Randomness Exercise

In this exercise for my Background Painting class I made a series of abstract acrylic paintings and scanned them into Photoshop and cropped in on a random area. After doing that I digitaly painted a made up scene on top of the scanned image using the basic elements of the composition that existed in the cropped area. The top image is of course the acrylic painting croped and the second image shows 3 color variations on the digital painting.

The Searchers

I haven't yet seen the movie and am not aloud to until after the project is completed, but basically I read the script for the film The Searchers and broke the 128 page script down into sequences. Each frame is a moment from each sequence drawn with graphite on copy paper. I drew inspiration from Fredrick Remington's romanticized paintings of the old west.

New Layout for Ark Project

These are the steps of a high school for my Ark project. Graphite on Vellum. That's it.

Super Quick Digital Study

A super quick digital portrait study of my son sitting on my bed watching the Disney version of The Wind in the Willows. He calls it "Da Win in da Wih-Woahs".

Gerenuk Girl

This is an exploration for the gernuk cheerleader character in my Ark project I'm working on. It's by no means a final character design although I will probably paint it digitally soon.

Value Studies in Graphite

These 2"x3" graphite studies were done on regular copy paper for a current project I'm working on.

Color Comp from DVD still

Gouache on 5" x 7" Cold Press Illustration Board

After watching this great flick with my wife, I did a color comp of a still frame from Hitchcock's Dial "M" for Murder.

Digital Comp

Here's a digital color comp I worked up for a sketch I did in graphite and scanned into Photoshop. This is for a project I'm working in Dominick Domingo's Background Painting class.

Gin Walla - The Drawing Club Sketches

Studies done in ballpoint pen on my 5"x7" Moleskine while attending Bob Kato's Drawing Club. The model was fantastic and Bob staged everything really well.

Armless Red Squirrel

ballpoint pen and gouache on 5" x 7" Molskine Sketchbook

Gyotaku

In my Dynamic Sketching class we tried Gyotaku or the art of Japanese fish printing. We simply rolled ink on the dead fish our T.A., Chris Grun, bought from the fish market that morning, and pressed rice paper over the top. I believe it was a halibut, rock cod, red snapper, and I forget what the one on the bottom right is.

More Little Prince Images

The top image is of the lamplighter, the king, and the drunk from The Little Prince. The next two are pages of character explorations.

The Pilot

Another Little Prince digital illustration drawn in graphite and painted in Photoshop

More Thumbs

These are design studies for the businessman's planet in The Little Prince. I thought I'd go for a more interesting shape than a mere sphere and I drew inspiration from asteroids.
The thumbs are done in a graphite technique taught to me by my mentor, Patrick Hanenberger where you lay down graphite powder in a wash and erase out to find shapes. The last image is just of some rough thumbnail studies done with warm copic gray markers in 3 values.

Little Prince Value Thumbs

Here are some Little Prince thumbnail comps I drew with Copic Markers and scanned.

Another Sketch

Ballpoint pen on Molskine notebook.

The Little Prince & The Fox

Here are some characters I am redesigning for my own modernized version of Antoine De Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. The boy in the school uniform is the Little Prince and the next image is of the fox he befriends and ends up taming. Both sketched in pencil and scanned into Photoshop for color. More to come!

The Witch

This pencil sketch that was scanned and colored in using Photoshop, depicts a 1940's style witch from the Brother's Grimm fairy tale, Jorinda and Joringle. I modeled the outfit from Mirna Loy's character Nora from "Shadow of the Thin Man."

I'm still around...

No, the rumors are untrue. I am not dead.

I have just recently moved, started school, and just been dealing with the crazy curveballs life throws you.

I'll post work again soon.

Take care all,

~Craig

Saber-Tooth Flea

This is the concept I have been working on for Krystina Castella's Toy Design class. The following is the text on the back of the package:

"
Meet the Saber-Tooth Flea!

Paleoentomologists recently unearthed the earliest known relative to the modern day flea: the Smilodon Ctenocephalides or Saber-Tooth Flea™. These wingless insects are generally less than 3.81cm (with teeth 13.97cm). It is supposed that this large parasitical insect spent most of its life entangled within the thick hair of the large wooly creatures that roamed the prehistoric world. Most often the Saber-Tooth Flea™ could be found feasting upon the North American Mammoth for its sustenance. It is believed that their teeth, or palps, doubled as heat-seeking antennae and its primary means of transportation: pole-vaulting. With the discovery of this amazing species, scientists have opened the door for the discovery of countless other previously unknown primitive insects such as the Woolly Poly™ and many, many more. Be one of the first to collect them all!"

I sold 9 of these at the student Toy Design sale for 25$ each and sold the deluxe albino under antique glass with an antique magnifying glass for $100. (My dad bought it. Thanks, Dad!)

Pirate

Cowboy John

John is a great model. I went to the Saturday workshop at Art Center and decided to paint in my moleskine sketchbook. I "gouached" it. I like saying "gouache". It's a funny word.

Minnie, Nilan, and a Movie Poster Concept

Mixed Media on Canvas 9"x12"

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas 9" x 12"

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas 16" x 20"

These are a few paintings I'm working on for my Image and Idea class with Kent Williams. The first two were painted from reference photos I took of my grandparents in costume. The last is a movie poster concept for George Clooney's recent movie Good Night and Good Luck.

Giraffe-ar

This is a character I've created for the Aladdin project [see previous post] I'm doing in my color theory class. This giraffe is the equivalent of Jafar from Disney's animated Aladdin. I used an awesome photo I took of my dad in costume for reference and tried to simulate the exact lighting using my wacom tablet in Photoshop.

The Oval Portrait

Oil on Acrylic, Strathmore 500 Board [images are cropped]

This Edgar Allen Poe image for the short story, The Oval Portrait, was another of Kent Williams' assignments. Kent had us pick a Poe story or poem and do a vertically formatted book cover of it. I will say that although I spent a lot of time on it, it needs more work and leaves much to be desired. The picture frame needs to be rendered tighter along with numerous other fixes. I included the pencil sketch which has a bit more breath to it.

Orange Dot

collage, gouache, and ink

This sketch pretty much sums up my feelings and fears regarding the cost of tuition and the law of diminishing returns.

Proactive Hitman

Mixed Media and Photoshop 11.25” x 11.25” Strathmore 500 Board

This is an assignment I did in pencil, pen, water color, gouache acrylic and oil for Kent Williams' Image and Idea class. For this assignment we had to either create a spread or a partial spread for a short story in a magazine article he had just illustrated. Of course we didn’t get to see his piece ahead of time and had to interpret the story for ourselves. The story is basically a crime thriller mystery about a proactive hit-man who collects stamps as a hobby (notice the eyes are stamps with cropped 100$ bills in them) and goes out looking for a new client in order to pay the bills. The wrench is the weapon used at the climax of the story.

James and the Princess Sketches

This first sketch is of yes,... you guessed it,... my son James.

The others are a few exploratory sketches I did in my earthbound sketchbook for my Inventive Figure class taught by Daniel Galieote. We get to invent our own characters for either a story of our own or an existing story or movie set in a different time period. For the assignment we are going to create a female, male, and an animal. I'm choosing to retell the old German Fairy tail The Brave Little Tailor. You may recall the Disney version of the story in which Mickey Mouse is the unlikely hero who kills seven flys in one blow and is mistaken for a giant killer. I chose the story because I loved the idea of modernizing it. Instead of a tailor, I'm going to be creating a techie nerd who brags about killing seven monsters while gaming online, but is overheard by some nearby thugs who believe he has killed seven "mobsters". The king has been replaced by a crime boss and the princess is his bratty socialite daughter. These sketches are for the Princess in the story who upon finding out she has married a common tailor, goes to her daddy the king asking for help in getting rid of him.