Harvey Weinstein

Loving some of the new photoshop brushes.

Have a good downfall Harvey...

P.Macca in NYC 1964

I like doing this sort of portrait using a whole bunch of technical brushes and printing textures.

Beatle Macca in NYC 1964

A few autoportraits

I am busy applying for jobs and so need to update my business card. I have been playing with a few self-portraits...might be a bit cartoony for a business card though. Would you employ this creep?

House Husband Gyton Grantley

Here is another vector based caricature. This one of House Husband and Underbelly TV star, Gyton Grantley.

Gyton Grantley

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...

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.

The sawtooth technique

Years ago I made this linocut and I liked the way that I had been able to define form without using lines but just sharp sawtoothed shapes of various sizes. 

Original "sawtooth" Linocut

A few years later I tried another sawtoothed linocut this time sketching out my rough on paper, scanning that and making a more exact sketch with straight lines and pointy bits in illustrator.

vector sketch for linocut

I also made a painting of gigantic early horror actor Rhondo Hatton from a photo I have since found out this photo is quite famous and often copied. In the painting I used the sawtoothed technique and limited the palette to 3-4 tones. I was thinking about making some stencil art based on it.

Rondo acrylic painting

This week I have been revisiting the painting and made it into a vector portrait. I liked that the vectors let me fool around a bit more with exact line and shape placement and the colours. Also the lines are so much sharper and pointier than in the painting. 

Rondo vector

After that I was looking for another portrait to do and found that Life magazine has just uncovered a very early photo session with a young Marilyn Monroe.  I picked a photo from that and cropped and treated it.

I brought the treated photo into illustrator and tried doing a straight image trace but that was overall too busy and complex So I had to smooth it out and simplify it a lot and then it did give me a few ideas in how to simplify my photoshop version.

Here is the first version which I drew in photoshop, it looked a bit weird and psycho.  I brought it into illustrator and reworked it a lot to tone down the eyes and simplify the face. It didn't end up with that many sawtoothed shapes but I think it it came out allright. 

photoshop

vector

I am looking to make more of these sort of portraits. They are quite graphic and would make good posters or screen prints. Once the basic shapes are there you can tweak them for hours, adding, deleting, changing colours... it's fun.

Vincent Price Caricature

I've been working on this caricature of Vincent Price over the last week. I love Price's voice and demeanour. The regal king of horror who never took it too seriously. The final background is supposed to have some sort of cheesy 70's Asian restaurant vibe.

I found a great site that has a lot of his audio recordings which I listened to while doing the picture. (insert maniacal laugh here...)

Here is a work in progress image.


My initial sketch and colour guide, it started as a pretty straight portrait but soon changed into a caricature, much like Vincent Prices own career arc.

illustrators Australia A3 exhibition 2011

Here are some images of songwriters from a series I am doing.

That new guy, Bobbie Dylan and the dark and brooding Nick Cave.

Quite graphic with Ben Day dots, strong lines.







I did meet Nick once but forgot to ask if I could call him my surrogate cousin.

These images were printed for the Illustrators Australia annual A3 show. There are some really good images from Dean Gorissen, Nigel Buchanan, Anton Emdin and especially a previous lecturer, the brilliant Andrea Innocent.
A3 show link