Hatch

Detail of a murder mystery book cover entitled "Endangered Species" by Nevada Barr, published by Harper Collins / Avon.
To see the entire piece, click here.
acrylics on illustration board

Crunchy

Detail from a Macy's poster I did a few years ago. It's acrylics on illustration board. To see the entire piece, click here.

Experiment

This is an attempt at a technique that Sam Weber demonstrated last winter at the Arts Forum. It involves doing something akin to a monoprint with acrylics, then painting the values and detail with watercolors. Mine was only marginally successful with these materials, so I did some fairly major tweaking in Photoshop.
Here are a few steps after the initial acrylic monoprint was done. It begins after a little of the face was started with watercolors. I wanted to document the acrylic part but it goes really fast and there's no time to stop and photograph it in progress.

Music

This is a piece I did for a very good friend who plays violin for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She runs an amazing summer chamber music program for very talented high-school kids in Atlanta called Franklin Pond Chamber Music. The group meets at her home, which is actually on a pond that is a frog haven, so the frog quartet was a natural theme. It was done entirely in Photoshop, aside from the instruments which I photographed and composited in to the artwork.

Frozen

Graphite on bristol paper with digital color.

Pattern

The Ivory Billed Woodpecker showed a pattern of decline for decades until it was finally declared extinct in the mid 1900's. There have been a few unofficial recent sightings in remote woodlands, and some groups are continuing to search for the Ivory-Bill, but it may be just a memory.
Of course, the checkerboard pattern of the graph also helps legitimize the image;-)

Cracked

Black prismacolor on coquille paper and linen weave paper with digital color.


This is the black and white drawing before digital coloring. It's a bit unusual in that in incorporates two different papers to achieve the textures; the clothing, or fabric areas are done on linen-weave acrylic paper which gives a woven texture to the drawing. That paper was carefully cut out and glued on to a sheet of fine Coquille paper, which has a texture of random, raised organic shapes. When you draw on each with a black Prismacolor pencil, you get two distinct textures which can be reproduced as "line" art, meaning that it doesn't have to be converted to halftone, as a grayscale drawing would be.

Here's a close-up of the two textures:

Theater

Not exactly Shakespeare, but it does take place on a stage. It was done to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Atlanta College of Art (see the number 100 anywhere??).

Impossible

Pigs flying, impossible constructions, multiple points of view...all indicators of things that can not be, yet actually came to pass!
Mixed media plus Photoshop

The Key

This was done as a process demo for one of my classes, and I offered it up for auction to a very worthy cause: the Art Fundraiser to Benefit the Atlanta Animal Welfare Committee. The auction/gala was this weekend... see comments below!!

Subtract

This was done as a book cover for a murder mystery called "Copy Kat" by Karen Kijewski. It was painted with airbrushed acrylics on illustration board, then some Photoshop effects were added later.

Celebrate

Lace

This piece was done for an article for Airbrush Action Magazine. The article was about using lace and other materials to airbrush through to get "lacy" effects. Several different paper doilies and lace patterns were used here to get that heavy brocade robe and the fancy collar.
The artwork was done with acrylics on gessoed masonite panel. The brick background was added later in Photoshop to give it a dark, catacomb look.

Rambunctious

Get it?... ram - bunk - shoes?? Oh well, it was fun.

Balloon

This is a re-post of one of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade posters I've done, since it's all about balloons. It was for the 2002 parade.
For those who are curious, this is all digital, mostly Photoshop with a bit of Illustrator for the type and the general structure of the Macy's building. The poster elements, such as each character, balloon and float, were done individually in layers, flattened, and then assembled into the final poster file. The poster was 21 x 27", 400dpi, CMYK. The final print file was about 600mb, but the working file, with the main elements on individual layers was over 2gb. If all the layers of every file that went into this were counted (and they weren't), there was something in the neighborhood of 2000 layers, give or take a few hundred.
Here's a slightly larger version of the poster.
And here are the others I've done for the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade (these are not digital).

Island

An oldie, but a good fit for the theme. This was done for an article in a travel magazine about the popularity of diving vacations.
Acrylics with a touch of Photoshop

Detach

acrylics on panel and digital

Legendary Senior Rockers

In my recent Materials and Techniques classes I've covered the mixed-media process that several illustrators use, primarily C.F. Payne and Mark English. It's a great technique for caricature portraits, so for the past two quarters I've done demos of some familiar rock and roll folks who have lots of character in their faces and in their body language. Here are the first two in what I hope will be several pieces celebrating the Senior Citizens of Rock and Roll.


Keith Richards
(scientists have claimed that the only living things capable of surviving a nuclear holocaust are cockroaches, rats, and this guy)


Bob Dylan

Foggy

This originally appeared as a cover for the novel "Liberty Falling" by Nevada Barr for Avon Books. It seemed like a good fit for the foggy theme, but I have to admit that I enhanced the foggy look a tad.
Acrylics and Photoshop

ICON5- NYC, July 2008

I had the great fortune of attending the 5th Illustration Conference (ICON5) in NYC the week of the 4th of July. Go here to get the skinny on what it was all about.