Baseball, audiobooks, Spectrum and lots of coffee.

A little while back I had the luxury of a nice two week deadline for Library Journal. A fun crowd scene requiring a variety of faces in a theater enjoying audiobooks that was just complex enough to let me flex some rendering muscles and take my time.

With two days left to work up the final, I had to throw my relaxed pace out the window to jump into a overnighter for Wall Street Journal.

WSJ's illustration was on the growing lack of interest in baseball among America's youth. My goal was to show that disinterest through several generations. Having done all my rollovers, this actually came relatively naturally. I love the idea of one part of an image remaining constant while things evolve around it. (Speaking of... I found out that my Ada Lovelace Day rollover was also accepted into Spectrum 18! Pretty much the same idea-> Image below). 
    Having been what some would call "indoorsy" as a child, I had to do a fair amount of research about various sports equipment, uniforms, and heroes that would end up on posters. (Full disclosure: the extent of my baseball experience is signing up for tee ball as a child, going to games, hitting the ball, refusing to run, and sitting back down.)

50s/70's/90's/00's.  None of the above had a part in my own childhood.

Luckily Derick Gonzalez at the Journal was a bit more knowledgable and helped me out. I will take credit for the ever-so-subtle upgrade from old school to new school skateboard in the last two panels.

Again... replace all sports paraphernalia with Batman: The Animated Series/ make the boy chubby and pale.

Lots of fun working this one up.  Looking back, I kinda wish I used hot-press paper to calm the texture down. Still, I'm pretty stoked on how it turned out. Even better, it printed in full color (a gamble at WSJ) and by far the largest piece I've had in their paper.

So, one overnighter follows another now that my time was nearly up for Library Journal. I should say now that I know it's not exactly uncommon for an illustrator to do back to back overnighters, but hey, this was my first.

final approved sketch

Final and in context.

Even though I was dead-man painting at this point, I think it still stands up. Tried a lil something new keeping the headphones and media players unaffected by the darkness of the theater to pop a bit more. 


And here is the Ada Lovelace rollover I mentioned that was also accepted to Spectrum 18.

-S

The Silence of Eggs

A while back I was contacted by Sagoma Editore to do the cover and back cover for their upcoming book "The Silence of Eggs" or "Il Silenzio Dell'uovo" for those of you in Italy.  I received a brief, in awesome broken English, describing a fictional biography of a 19th century poet obsessed with the silence of things. They wanted to push the bizarrely humorous nature of a person stubbornly preoccupied with an egg's silence... as if the egg was holding out on the poet and the poet wasn't buying it. Oh, and another goal was to have the feel of high class literature. But,  you know... with an quiet egg.

I sent a couple ideas to see if I was in the ballpark of what they were looking for and quickly found out they really had no clue what they were looking for. Through a series of some of the most baffling art direction I've ever received, I produced a number of very loose sketches. 

The interrogation chair and the duct tape make me stupidly happy.

Of course they picked the only one I was sure they would not.

Yay.

So... I was to paint an egg for the front cover, with a monochromatic background. Before I could moan about the mind-numbing boredom of such a choice, the client sent a request for the back cover. He wanted the same egg, but now crushed by a frustrated poet's fist. Somehow, without knowing it, they asked me to create a rollover like I'd done many times before.

Of course, just the right flavor of angry/desperate/insane took a couple tries to nail down.

And despite all the struggle I'm pretty satisfied with the final. Maybe it's my narcissism since that poet is basically me with a mustache.

 -S

Paranormal Romance

Not all holidays are endorsed by Hallmark. When it comes to tweens and, from what I can tell, moms, a new Twilight Saga movie premiere is bigger than Christmas, Hannukah and the 3rd coming of Jebus combined. So I did my part to commemorate it. 

I looked up the imagery associated with the movies and got 99% steamy gazes and emo angst with dramatic lighting and stormy backgrounds. Why not throw a couple other classic paranormal romantics into the same ridiculous posing and lighting?

The pose and lighting were the most important to get down correctly. I stuck to one photo mainly, with one or two others to help with the overly shadowy parts.

From here, I just needed to find appropriate characters to switch in then light them the same way. I settled on the Munsters and Micheal Jackson's Thriller couple. The trickiest part was getting their likenesses in lighting they didn't pose in. Netflix screencaps help a lot for this.

Add some paint, and align everything in photoshop and we are all set. 

You can see the animated version on Tor.com here, where it is helping usher in their Paranormal Romance month. 

-S

New holidays, new art, new address, ole Scotty.

So March was a very full month. Somehow between packing, moving from Queens to CT and unpacking, I completed a handful of paintings and still had enough energy to celebrate my birthday in style.*

First up was Ada Lovelace Day which praises women in technology. Ada was the first computer programmer back when a calculator would have been considered magic. The holiday is typically celebrated by blogging. My contribution was my first three-part rollover showing the past, present and future of women in technology. Click here to see it in motion.




Following that, I packed up and moved to beautiful Danbury, CT for my temporary summer digs and immediately got crackin on an Easter rollover. Irene Gallo at Tor.com had some specific requests which I was happy to comply with... "Bunny + easter egg : fade : Astronaut + 'Alien' egg and face-hugger." I think I can find the will to do that.


And in between all of these, I continued with what has become a nice break between rollovers. These images for the quilting lady are already fun, but after trying to make multiple image work with each other, its nice to have a single image answer only to itself.


-Scott

*Authors note: "celebrating a birthday in style" entails imbibing girlie drinks including, but not limited to, Smirnoff Ice and dessert wine, and staging a spectacularly unskilled game of Bocce on a sunny day.

Calling a turd a turd.

I worked for Steven Brodner for a while when I first moved to NYC. Among the many things I learned while helping out in his Studio were two very wise quotes that stuck with me....

1: The most important drawing is the next drawing.

2: If the wine is no good, throw it out!

Both are basically his philosophy on work ethic. I'd watch him eat a stack of paper making sketches for a single likeness, most of which I'd drool over, but he knew his standard and wouldn't settle. He also was a believer in not falling in love with a drawing if it wasn't the right one.

Now here is a story of me not heeding this advice.

Normally when creating a rollover I have a plethora of imagery to think about and skew to my whim. Usually a holiday is associated with its own managerie of icons, mascots and folklore. This time, however, I was tasked to create something for the obscure "Pi Day" (aka 3/14) celebrated by math fans everywhere (or maybe just MIT.) So, what do I have for Pi Day? The irrational number starting with 3.14 and the symbol π. I had to relate it to something Tor.com would be interested in, so something scifi/fantasy/literary/comic booky. I thought something that was a classic riddle in stories could rollover to reveal the shapes in π. My buddy, Frank, mentioned the Mad Hatter's Riddle "How is a raven like a writing table?" which is a riddle with no answer (the Mad Hatter is mad). Seemed like a good excuse to do an Alice illustration.

My first clue that I was on the wrong track should have been that I'd never heard of that riddle.

But I went for it.

I tried to figure out how I'd like to show the scene of him asking the riddle. Something that wasn't too obviously inspired by Tenniel and Rackham.

Then I played with the shapes of π and ravens and desks to get them to be somewhat similar.
And I had the great idea of framing the drawing in cards. But ho! The cards are in order of Pi's digits!

I got to about this stage before I realized that the idea was bad. Very bad. Only a handful of people would understand what was happening, and the fact that the table and raven looked like π didn't actually mean anything.

So... even after committing to paint every-effing-one of those cards accurately, I knew it was toast. I had to start completely anew. (notice the creases from when I threw the painting out, only to dig it out of the trash to blog about the experience)

Now, with much less time to work, I rethought my whole Pi dilemma. In about three seconds I realized the word Pi was extremely accessible and had a much better idea involving the Pied Piper.

Moral of the story: Don't fall in love with an image if you know it isn't the right one. A pretty illustration that makes no sense is a bad illustration.

-S

Valentines in Oz and bloomin flowers.

Another holiday rollover for Tor, this time addressing Valentine's Day.

A lot of these holidays are fun to explore because of the either traditional or completely commercial imagery associated with them. Valentine's has a great variety of love, religion, and hallmark-ish symbols and images to choose from. I figured the most fun to paint would be cherubs or cupids following lovers in a very saccarine sweet scene of whimsical romance. I could avoid doing anything using hearts or chocolates that would have been a lil obvious.

So... even picturing possibilities in my head, I started thinking of Rococo style painter, Fragonard. He is primarily famous for (what I consider) over the top romantic paintings. Rosy cheeked men fawning over plump women with enormous dresses in flattering sideways light, in the middle of a lush garden. Adorable.

Beautiful, and very very ridiculous. So, one goal was to attempt to reach that level of overthetop ridiculosity. I started figuring out poses that would be graceful and flowing to see what possibilities would lie in the shapes. I quickly found that the cherubs would easily translate to flying monkeys, and with such an opportunity, I had to make the rollover involve the Wizard of Oz.

Narrowing down the scene a bit more to what I really wanted to show, thinking what could possibly relate to the rollover image, I settled on a carefree lover's chase. Cherubs circling above, aiming arrows of love.

Some tracing paper and photoshop magice later, I had my translation to the world of Oz.

And painted the finish.

... and another heartwarming image to leave you with.

-Scott

Tor.com 2: Birth of a nightmare: Cthulhu Santa process

I had just finished reading some H.P. Lovecraft, so his flavor of awesome was still fresh in my mind. Usually when thinking about making these I go through lots of failed ideas before connecting something random to something else that could relate in shape or texture. I landed pretty quickly on Santa's beard being similar to Cthulhu's tentacle mouth. After that, I just needed classic scene to befoul, like a child in Santa's lap.
My first thumbnail and loose drawing was just to figure out a pose and loose shape to play with. I knew I'd have to fit batlike wings in somewhere so Santa's chair became ornate to fit those needs. You can see I was playing with sizes and shapes still in the rough sketch from the doubled up legs on the child. From here I grabbed a bunch of reference of classic shots of Santa, Santa's lap, happy or screaming children, etc. I wanted it to read as the quintessential happy boy waiting to tell Santa how bad he wants a bb gun type thing. Old illustrators and Saturday Evening Post covers are a great place to start for that timeless imagery, google image search helped with the rest.
Then I refined the sketch to get the folds and figures believeable. The chair became important since drawing simple ornate carvings bores me, and reflect in the drawing. So I dropped hints of Cthulhu into the before shot, which was a lot more fun. Photoshop helped a lot in that I only had to draw half and then mirror it to get a nice symmetry.
Then I gather some reference for Cthulhu. Its a little strange to look up photo reference for something that doesn't exist, but in this case it was necessary. I had Lovecraft's prose to go by, but he writes in a very old timey way that can be interpreted different ways. So, seeing what some other artists have done helped understand what I wanted to do. Since the jump from before to after can't be too dramatic, I've found the best way to work is to use a print of the sketch and tracing paper to get the shapes equal. When the shapes match up, I retool them to be the after shot. Even then I end up tweaking and resizing a lot in Photoshop to get it right.
The before shot of Santa obviously dictated a lot of the after shot of Cthulhu. I had to pay attention to both my sketches and the finished paint to tell me where to go with value and color. Tentacles are always easy to play with, and matching the gestures of the beard and candy canes definitely added a nice touch. To finish off the rollover, I laid the after shot onto the before and erased out some of the wings to show some of the chair behind it, making the transition much smoother.

Tor.com is now hosting this image on their site during Cthulhu month, and you can buy it on holiday cards and baby onesies if you think your toddler needs exposure to the maddening abyss.

Thanks for reading!
-SB

Rollovers

Lately, I've been devoting a lot of my time to some simple animations. Initially, I used them as a frontispiece for my website (idea completely stolen from my buddy R. Kikuo Johnson. He made something beautiful, I figured I could make it cheap and crude in my own way.)

The first one I did was relatively simple. A quick unexpected outcome to the first image.
Then I realized that there was a bigger possibility for using that relatively (like geologically relative) "new" format of HTML code to do things that one image couldn't. Typically, a pretty normal image followed by a more outlandish one acheives the desired effect.I started playing with making the change more of a transformation than an animation. The key was keeping the shapes and gestures very similar.
More recently I've been attempting more ambitious compositions, and leaning toward more scifi and fantasy themes.Check back for more soon.
Scott