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Sorry for the no post last week. I was having creative difficulties with a t-shirt design, which needs to be redone completely before I like it. I also worked on some Into the Dust last week. But I don’t want to show you that just yet.
I have an upcoming collaborative project with a friend of mine that I will most likely be working on soon, plus a few more paintings. Until then, enjoy a shot of my banner, which arrived this morning!
So I was asked to do something for my friends the Hart brothers, for their comic strip about Jackson Michigan called The Burgh. This is what I came up with. Check out their comic, you just might learn something!
Into the Dust is next on the drawing table…expect to see a few more pages crawling out here before the end of August. I will try to give you something new at least once a week.
So it took a while, but I hope the wait was well worth it! Here it is, my Triple Self Portrait. My plan for this image is to print it on a retractable banner to promote myself at comic conventions. Obviously this painting is based on Norman Rockwell’s famous Triple Self Portrait. I have quite a few hidden gems in my version, so as a treat, I have a key below so you can understand all of the references. Also, as this is a perfect advertising image for my work, I have a larger scale version of the file up for people to use if they wish to spread the word about me. You can get the bigger version here. I have a pin-up to do for a friend’s comic project to do next, and some more Into the Dust, and later this month or Early September I have a few more parody paintings to do for a client. Whistler, Monet, and Rockwell again will be the painters I will be working from. Any ideas as to subject matter or specific paintings?
The Michigan Comic show that has been traveling around the state all year just opened at it’s final location at the Ella Sharp Museum in Jackson yesterday. It’s going to be up until October 31st (so people at Detroit Fanfare can go see it) I hope some of you will get a chance to go over there and see the show. I have 3 pieces in it from Into the Dust #4.
1. Iron Man‘s Helmet
2. Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised
3. Superman‘s Cape
4. I am left handed, but draw and paint with both my hand’s simultaneously
5. My ScottEVest
6. Homer Simpson
7. My friend Scott McCloud
8. Kermit the Frog
9. Wolverine’s Dog tags with the Lost Numbers
10. Dharma Initiative Beer
11. Norman Rockwell Art book
12. Sketched page of Into the Dust art
13. Mjolnir, Thor’s Hammer
14. Spiderman’s Webshooters
15. Batman’s Utility Belt and Batarang
16. One of The Phantom’s pistols
17. The Infinity Gauntlet
18. Cyclops’ Visor
19. Harry Potter’s Wand
20. Generic magician’s wand (I do artwork for a lot of magic books)
21. Eclipso’s Black Diamond
22. Nick Fury’s S.H.I.E.L.D. badge
Worked on it a few more hours yesterday, here is what it currently looks like. Mirror and the chair it sits on are done! Even though I work my day job from the living room, it is difficult to paint when I am on the clock. But again, I don’t want to rush this thing, so enjoy as I putter along at it. Stay tuned for more updates!
So I told myself I wasn’t going to rush this painting. This is the result of today’s efforts. I broke out my watercolor pencils for the first time in years for a few areas…forgot how much I loved them. Stay tuned for more process shots throughout the week, and eventually the finished painting. Do you think I should make prints of this to sell? Who would want my ugly mug on their wall?
So I am in the midst of working on my largest painting yet. I figured I would tease my readers a bit with a sketch. Enjoy, and check back some time next week for the completed painting!
Here is what I have done so far this week on the painting front. It is based on The Scream by Edvard Munch. My patron wanted Psycho Pirate from DC comics, a B-list villain who’s most famous appearance was in the series Crisis on Infinite Earths, where he was one of the lead villains. Recently he has cropped up in the Infinite Crisis where he died, and in Blackest Night, where he was a Black Lantern. Due to the events in Crisis (both of them) I included Black Adam (who killed him, 3 stooges style) and Power Girl (a fellow refugee from Earth 2) in the background as the ominous figures haunting him.
Working on a painting for a promotional poster next, should see that soon! Anybody else liking the weekly updates? I am trying to post something each week….
So as promised here are some in action shots of me painting my latest work “Dark Starry Knight” I switched to acrylic paint for this project, and I am working at a larger scale. 
I wanted to mimic Van Gogh’s brushwork as best I could; that meant watercolor was out, and even though the original was done in oils, I did not have the funds to purchase such supplies for my own work, so that left me with the poor man’s oils, acrylics. I used heavy body gel medium to mix with the paint, this helped add some chunky-ness to my paint that mimicked Van Gogh’s heavy amount of paint that he placed on his canvas. 
To speed up my process, I used a projector to cast a really low res version of Starry Night onto my canvas. Once the basic forms were there, I went at it with my chunk of graphite and added my version of things to the design. Then onto painting. 
I started with the sky, doing a lot of on canvas mixing of paint. I tried to start with larger areas of color, and move into more detailed work as the larger areas would dry. Once the blues of the sky were mostly in place, I attacked the yellows. At this point I could see the end product in my head. The building came next, along with the bat signal itself, and every so often, I would add a few more strokes of blue or white to the sky, never truly satisfied at it’s completeness. I continued moving down the piece, adding the buildings and Joker’s balloon. 
The last bits of the painting to be complete was the Joker gas clouding over the town. The original painting just had trees, 
and they were mostly blue. My gas is quite a bit more green, however due to the nature of Van Gogh’s work, I still think
that my gas clouds look like trees, no matter what I tried to do to change them.
This painting was also my excuse to finally buy an 11 x 17 scanner. I hate stitching my paintings together in Photoshop, it’s such a time waster. However, due to this painting’s size, I still had to scan it 8 times to get the full image into my computer.
The original painting has already sold, but Prints are available to anyone who might like to purchase one.
So I had been putting it off for too long! My 2010 Moleskine Sketchbook page has 11 new sketches in it, go check it out! Here is a peek at the latest sketch, which I drew this week while Amber was in the hospital (don’t worry, she’s okay now)
Tomorrow, I head off to Dick Blick for some long overdue supplies, then I am diving into my latest parody painting titled “Starry Dark Knight” which will be done in acrylic for a change, on canvas, and at a larger size! I think I might post some in process shots of it here on the site, for those of you who want to feel like a fly on the wall.
So if you have been following my tweets on twitter, you might have noticed me saying I was back to work on Into the Dust, figured I would give you all a peek at a page. There will be dialog in the final version, but you can look at the pretty artwork. I tried a thinner bristol on this page that had been lying around the studio for years (it was a sheet of Blue Line pro comic board) and I have to say that even though it worked wonderfully for the inking and drawing,
once washes went down, I was cursing every few moments. This paper wicks like crazy, it was if I was painting on a roll of Bounty! So, for future pages, I will not be using this paper, but my good old 3ply (or 2ply in a pinch) Strathmore 300 series. I have finally bit the bullet, and I am working at 11×17 like most of my peers, working at 6×9 was fun, but I love the room (plus it hides the mistakes better)
You may have noticed a few new conventions on my list for the fall, looking forward to getting back into the swing of conventions for the late 2010 season, and all of 2011! Expect me to travel quite a bit next year (there may even be a San Diego trip possible)
I have commissions again! Expect a few of those to show up soon too!
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