this is my vamped-up rendition of Joy, a character from the hit 1970s Saturday morning live-action Bugaloos (Official | Wiki). Considering its producers might have been high as a kite -- even by 1970s standards -- it's a miracle the episodes were even coherent. The show's popularity was very likely from Caroline Ellis, the 19-year-old actress who played Joy. It's been over 30 years now. Can you name someone other than Caroline or Martha Raye?

Pinup for my vamped-up version, the body is based on a 26-year old Mara Carday (AOL Photo Swipe | Official | Wiki).

iFridaynista Slow work week for Dave? Yes.

Buzz: Coffee Stained

2007-01-08T21:33:00.000-05:00

Tech Talk Photoshop, scanner, Google Image Search

Art Speak Sometimes, you don't have to draw a damn thing. This "found art" approach is a return to my art-school roots. Like most of my work of that period, I have no idea what this drawing actually means. It probably says more "coffee stain" than "buzz".

iFridaynista All new art, a direct -- if somewhat addled -- response to the assignment.

Buzz: Coffee House

2007-01-08T11:58:00.000-05:00

Tech Talk Corel Painter, Arylic and Pencil tools.

Art Speak This started off as a single-layer, one-session "action" painting. While the background still adheres to this method, I couldn't escape the need to "draw" the main figure. My curse is spending so much time on the "behind the scenes" elements of illustration (reference, tight pencils) that there's little time left for final art. The whole idea of the "single session" painting is to produce work that is fresh, direct and less dependent on reference. My greatest fear that this work is only rushed, hacked and lazy. With Boston's 60-degree weather weekend, there were much more satisfying ways of being lazy.

iFridaynista Without a real client, it's hard to tell if I "direct hit" this week's assignment or merely grazed it with the "flesh wound" of abstract reference.

Phoenix: Pinup

2007-01-01T18:52:00.000-05:00

Artspeak Corel Painter, Acylic tool. Slight color manipulation in Photoshop. I love the technique, but it's taking way too much time. I'm either gonna have to go vector, or allot more time to finess the painting.

Content Cramming this week's theme with 1940s pinup art may seem a bit forced. My most recent entries, however, have been either way too serious or guy-centric. Hence, the throwback girly art. In my defense, the tradition isn't entirely without precident.

Process Most of my iFriday work -- including this week's -- is done in public at my favorite coffee house in Cambridge MA. Working on the saucier stuff sure generates a lot of discussion.

Peace: Context

2006-12-26T19:41:00.000-05:00

"Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge."
-- Meir Kahane

Art Stuff Corel Painter, Acrylic tools. This seems to be my most comfortable software artmaking tool. The layers and opacity control let me do the glazing technique of my pre-digital days. The HoliDaze season cramped into my IF time. (Let's see, spend forever on free art OR keep my job and shop for my 5-year-old ...). A search for wrapping paper turned up my old sketchbooks. The 1995 brush-and-ink drawings were looser, bolder and a lot more fun. These two elements (no time and old sketchbooks) contributed to this week's "if it ain't rough, it ain't right" look. Lemme know your thoughts.

IF Observation So far, my most political or smutty works got the most comments (KKK=9, Sexy Robot=9, Sexy Woman in Crackhouse=12, CEO with Arrow through Head=8, etc.) Meanwhile, the most wholesome, G-Rated entry on the site drew only 2 comments (and one of those was rigged). What does this say about us iFridaynistas?

Help: Nice

2006-12-18T14:28:00.000-05:00

Repurposed Selections of children's text book illustrations I did for Houghton-Mifflin. The drawings are so old I can't remember the original application. They are, however, recolored for the new audience of Illustratiion Friday.

I still have a trick or two up my sleeve for a second, all original contribution (think opposite of "nice"). Career and family lives are more demanding this week, so it might not happen. We'll all know by Wednesday night.

Mask: Marvel

2006-12-08T22:09:00.000-05:00

Repurposed, no ... refurbushed art. The drawing is part of a failed 24-Hour Comic (24 pages in 24 hours). It took me 24 hours just to get 11 pages done. By 6:30 AM, I was bleary-eyed and incapable of making even the most basic decisions. This panel shows how most fictional characters are really just different views of the writer.

Mask: KlanMan

2006-12-08T20:35:00.000-05:00

New art, Painter Gouache. This was supposed to be a saucy superheroine in distress piece. The project got a bit sidetracked by my memory of Watchmen, Alan Moore's classic graphic novel about how superheroes couldn't work in the real world. Basically, my illustration depicts the only known example of people wearing masks and special outfits to violently enforce their own views of justice.

Mask: Whiteface

2006-12-08T20:17:00.000-05:00

A study utilizing pairs of black and white job applicants with identical credentials found that in 476 hirings in Washington, DC, and Chicago, "unequal treatment of black job seekers was entrenched and widespread, contradicting claims that hiring practices today either favor blacks or are effectively color blind. In 20 percent of the audits, whites were able to advance further through the hiring process than equally qualified blacks."

Opportunities Denied, Opportunities Diminished: Discrimination in Hiring
Margery Austin Turner, Michael E. Fix, Raymond J. Struyk, The Urban Institute

Might: Punch!

2006-12-05T22:11:00.000-05:00

Lame-ass Caption: Apple gets serious about software piracy. (If you folks come up with a better one, I'll post it).

Media Awareness: All-new art, rendered in Corel Painter's Acrylic tools. No glazing, one-layer, no research. I'm getting better at the modeling, but can't pull it off consistently. I'm aiming for clarity first, style consistency second. To be honest, I spent so much time rendering, I can't tell if the drawing is funny anymore. The thumbnail was funny enough ...

Invention: Gear Face

2006-11-29T21:56:00.000-05:00

Repurposed Art One of the classic images I considered for this theme was Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times". After trying to shoehorn the gears into the Metropolis idea, I had a strange attack of deja vu ... as if I've been on this track before. Sure enough, I remembered. In addition to the technical difficulties of rendering this in Adobe Illustrator 3 -- no working in Preview mode, every blend is hand-built and masked, no Gradient tool -- my client was also difficult with last-second demands. Therefore, I believe I earned enough combat pay to bring this 1993 classic to a new audience.

Invention: Metropolis

2006-11-28T20:30:00.000-05:00

"There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator."
-- Fritz Lang, Metropolis

In the future, the society of Metropolis is divided in two social classes: the workers, who live in the underground below the machines level, and the dominant classes that lives in the surface. The workers are controlled by their leader Maria, who wants to find a mediator between the upper class lords and the workers, since she believes that a heart would be necessary between brains and muscles. Maria meets Freder Fredersen, the son of the Lord of Metropolis Johhan Fredersen, in a meeting of the workers, and they fall in love for each other. Meanwhile, Johhan decides that the workers are no longer necessary for Metropolis, and uses a robot pretending to be Maria to promote a revolution of the working class and eliminate them. Official Movie Site

Thanksgiving: In Honor of Jack Cole

2006-11-24T16:36:00.000-05:00

A Day Late and a Buck Short

There are a few reasons why this week's installment is late. The delay was mainly caused by the a short work week, creative ambition and running into a Corel Painter wall. Since the IF "Past Fridays" tool is broken, it's doubtful anyone will see this painting. Still, I'm tired and brain-dead. Is there a better time to unload on your 'blog? Here are answers to questions both real and imagined:

Why The Retro Pin-Up Art?

There certainly isn't a logical, market-based reason. The genre reached its peak in the mid-1940s, then slowly died off in the mid-1960s, as magazine's ability to print photographs improved. The classic pinup art entertains and excites men and women of my generation. To us, the best paintings accomplish a sense of warmth, wit and sexiness that far surpasses mere photography. Anyone younger than 40, however, isn't interested in all that old man art shit. That generation is more likely to get the same thrill from Maxim or FHM. For this younger audience, even Playboy is a relic.

This is partly why my IF work takes so long to produce. The masters of the genre -- Gil Elvgren, Earl Moran, Jack Cole, many others -- made it look easy. Attempting to express the same combination of charm, sex appeal and craft -- through the bottleneck of my limited artistic abilities -- is A LOT harder than I thought.

Creative Ambition

Before going to paint, I tried to cram a lot of wit and historical reference into this picture. The scene itself is inspired by one of Jack Cole's paintings for Playboy. It was of an adult costume party in some swanky New York apartment. We see a bedroom where a couple just finished banging. The man is putting his Uncle Sam costume with a huge smirk on his face. The woman, still stunned, is on the bed in her disshevled indian costume. She says "Boy, that's history repeating itself".

My version isn't nearly as well-drawn, witty or socially significant. However, like Bill Parcells says, you work with what you've got. Rather than regurgitate another Norman Rockwell painting, I decided to focus on the first Thanksgiving. The woman's costume is based on actual Wampanoag clothing. The man's outfit is close enough.

Corel Painter's Not All It's Cracked Up to Be

My first two attempt were spent trying to master the Watercolor tools again. This time, using traditional watercolor examples as a guide, I tried to emulate the quick technique of Jack Cole. None of the Painter's watercolor tools worked as quickly, intuitively or naturally as traditional watercolor. It's not that I have a more natural ability with the opaque tools; the Watercolor tools simply don't work. This took 12 hours of R+D to discover, before giving up the ghost and punting to Gouche.

So What Have We Learned?

Spent less time on research and media discovery, more time doing the actual drawing. Hopefully this week's theme'll be a lot easier to work with.

Smoke: This Old Crackhouse

2006-11-04T18:20:00.000-05:00

Once again, I was able to create an original drawing, learn a new Corel Painter tool (gouche) and finish in one day. As a bonus, this is my very first crackhouse illustration.

As the weeks progress, I hope to simplify my approach to these exercises. The wonderful thing about this exhibit is see how others succeed in creating solutions that are simple, elegant and brilliant. (This doesn't account for the repurpose crowd!)

Wind: Central Squared

2006-10-29T22:21:00.000-05:00

In addition to creating new art, I also decided to adhere to the following self-imposed criteria:

Place the scene in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge MA
Not use cartooning's "motion lines"
Teach myself to use Corel Painter's watercolor tools
Refer to last week's "ghost" theme (I feel guilty for repurposing)
Get it done over the weekend

Now that it's finished, I think my color needs more planning and sophistication. Here's to getting more practice!

Ghost: Dead by the Pool

2006-10-20T22:39:00.000-04:00

This one's a multimedia experience. Yes, I remember what I said about repurposing. This week's theme -- being too good to pass up -- was right inline with an unpublished comic book story I did a few years ago. Do you agree, or am I stretching? You be the judge! Online Slideshow | Downloadable PDF

Trouble: Bloody PowerPoint

2006-10-06T20:28:00.000-04:00

The speaker is a CEO of a "fictional" company, running a company-wide presentation as a video conference. He's using a bunch of charts and projections to justify yet another round of layoffs. The "trouble" is that I have two weeks to find a new way of supporting myself. Why to the grunts always get RIFed while the six-figure salary guys get raises?