Modigliani portrait

Modigliani sawtooth portrait

Muddy "Mississippi" Waters

Another in my line of vector portraits of songwriters is one of my all time favourites, Muddy Waters. I have been doing this one over the last few months. I haven't quite worked out what i want in the background yet or what the final colours should be.

This is probably the closest to what i originally wanted to achieve. Love that 70's style shirt...

Here i was fooling around with various patterns & fills in illustrator.

More with the patterns and fills, starting to fall apart as a portrait though.

I kind of like this colourway , but it isnt quite popping enough for me.

Maybe a bit to obvious for a bluesman to be in shades of blue...?

When I had the vector shapes sorted out i quickly painted it as an acrylic on wood portrait. I think it still needs quite a bit of work as it has lost something of the confidence seen in Muddy in the vector. Also it needs a background, maybe some kind of abstract cityscape...

Some more summer artwork

Here is some more stuff from my sketchbook of the last couple of months...

Some local wiring is like a puzzle to draw...

This stuff can get pretty busy but is fun to draw with a brush.

A native from the backyard

Same backyard, same afternoon, different medium.

A Salad container label for my daughters primary school fete.

A cupla kookas.

Brushpen of a newspaper photo

Yo dude! Whattup dawg?

Feb 2013

Yeah, a long time between posts, but I have been doing a fair bit of artwork including some paintings that i will post when they are finished.

Here are a few odds and ends from over the summer.

I dunno, some kind of vector/limited palette test...

Oh yeah, this was used to help sell gingerbread to to little prep kids...

This one is part of something else, still in progress.

Reflecto lettuce alien, still not finished but a fun way to make pictures. Did I show this already?

Something from a series I am working on currently in a few different formats.

Allright, that's enough for today but I have a bunch more that i will put up over the next little bit.

Birthday Jamboree

Yes the Birthday Jamboree!

Various Birthday items happily marching to a birthday party to offer themselves up for your delight.

I first did some sketches as ideas for the annual Illustrators Australia 9by5 exhibition, the theme Carnivale. I carefully drew it in pen and ink to 9" x 5".

I scanned that and came up with the colours digitally. I used an idea from James Gurney (of Dinotopia fame) to come up with the colour range, it's called gamut masking and it really helped limit the colours and made it much easier to make colour decisions.

I drew it up on the 9 by 5 wooden board and started in with the Golden acrylic paints. I am not so keen on painting things so small.

That was finished just in time for the 9x5 exhibition and was well received but didn't sell...

Pretty happy with that little painting so I decided to upscale it to a bigger canvas. This was now the fourth time I had to draw it so I felt I was getting the hang of it. I had a little more room on the left so I added a drink cup but that was voted out by others and I changed it to a choc top ice cream which everyone loves. I have been taking photos of the progress of the bigger painting but it is going much slower than the little one. I will post them soon.

Ear Hole Trumpet

Ear Hole Trumpet has landed!

well, I got sick of telling people "You should listen to this thing online, it is hilarious!" and then 3 weeks later the person says "what was that thing again?" and ususally it was something that was only up for a week and is now long gone or I can't find the link anymore.

EAR HOLE TRUMPET LINK

I decided to make another blog (than this one) and it would be dedicated to all the online spoken word and comedy stuff I listen to while I am working. I cant listen to stuff while I am typing or trying to read a website or stuff like that but when I am making artwork or putting together designs I listen to all sorts of things.

It is weird because I really take in the audio and days or a few weeks later I can look at what I was doing and remember exactly what I was hearing. If you asked me "remember that episode of This American Life last week, i would probably just look at you blankly but if I looked at a detail in an illustration I will remember what the guy was saying at that point. Is that common or a bit wierd?

So if you want something good to listen to, drop in have a look around and see if anything takes your fancy, run it up the flagpole, see who salutes...

It has only been up for a few days but I have a whole bunch of links to get up there over the next little while.

Owls

Earlier in the year I was putting together a whole bunch of different ideas that I thought might be good for my sister-in-laws clothing company - Red Rascal

I had read on a design site that their tip for the next big thing was Owls. Deer, stags and antlers were on the way out (about 5 years ago i reckon) and they were predicting owls. So I started doing a bunch of owls. Owls are great to draw, they have a few simple characteristics. Anyway Red Rascal had already done a bunch of owls and didn't need anymore, so here they are.

Some Patterns

Ever since I saw a mind blowing Islamic exhibition in Venice back in the early 90's I have been interested in those ancient patterns that evolve from simple geometric shapes.

This is the first one that I copied into my sketchbook to try and understand. It was on the wall in the great Alhambra Castle in Southern Spain.

It is really quite simple made from a quarter of a square and a quarter of a circle... now try to draw it freehand.

 And this one is based on a similar idea using just circles and squares.

This is a bit more modern and was tricky to make as a vector because of the underlapping and overlapping but it makes a great all over pattern. It could make a great fence.

Here are some other little self contained patterns that you might see on a bowl, a buckle or the head of an axe, etc. overlapping forms that combine to make other shapes.

This final design was pretty common in one form another (not always with fish) and can be found on the bottom of a bowl which makes good sense, especially if you are having fish soup.

 Anyway, that is my little rant about patterns, I am always on the look out for them and they can be found just about everywhere people have had a bit of time to decorate a functional object. It happens less now days but good patterning is all over stuff from before the middle of the 20th century, buildings, manhole covers, fencing, balconies, brickwork, tiling, ceramics, wrought iron, carved wood, porcelain, anything just go into a city and look for it.

Berg, Claudia and Lucky Joe

Hello, long time no post.

I have been busy with a bunch of things I will reveal shortly. I thought I had better get some new posts up with some of the other work I have been doing this year.

Here is a picture I did for some friends, Bergen and Claudia and Lucky Joe. These guys live up in Castlemaine and we went up recently to catch up with them. We had missed their birthdays so I made this picture and got a nice A3 print of it made.

It has a sort of old fashioned comic book look to it with everything coloured and textured with mechanical lines and ben day dots. I started of using just the 4 basic printing colours but along the way I added a few more colours.

Another vector portrait

Howdy and Hi,

yeah, it has been a while between posts but that is because I have been busy.

I landed a 6 week job at Iloura as a matte painter for a feature film, which was exciting. I can't say much about it until the film comes out later in the year. Well I could at least tell you that it is set in Tokyo at the very end of WWII and is called "Emperor." I was amazed at the crew that Iloura has put together and how much it had changed since I last worked there 15 years ago!

I have also been trying to get an idea for a business off the ground with my brother Simon. A lot more about that soon...

Anyway I found this vector that I did a while ago and realised that it was another of the saw-tooth portraits (as seen in my last post) so here is another one, well two versions, because I can't decide which colourway I like.