In Class Demo

Here's a little gouache in class demo I didn't get to finish in class - I'm still trying to figure out how to a finish in an hour.   I'm just going to walk through the process a bit.

Here's the finished piece.

Hour 1:  Working thin, and not using the full opacity of the gouache, I'm laying some basic warms and cools, focusing a bit more in the cools in the shadows.  Im basically laying on some color and then subtracting out to maintain a little bit of a value structure.  In all of these color in the face, I have a little bit of a pale coppery blue-green (besides the hair).  I want that to be a unifying theme color.

 Hour2: I kind of liked how the warm we're looking on top of the cool - so I decided to warm the whole thing up a bit, and lay in the background color.  I'm also starting to shape the hair a bit, and looking at how all those curls are working structurally.

Hour 3: Ok - so I like the warm, but now its too warm - so I bring back my tealy base color: a little darker, in the sky, and bit cooler on the ground.  In the sky, I'm painting thick on top, going lighter on the bottom toward the horizon, so I can have a little dusky feel.  I subtract out some secondary highlights in the hair, and add some darks in the hair.  This is why I love gouache - you can still make some big changes, and blend.

 Hour 4:  I figure I'll work in a little narrative imagery, and after listening to a podcast about the wizard of Oz, I figure I'll make it about a woman who finds religion after her house is destroyed by a tornado.  I add some cools in the hair - same cools as the ground color.  I also threw in a white morning glory in her hair.  I want to pull the foreground forward, so I added some more warms to the ground, and a few stars in the sky.  I also like the pale of her eyes after hour 1, so I brought back the pale blue.

The Hamptons!

 In all the vacation madness of summer, I neglected to post a new map I created for Scene Magazine about the Hamptons.  This one was a lot of fun, and a lot of work.  I try to have as much real info as possible, while still manipulating the figures, typography, and scenes for a fun composition.  This one was initially a single spread, which after the first round of sketches, got turned into a double spread covering the bottom half of four pages, along with a type design (above).  The finished painting is below.  I decided to do a little more mixed media, with ink, water color and gouache on Arches 300lb hot press to have a lot of slight textural differences - gouache dry brush, watercolor dry brush, watercolor full soaks, gouache line, and micron .005 line.  Thank you to Jasmine Lombardi for working with me on this (it went right down to the wire!), and Scott Dvorin from the Observer for throwing my name in the basket.  And congrats to Scott on his new baby and new endeavors!

Below is the second set of sketches with the stretch to 4 pages.

Here's the first set of sketches below for the initial spread (two sketches and two type designs).

Medicaid: The Sinking Ship

New editorial piece for Annemarie Neff at American Medical News about the team effort being used to consolidate and help out Medicaid (symbolized with the boat).  Basically doctors and hospitals are trying to consolidate medicaid patients and work as a team to help relieve some of the cost while providing better care.  Medicaid is a huge drain on the national debt and a system in drastic need for reform.  It's also an essential program in need of saving and not to do so could be catastrophic.  Possibly even cata-seamonster-trophic.  
     I had a good time painting this using gouache on hot-press paper to lay out the color structure and then subtracting out highlights with a wet brush.  By heavily wetting the areas before the initial color blocking, I can bleed in some other subtle color variation (the more purplish red in the sea monster and the variation in the blue of the water) to get a little more depth in the painting without over powering the line work.

"North by Northwest Passage" for Alfred Hitchcock Show, "Suspense and Gallows Humor"

"North by Northwest Passage"
22" x 22" Gouache on paper

 I've loved "North by Northwest" since the first time I saw it - the visuals, the music, the tiny razor gags, but most of all, the urban/rural scene hopping, from New York, to Chicago, to South Dakota.  So - I thought I'd throw together a sort of scenic chart of all the actual locations in the movie - the only fictional one being the Northwest Airlines terminal, which no longer exists and I couldn't find reference for (but for "North by Northwest", I figured I'd take a little liberty).  Also not included are the 1212 Michgan Ave Auction house and the hospital in Rapid City, as they were shot on soundstage in Hollywood.    Even with that, it was a bit of a beast.  Lots of research, lots of windows . . . The cars are also accurate from the initial 57 Skoda 440 cab to the '51 White Freightliner the plane crashes into, to the '52 Ford Customline Cary Grant rescues the girl in.  I took color from the footage to get some of that "technicolor" feel, and blatantly ripped off Saul Bass' opening credit arrows to show the action.

Anywho - the show opens at the Gallery1988 Venice location on April 13th!

(detail)

progress - pencils to color blocking, to black line on top

The remnants of my notes.

Reginald Chelmsley Wigglebottom - Gouache demo

Hour 1 (plus a little)

Hour 2 (plus a little)

Here a little in-class demonstration I did for my Methods and Media I class at Pratt.  Demos can be a little fickle and rushed, but I like how this one came out.  I usually do weird colored renditions of celebrities from photos for demos (see the otis below) but this time I thought I'd just paint out a character of my own with more of a realistic feel.  I started out with laying the background green, and then layering on the major base colors in the face: the brownish lower portion, the reddish nose and ears and warmer forehead and cheeks.  Then I subtracted out some of the lighter portions with a brush and rag, and then just continued building in light and darks.  In the second hour I just kept shaping the face, rounding it out and adding detail in the wrinkles as well as finishing out the frilly cravat and jacket.  Then I flattened out the background tone to highlight the texture in the face with a couple twinkley stars for giggles.  Ba-boom.  Wigglebottom.

Haunted Hizzle!

A little haunted house that's one of about 15 buildings that are part of a new advertising job I'm working on . . . More to come later!