Troublesome cubist painting...

 

Still not quite there but getting closer....
Never done a painting like this before, could maybe have left it a few sessions ago...

Harvey Weinstein

Loving some of the new photoshop brushes.

Have a good downfall Harvey...

2017!

OK 2017!! This is the year where I really up the ante on putting up more artwork. I have a few ready to go, so here is something I did over summer... took Lottie rockpooling...

Aussie poster

I'm a big fan of Peter Drews Aussie posters which I have been seeing all over town over the last few months.

I thought I would do my own version of a true blue Ozzie...

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

photoshop brushes

I have been playing with a few new photoshop brushes found at various places online...

Walking dude

Sartorialist denim man

Stamp face

Stamp face 1

Here is a little cubistic stamp face i whipped up last week. Really soft rubber to carve, even softer than eraser rubber. The trick is to not cut too much off as it cuts like butter.

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.

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.

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

Dylan Portrait

Well, I have been doing a bunch of different stuff towards a Bob Dylan portrait but still not sure which direction the final will take.

The black and white version evolved from a large pen and brush ink-drawing and an acrylic painting. I enjoyed using Ben-Day dots to add tone, here is an almost finished coloured version.