Max’s first birthday

Back when we painted custom watch faces at Disneyland, a guest asked me for a design of Max and Goofy on Max’s first birthday- here’s what I came up with. 

 

Chip ‘n’ Dale

 

Chip ‘n’ Dale love Disney Parks popcorn. This was a gouache painting for the Disneyland Art Watch program. 

Jinxy's Retro Lounge

I just finished this Cover Illustration for the Facebook group, Jinxy's Retro Lounge.

Gouache on illustration board with digital text.

First Year Hufflepuff

Remember this guy? I posted a sketch of him quite a while ago . Well, he's all painted now. By an overwhelming majority vote on Instagram, he was sorted into Hufflepuff House.

"We've come for your daughter, Chuck"

I painted this for a Tim Burton Tribute Art Show back in October. 7x15in Gouache on Illustration Board. The original ($300) and one print ($35) are still available. Please contact me through the contact link on the right if interested.

It's from Sirius!

Wow- It's been so long! I'm ashamed to say that I've ignored my blog for over a year. I'll admit the simplicity of just snapping a picture for Instagram rather than scanning it at my computer is primarily the reason I've been so negligent. But with the upcoming new year I resolve to do better. I'd like to start with sharing this small painting I did for my daughter, a huge Harry Potter fan (ok, so are we, her parents). In fact, I've been away from blogging for so long that apparently I didn't even share the initial sketch, which I only decided to paint several months later. I did the sketch in about 15 minutes, with a light grey Prismacolor Marker for the rough drawing and a Pentel brush pen for the black lines. A few months later, as her birthday approached, I thought I decided to flesh it out into a full painting. As you can see it's basically the same but with many subtle changes. Check out the video below to see how I refined the sketch in Photoshop before painting.

 If you compare the two versions, you can see some subtle differences. I refined the likeness a lot, and improved on the pose, hand positions, etc...

Here's the final painting. If you'd like to see a quick progression, showing the Photoshop refinements to the sketch, here's a short progression video.

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day 2013

Cat-erwaulers

These poor Pirate Cats have been sitting around half painted since before Christmas. Finally got around to finishing them.

 

Pull up a stool, Matey...

I'm working to flesh out some of my Pirate Cat designs. I posted a sketch of this guy over 2 years ago and thought he had such great personality that he was a natural cantidate to paint. The fun part was figuring out just what type of cat he should be. Here he is, in a shadowy corner of the Keelhauled Kitty Pub, regaling listeners with a tale of his adventures.

 

Gouache on Illustration Board

This reminds me of something Neil Gaiman said: “Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.”

Jarrod Boutcher Puppets

This is something I did for Jarrod Boutcher, super talented puppet designer/creator who did the Little Brother puppet I blogged about ever so long ago. Jarrod always amazes me with the variety of characters that he creates and I've long wanted to paint some of his characters. You should really check out his blog here .

On my desk

Sneak Peek

Another small peek at what's been on my desk for a while now. Long overdue but still not finished yet.

On my desk

I always love when the arists whose blogs I follow, show pictures of the unfinished piece their working on. I'm excited about the thing I'm working on now, so I thought I'd preview it even before it's done. It's a pretty low res pic, but there's not much to see yet.

Finish line

What?!! Something in color?! A piece that took more than 5 minutes?! I know, contain yourself. This was a done for a friend as a gift for her boyfriend. Very fun to do, since I normally just draw and paint cartoon animals. 16x20 Guoache on Illustration Board

To the Neighborhood of Make Believe...

I decided some time ago that I'd love to do a series of illustrations depicting the puppet characters of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. As I've said before, this show had such a huge impact on me growing up, and yet unlike most kids shows, I didn't ever see any merchandise for it. I found out later in my adult life that there was quite a bit of merchandise- books, toys, and records- for some reason I just never saw them as a kid. I was fairly disappointed in the quality of the illustrations though. The flaws ranged from total inaccuracy of the characters and places depicted, to more nit picky stuff like making the puppet characters more human sized. In short, I definitely had opinions about how I thought this sort of thing should be done.

So, in my illustration I wanted to be sure that the puppets were depicted fairly accurately. I'm not opposed to showing them walking around as they have in other books, using legs that they obviously didn't have on the show, but this should be kept to a minimum. Also they should be kept puppet scale. Another thing I wanted to depict were the human cast members interacting with the puppets, something that was never done in the books. I thought a quiet moment between Lady Aberlin and Daniel Striped Tiger would be a good recognizable moment to depict. This scene occurred countless times over the course of the programs run. Daniel's favorite way to show affection was to rub noses with someone and say "Ugga Mugga".

I'm not a caricaturist, so the one thing I really am not happy with is Lady Aberlin's face- I wanted a very stylized look for the humans, but someone more skilled at caricature probably could have gotten a better resemblance. But overall I'm quite pleased with it. It also confirms my theory that seemingly unimportant details like the colors of the wall, distant hill, and surrounding ground really do say "Neighborhood of Make Believe" just as much as Daniel's clock does. That's something that other books seem to have played a little more loose with. I guess those illustrators were trying to expand the Neighborhood beyond what the show could depict on it's limited budget, but to me it always reeked of disregard for the details of a beloved show.

Drawergeeks: Teeth

This weeks Drawergeeks theme was teeth. This is one of those pieces that was pretty well formed in my mind as soon as I heard the theme. I think it owes a lot to this record album that I had when I was young:


That picture of Puff always scared me too much to look at it for any length of time, but it definately stuck with me. The eyes and that crooked smile definately came from that LP. I didn't even realize that I still had it until this morning, so the inspiration was from the LP's memory, not actual physical reference. Below is the final sketch that I used for the painting. If I'm working on something that's got an established model or look, I'll do a drawing much tighter than this, but this one was very much about playing with the shapes and lines and I kinda just decided to do that in the painting stage.

You can check out the other Drawergeeks Submissions here.

A little Wednesday Mischief

Still trying to come up with a suitable name for this little guy. He's a mischeivious white kitten with a black head, or is he a black kitten with a white body?

Forest Background

This is a background I painted for that Kidmo music video I mentioned in a previous post.

Nothing too special- I like that other one with the Island a lot better, but these were quick jobs. If I were doing it again it might be fun to stylize it a bit more.

More preschool yearbook animals

Some more of the illustrations I did for my daughters yearbook some years back. Some of these have breaks in the art, where they were overlapped by either text or a photo. Below are the Yellow Ducks:
The Purple Caterpillars:

And the Red Dinosaurs (I think these are my favorite).

Brown Bears and Blue Alligators

A few years ago I did some small illustrations for my daughter's preschool yearbook. Each class had a animal name that incorporated a color. These were done so quickly, I am amazed that they came out as good as they did. In actuality they have a tremendous simplicity and appeal that I think I lose if I work too long on something. I literally sketched these each in a minute or two and then on the final yearbook layout page tried to reproduce the design from my sketch as best I could with guoache- no underdrawing. I tried to use a very limited color pallete, keeping each animal monochromatic as much as possible. Here are just a few today.

These are the Brown Bears:

and some Blue Alligators:

More to come in a later post.