Law and Order
Political cartoon done today to experiment with more caricature and the pentel brush pen. After looking at the inspirational brush work of Jack Davis I had an urge to give it a try. My brush strokes are not that dynamic in this cartoon but I was trying to maintain a likeness to the person. Didn’t do any shadows or rendering out of boredom and political cartoons don’t need it.
The cartoon is a play on the news that Law & Order has been canceled after 20 years and career politicians. Really bad english there.
Trying Out Alchemy
Tried out a free vector program called Alchemy. One of my friends has a writing project with a reaper like character with crows on his shoulders. I used Alchemy to fool around a come up with this. Alchemy is black and white only and used for brainstorming ideas using vector shapes. Pretty neat little program. Can’t beat free.
In other news, I’m getting married soon.
One More Caricature
Tried to maintain a better likeness with this one. If I keep posting this frequently I should probably make a separate area for artwork posts. This might just be a temporary spurt of motivation though. Let’s hope not.
UPDATE:
slightly changed the rendering by removing a bit of the shading on the chin and cheek. Makes the face a little younger. Was going to make the chin smaller but I’m lazy and not sure it would help.
Try Try Again
Got this caricature in before breakfast this morning. My lines are not confident enough when drawing on the computer. The line gets away from me sometimes and it leads to them getting overworked. The rendering gets overworked simply because I don’t do it well. Then there is the caricature itself. Ugh. Tried to maintain likeness while pushing some features. This guy has some cool ears but I didn’t do anything with them. A pretty cool face overall.
Caricature Practice
Got inspired by Paul Richards caricatures at his blog and wanted to try my hand at a quickie. Looks like I need to be looser but it’s tough for me to get used to drawing on the computer. Probably should use a bigger brush to block things out and then make lines over that or something.
Sam Nielson Painting Process
I was trying to follow a tutorial to see how Sam Nielson does his awesome painterly style for cartoons but I kept getting hung up on how to do the lighting layer. I think this is how it is done and thought I would do a quick example to explain it. It’s nothing like Sam’s work but it should explain the process. Now go forth and conquer the world with the Sam Nielson painting process.
My only problem with this process is that it’s kind of hard to select the right flat color. Also the picture would need some work beyond the lighting layer for highlights as overlay won’t get you all the way to pure white unless it’s on white and you don’t want any of the flats to be white to start with as the lighting layer will have no effect. The occlusion layer is for areas where no light will be getting to like cracks and such. I don’t understand all of the process but this is a start.
Logging and Drawing
I’ve been doing some logging with my dad and brother Chance for the last few weeks since I have been unemployed. It also worked out that my oldest brother Stu has also been laid off from road construction and decided to do some logging. This is the first time that all of us have logged with my Dad at the same time, so it was cool to get a picture of it. We have all logged in the past, but never at the same time. Makes for a pretty cool family photo I think. Logging has been tiring for me as I was completely out of shape, but it has been fun with all the family there. It’s fun to murder some trees once in a while too.
I also was contacted about doing a promotional piece of artwork for a woman doing a speaking tour. She had an idea of the statue of liberty being pushed down by liberals and the people coming to stop it. I had some more ideas and sent her a sketch, which she liked. The completed piece ended up being a collection of gags about how most of the wealth in our nation is in government. One of the most fun drawings I have done. She really let me run with it. If I had my way there would have been some gags about George Bush and Dick Cheney also, but her audience was mostly republicans. Oh well. The top left area was left blank for text that was added later.
Football in the NFC North
I’m really looking forward to the Packers this football season. They looked great in their first pre-season game. The NFC North division has a lot of really interesting story lines including the Packers new defense, The Bears new quarterback, and most recently the signing of Brett Favre with the Minnesota Vikings. Detroit also has a new QB, but they have so many things wrong it probably won’t matter much.
With all the excitement, I got a little jazzed about doing some kind of football picture. I started working on a caricature of Aaron Rodgers, but this little cartoon seemed more appropriate for how I think things will go down in the NFC North division this year. Yeah, that’s right. Pack all the way.
Paper Heart Semi-Finalist
My Paper Heart Poster entry over at DeviantArt is in the semi-finals (top 25). The top three winners get a wacom tablet and cash prize of a few hundred bucks ($650 for first). Man, that would be sweet.
This is the fourth time I have entered a contest on the internet. The first two contests were fairly small and I ended up with two calendars. The last contest was another one on DeviantArt, but the competition was fierce. There are just so many people on that community that it makes it hard to stand out. Not to mention the quality of artists that congregate there. In a pure art competition like that last contest, it’s tough. The top 25 entries were all superb in artistic quality.
The Paper Heart competition was different though. Being a poster contest, artistic quality is not as important as design and interpretation of the theme. Seemed like a good opportunity to give it another shot and so far the entry is in the semi-finals. My brother didn’t think it had much chance (and his name is Chance. Weird.) because he thought it looked like a 7 year old made it. He is right, but that is the look I was going for and it’s definitely not my normal style. That is simply the design that seemed to best fit the movie and the competition in my mind. So far, so good.
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