It's egg month 2011!

Under-paintings

Every spring semester I teach an oil painting class for sophomore illustration majors and I introduce several techniques using an egg as the subject. The egg offers a simple breakdown of value offering a clear and concise mapping of the different lights and shadows.

They poke one hole in the top and bottom of the egg and blow out the contents (gross) and then they have an egg to work with for several weeks. They use different lighting effects as well as oil painting techniques. Underpainting in acrylics and over painting in oils, wipe outs, mounted drawings with overpainted color, glazing and scumbling and much more.

It's a challenge but it's a great build up to the trompe l'oeil project. It's gotten fun for me to do and now I have a serious collection of eggs!

L is for Luna Bird

Graphite on hot pressed watercolor paper. If I take this to final color I would make the orb glow and look all misty. But for now it's just a sketch.

Last of the Dingbats

These are some more dingbats I did in Illustrator. They lie beneath the title separating it from the body text. These are derived from portions of the stories.

Dingbat 2

Here are some past dingbats I did for GreenPrints. They were done in Adobe Illustrator. I chose to use Illustrator because I can work really fast in that program (I've been teaching it for 10 years) and it has super crisp output. These guys were printed about the size of my thumbnail so clarity was really important.

I have done pencils and Painter for dingbats in the past but they usually didn't work out. It's easy too caught up in gradations and values and more time was spent rendering something that didn't show up or show up poorly.

Sketches and Dingbats

This is a page from my sketch book that shows a small study of decorative patterns. I found that some of these worked for my dingbat assignments. Dingbats are small decorative symbols used in publishing. Most of the time you will see dingbats accompanying type. They are used to fill up dead space and liven up the article or story by giving a interesting visual for the reader's eye to land on for a split second.

I also have found that these studies help me add decorative additions to some of my final illustrations.

Drop Caps Drawings

These are some drop caps I drew up for an interior article. Just pencil. I wanted to feature the texture of tweed within the letters. Tweed is a big part of the story.

Last Summer

Oil on Panel

I kept meaning to post these but they ended up on the back burner. In August Dominick and I were very fortunate to visit our friends Will and Shelly in Colorado. They took us sight seeing in the rocky's and we drove north to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. It was a wonderful trip hiking and being engulfed in nature.

We wanted to fit as much sight seeing in as possible so Dom and I didn't paint that much. This is the only one I didn't wipe off my board. It is a view of the Tetons which was painted in a small alcove off a hiking trail. The sketch was a little flower we saw in Colorado right before encountering a moose.....which was my biggest find!

Cat Queen

Cat Queen

And so it is put to rest. I finished the never ending project in time for the new year. Open deadlines are a pure nightmare for me to work with. I work much better under pressure. I will say that I did take advantage of the time and explored a lot of techniques I wanted to work with before but couldn't find time to do.

This became a pivotal piece for me. I'm happy. The client is happy. And now it's time to move on to a follow up piece. Decisions, decisions.