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

Winter Sketch Dump

Subway sketches and exercises from a sketchbook I just finished out. I keep a variety of pens on me and see what each is capable of, or more accurately, what I'm capable of with them. Hope you enjoy.








-S

Baba Yaga doodles

Been shooting around ideas for a Baba Yaga painting. I knew nothing about her or her story aside from being a witch, Russian and living in the forest in a hut on chicken legs. So before doing any research I started going off that to see what happened, then slowly adding more educated images from looking up her folklore.

I figure posting this will get me to actually follow through with the painting in a somewhat timely fashion.

Also, after reading Sam Bosma's blog and seeing how much prelim exploration he does... I feel so damn lazy for doing just these so far.

Ol' women be quiltin ...in color!

I've been busier than my blog would suggest. Stupid, lying blog.

These are some recently finished paintings for a children's story pitch I've been working on. The first two I showed the finished drawings for a while back and forgot to post the finishes. Well, now I'm fixing that problem:

And here are some even more recent images from the same series.

She likes quiltin.

And there is a quickie I did last week for Derick Gonzalez at The Wall Street Journal on blacklisting job applicants.

Because of a busy month of running around for funerals and social events (even a trip to Montreal that I really should write about, but haven't) I'm a little behind on a couple projects. But stay tuned for more nonsense soon.

-SB

A wintery mix of sketches

-Scott