IC14 Show

Well, back to the Illustrators Club show. The gallery that evening was packed and hot and stuffy and I was nervous and sweaty and feeling more un-photogenic than usual, so I'm not in these pictures. Really I was just happy to be there.

I am sorry that all I documented of the event centered around people looking at my piece (or not looking, as that's a gold medal winner by the awesome Greg Harlin they're admiring):



But I did catch these guys taking a closer look:



I was so proud to be in this group, knowing I was a small fish in the pond. And hey, my name was mentioned in last Friday's Washington Post review!

Illustrators Club show!

Happily in the time I was "away" some good things came along, one being the news that this little piece was accepted in the Illustrators Club of DC, MD & VA's annual juried show, and we're planning to drive up for the opening tomorrow (sorry I'm posting this at the last minute).

For now I'll say some other stuff is in the works too, which makes me think that Yeats' old crane of Gort may himself be enjoying a trout or two....

Lost and found, WIP

Lazarus, oil on illustration board, 6x4.5 in.

I was trying to catch up on some other work so I didn’t do a new painting last night. But I remembered this piece which I had wanted to share for a long time. Last July while we were visiting my parents in California, and before I had started this blog, I happily rediscovered a folder of sketches from (what should have been) my last year of art school....

We were given a sort of long-term project to illustrate the alphabet, and my old classmates reading this may remember it. I came up with something a little too ambitious for my feeble mind at the time – I could think it up, just not execute it. I see now how elaborate I had wanted to make it, and if/when I take it up again it could take god knows how long. When I found this stuff again after so many years it was like having back a substantial part of me that I had carelessly lost.

It was a neat little bundle, with some compositions fully sketched out and some just light doodles (though many blank), photocopies I’d made for reference, and all the little boards that I had gessoed ahead of time so as not to have anything hold me back when I was ready to paint - a few of them, like the one shown, had some paint work started. These boards were really small, as if I thought by working at a ridiculously tiny size with my usual brushes it would have somehow made things less complicated. This was the thinking of someone who, though often hesitant to start something new, could get so lost in his own mind that while working on a particular make-up assignment he wasted hours and ultimately several days painting and repainting an area only a few inches across. Ha ha. I don’t know how I got better but I am better now.

So my idea for the project was a pseudo-English medieval fair, with musicians mainly but with some circus-type folk and others of a pseudo-medieval sort, and each musical instrument or other specialty began with a different letter of the alphabet. Here, I have an Organ Grinder (originally a player of the Hurdy-Gurdy) whose name is Lazarus, and with him is his monkey. I wanted to portray a mix of skin colors and body types and evoke the parts of the wider world from which some of these strange little characters might have traveled, a variety aspiring to that which I might now read about in an Umberto Eco novel. Hence some obscure instruments and some very different moods from one picture to the next, someday to be seen....

I like to think that into each one of the scenes I put a little bit of myself, and maybe that’s why it was such a happy feeling to discover them again.

Illustration Friday: "Grow"

10/25: Grow, oil on coated paper, approx. 7.5x8.25 in.

Well, somehow I've gone a whole day without posting (sigh). I'll have to paint an extra piece of fruit or something. At least I tried the IF this week - by chance I came across this story in The Penguin Book of English Folktales, edited by Neil Philip (whose introduction is far more exciting than most of the tales in the book):

The Turnip and the Horse

A poor man near Brighton grew a huge turnip and sent it to the King. The King graciously accepted and sent the man a guinea. Hearing this an individual (whose descendants are living, so I leave out the name) bought and sent King William a beautiful valuable horse. The King accepted, and immediately sent the huge turnip in return, saying the horse was so fine that he must give something in return that was equally fine of its kind. The man who had expected a valuable gift was not pleased.

This version dates from a 1912 source, but writes Philip, "Here we find a story popular in medieval jestbooks, which is told as true and attached to a nineteenth-century monarch." I'm struck by how nonchalant the narrator sounds - the man simply "grew a huge turnip" - and that's why I made my farmer unsurprised, and maybe as if about to say "that'll do, turnip. That'll do...." But I didn't intend for him to look like a doll.

I printed my sketch (with the reddish outlines) on a scrap piece of Rives paper, used acrylic matte medium to coat the image then mount the paper onto a piece of board, blow-dried it, and went to oils - this is a decent shortcut as long as I use a thick sort of paper and "glue" it down with a lot of medium, mainly to reduce the chance of air pockets (there were a couple here but you can't tell in the end). I tried some Galkyd Lite for the first time here and it's wonderful - it's thin like the old Markowsky medium I used before I did a stand oil mix, and it dries fast enough that I can start layering thin colors on one another like glazes. It's like rediscovering something I'd lost. I could have pushed this farther but just tried to get it done fast.

Work in Progress: Polar bears

9/22: Here's part of the sketch for a painting I'm working on for Highlights. They had dropped the deadline for it a while back but the other day decided that they do want to use it, so I'd better wrap it up soon. This was my painting work for the day....

Illustration Friday: "Momentum"

9/8: Momentum, oil on canvas panel, approx. 4.25x4.25 in.

I think I screwed up my eyes staring at the bright part so long.... How awesome would it be to see a liftoff for real?!

Illustration Friday: "Alphabets"

9/1: Alphabets, oil on paper mounted on panel, 5x7.75 in.

The theme led me to play with having two alphabets contrasted side by side. My first (terrible) idea vaguely had Roman soldiers encountering runes carved in a rock, until my wife suggested a scene with a kid writing something. Then after seeing the August National Geographic feature on the Maya, I settled on this scene. The glyphs are of course not an "alphabet," rather logograms and syllabograms - plus, though the symbols I drew began as accurate representations, I made up most of them. Sort of blasphemous from someone who loves this stuff.

I printed out a sketch that I had scanned in and tweaked in Photoshop, then mounted it with acrylic matt medium to a canvas panel (for lack of anything else). I massed in areas with acrylic yellow ocher, then later painted with oils.

Illustration Friday: "Visitors"

8/25: Visitors, oil on paper, approx. 3.5x5 in.

Here's a corny little piece, my first time with an Illustration Friday topic. It was done on a printout of a sketch, coated with acrylic medium. So, I was thinking, what about when the first two little pigs show up at the third pig's house? Corny. And it disturbs me a little somehow.