Fashion Thumbnails

I love the Hel Looks fashion blog, and every once in a while I'll do some black and white studies in Sharpie to get some cool fashion ideas. It's interesting to note which outfits work because of their contrasting value, and which ones completely fall apart in grayscale without the warm and cool colors that play off one another. One thing they all have is a good or unusual silhouette. The second half of the page is a more down-to-earth set of styles.

Elrod the Hilbilly

Here are the pencil sketches for a character I was drawing for fun the other day while watching "Call of the Wildman". That show has all kinds of crazy-looking people that are more bizarre than anything I could think up on my own. It's awesome!

Also, a random page of character exploration stuff, just to show I haven't been slacking on my visdev work TOO much

De Young goodness

I've been on kind of a dog kick lately, so when I saw a pair of these life-size pups carved into a mantelpiece at the De Young museum today, I had to take pictures.

There was other cool stuff too, including a head study by Frank Duveneck that blew me away. What a painter!

I'm still figuring out the best camera settings like shutter speed, color stuff etc, so no complaining if the photos are a bit blurry or weird colors. Also, I'm getting a weird lens distortion. One of these days I'll figure out how to photoshop that out. 

More dog stuff

I did these a couple of months ago, just for fun. I think I was looking at the amazing Jin Kim's concept art for Bolt at the time.

At the dog beach

We went to the dog beach today and it was a lot of fun watching all the unleashed dogs running around like crazy! My favorite was when they form a 'dog tornado', chasing each other in circles and gathering more and more dogs as they go. 

There was also a white bird, I think it was an egret, wading around in the ice plant nearby. They are very graceful and seem to be fearless of humans and dogs. 

Christmas Cards

Forgot to post my christmas cards from last year. Each one was different; I wanted to make more but I didn't have time...
I sketched them in with a red col-erase pencil, then used a speedball dip pen to ink, then washed in watercolor on top of that. I like the retro look that comes from limiting the pallette to only red and muted green.

Church People

Happy New Year!

This is the digital color test of a painting I did for my mom for Christmas. The final was done in watercolor washes over the pen linework.