Next month one of my paintings will be on display as part of the group gallery show FAERIE at Krab Jab Studio. I will be attending the opening reception on February 9th from 6 to 9 pm. I'm excited and honored (and a little nervous) to have my work hanging alongside some of the masters of fantasy art! If you're local to the Seattle area, I hope to see you there!
Ushering in a month of beauty and magic, Krab Jab Studio is hosting FAERIE, a group show filled with some of the world's brightest and legendary fairy artists.
Curated by local artist Julie Baroh (with the assistance of Tara Larsen Chang), this show is a dream come true. Raised on books illustrated by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Brian Froud, Julie has been an admirer of fairy art nearly all her life and continues this tradition in her own work. As facilitator for Krab Jab Studio, Julie sought to include an art show that allows the public to see for themselves the wonder of the fae world, through the eyes of contemporary artists.
Featuring the fairy art of: Amy Brown, Allen Williams, Brian Froud, David Thiérrée, Echo Chernik, Emily Fiegenschuh, Eric Orchard, Fred Fields, Gary Lippincott, Gregory Manchess, Heather Hudson, JB Monge, Julia Jeffrey, Julie Baroh, Justin Gerard, Myrea Pettit, Norman Taber, Olivier Villoingt, Omar Rayyan, Poul Dohle, Sheila Rayyan, Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, Tara Larsen Chang, Terese Nielsen, Toby Froud, Todd Lockwood, Tom Kidd, Tory Taber, Wendy Froud, and Yoann Lossel.
The film tells the story of Wayne White, an artist I was not previously familiar with, but should have been because his fingerprints are all over one of my favorite childhood TV shows: Pee-Wee's Playhouse.Beauty is Embarrassing explores what it's like to be an artist and the feelings of accomplishment and self-doubt that go hand-in-hand with creating things for a living.
Wayne White's wife, Mimi Pond, is a cartoonist and writer. I would have liked to hear even more about her work. Because I am also an artist married to another artist, I like getting a peek into the ways other artist couples make their relationships work.
To see the documentary, check your local PBS station to see ifit's being broadcast in your area. If the air date has passed there is usually a late night re-run soon afterwards.
ImagineFX Magazine has a recurring feature called "Artist in Residence," which showcases the studios of working artists. Issue #91 (currently on newsstands in the US) takes a peek into the studio Vinod and I share in the house we rent.
Here's a little extra info that wasn't printed in the article about the challenge of setting up a shared studio :
A
casualty of moving to a new state every four years for the past
decade, our studio is ever changing. It's not perfect, but we have
everything we need to run our freelance illustration business.
When
setting up the studio we usually pick the largest bedroom in the
house. Dividing a room into our own personal workspaces can sometimes
be a challenge. In the past, we have experimented with different
set-ups including placing our drafting tables back-to-back or facing
one another. During the year that we lived in an apartment in Wisconsin, we each had a studio in a separate room, but that wasn't
much fun because we'd have to yell across the apartment while we were
working to talk to each other.
Bonus photo!
Random toys, my dry erase schedule board that I try my best to keep up with, and a drawing by my niece:
Toy shelf: required for every art studio.
Two minor corrections to the printed article: Vinod is currently a senior concept artist at Motiga–no longer with Monolith Productions. We also haven't lived in an apartment for about eight years now. There appears to have been some confusion in the article when some of the text we provided was edited for space. (The latter correction is obviously not a big deal, but I'm a perfectionist.)
As our fellow work-at-home artists would probably agree, an art studio can get pretty messy. I always do my best to clean up the area around my desk after each project, but rarely do I have the time to tackle the entire studio. One of the goals we had been wanting to accomplish for the past several months was to clean up and re-organize our studio supply closet.
Even more junk lurks behind that door.
We finally got the chance to begin the task during the holidays. We made an even bigger mess dragging everything out of the closet and stacking it into piles in our workspace and hallway which forced us to finish the job quickly if we wanted to reclaim our home office.
We pawed through big cardboard boxes full of unused canvases and drawing pads, old paintings, scraps of matboard, and various other odds and ends. We also looked through a half-dozen old portfolios of artwork to see what was worth keeping and what wasn't. There were product design drawings from our time at The Franklin Mint and concept drawings Vinod did at Ravensoft. There was a lot of my student work from Ringling. There was also artwork from my childhood, some of which was close to 25 years old. We pulled out drawing after drawing, sharing (and laughing over) our old artistic triumphs and failures.
When I was
taking my first art classes as a child, for some reason drawing with
colored pencil on black board was all the rage. Maybe the cool effect of the bright colors standing out against the dark paper gave kids like me a greater sense of accomplishment. I had a
bunch of these old colored-pencil-on-black drawings including this totally rad name plate I made, probably circa
late elementary–early middle school:
I think maybe this belongs on my new business card...
*So who remembers the video game Flashback? I didn't have the right system to play it on, so I rented a Sega Genesis solely to play that game. I guess my love for Flashback hinted that Blade Runner would eventually become one of my favorite movies.
Why do so many life drawings of animals feature reclining poses? (Hint:stop moving!)
Before creating the simple gouache painting I made to celebrate 2013, I did a few quick rabbit studies while playing with my bunny friend. Most of the sketches took around a minute or two. He didn't sit still for much longer!
As I explained in Part 1 of this series, due to time constraints and
other considerations, I decided I would draw and paint the cover illustration
in separate layers, scan in the
pieces, and use Photoshop to complete the image. With the drawing and color comps finished, next I needed to decide which creatures to group together for each painting piece. Those that were overlapping each other made the most sense to paint together.
I decided to paint the background, forest behemoth and flying fish as one piece which the other paintings would eventually be layered over.
Then, I printed the sand dragon, Marmoken warrior, sphinx and chimera on one piece of watercolor paper, and the Minotaur, crowned ibak and hydra on another.
The remaining creatures (the glass dragon, Paki, pancake glider, hook-legged bodeo, and lantern bat) would all be painted separately.
"When using gouache, watercolor paper is a great surface. Depending on your preference, you can use a cold press paper, which has more texture and is able to hold large amounts of water for very wet washes, or hot press paper which has a smooth finish but can not hold heavy washes as easily. This demo was created on 140 lb. Arches cold press watercolor paper.
If you have access to a scanner to scan your drawings and a printer that can handle watercolor paper, the easiest way to transfer your finished drawing down to the paper is by simply printing it! Consult your printer's settings to see what size, shape and thickness of paper your printer can accept. Another option is to take your drawing files to a local print shop to see if they can print it on watercolor paper for you. You can also transfer your drawing the old fashioned way, using a light box to trace your finished image onto your watercolor paper. If you're feeling confident, you can also start a fresh drawing directly on the paper you plan to paint on. In that case, no transferring is necessary!
Once your drawing is transferred down to your paper, it's time to secure the paper to a rigid surface for painting. Watercolor paper tends to buckle when a lot of water is used, especially at the wash stage. If you don't want to deal with annoying ripples and wrinkles in your paper, stretching the paper is the answer.
1. Prepare a rigid surface, preferably any type of board that can handle staples. If you can find a wood soft enough, you can use a light duty staple gun to staple your paper down. If you prefer not to staple your paper, you can also use brown gum art tape, which sticks the painting to the surface when wet. You must leave space on the sides of your painting when you use this tape, however. Because it sticks permanently to the paper, it must be cut off of the painting when you're finished.
2. Fill a utility sink, large basin, or even bathtub with water a few inches deep. Immerse your watercolor paper in the water for 2 or 3 minutes. When you remove the paper, hold it up and allow the water to drain off the surface. The paper should be thoroughly saturated after having soaked up water.
3. Spread the paper out onto your board and staple all around the edges, keeping the staples a few inches apart. Make sure the staples are close to edges of the paper, not in the actual image area of your illustration. You don't want holes in your final picture!
4. Tape off the edges of your painting with artist's tape, up to the borders you wish to define. This will give your painting a crisp edge and will avoid water spillage over the sides of your paper, preventing a big mess.
After your paper has been stapled down to your board and is completely dry and flat, it's time to start painting!"
Want to see this process step by step?
Then watch this excellent demo of the paper stretching process made by Terese Nielsen:
A few years ago I accepted a project on which I worked mostly in my off-time...mostly. It was a project that unexpectedly spanned several years, much to the dismay of the small and dedicated group of people with whom I was working. I was happy with what I was doing, but incredibly embarrassed about the length of time it was taking me to do it. The project was a privately commissioned sculpture of Link (from the Legend of Zelda video game series) that would become a model kit for the group members' personal collections––not to be reproduced or sold.
When I finally completed the sculpture, I sent it to Joachim Höstlöf for clean up, and a few months later, I received my copy of the kit from the project coordinator, Derek Kan. I admired the excellent casting job, then carefully packed the kit pieces away in a box, hoping I'd have the time to put it together and paint it someday.
Derek's kit was completed last December, and he's sharing the process of the sculpt's creation from its humble wire armature beginning, to its beautifully painted completion on his website.
The finished kit, painted by John Allred.
I would not have been able to finish the sculpture without the encouragement of the group, and definitely not without the help of Joachim, the very talented model builder and sculptor who made the beautiful shield and swords and prepared my sculpture for the the molding and casting process.
The Cover Painting: Color Comps It's hard to believe, but it's been a whole year since I last posted about the making of The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures cover. Whoops! Instead of making another massive post, I've decided to break up what's left into more manageable segments with the hope I can finish the series in a more reasonable amount of time. In Part 1, I discussed the process of creating the drawing for the cover to The Explorer's Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures. Now I'll move on to the making of the painting. First, I wanted to do some color comps. Since the creatures had all been painted previously for the book's interior art, I already knew what colors to make them. But I still needed to work out exactly what I wanted to do for the background of the image. I knew I wanted something simple since the focus is on the creatures. Additionally, I needed to leave some space uncluttered for the cover text. I also wanted a very colorful cover, so I skipped what would typically be the part of my color study process where I try to work out a specific color palette. To do the studies, I printed several tiny versions of the cover drawing onto a piece of watercolor paper and blocked in the color quickly with gouache. I only painted the creatures once, painted a few backgrounds, and then scanned everything in and played with various combinations in Photoshop.
Study number two became the model for the final cover image.
