Waking Prince continued....

A follow-up/addition to/companion of The Waking Prince is in the works. This time as a very cool app for the ipad.  Here are a some peeks into the new artwork that will be included...

 More to show soon. -Scott

Clark Gable sketch

 

On 20468 Petercook

Illustration superhero and pal, Irene Gallo, asked me to whip something up for this short story by Andy Duncan about the comedy duo Dudley Moore and Peter Cook.  I have to admit that I was shamefully ignorant of their existence before this assignment. My mom thought Dudley Moore was the cat's pajamas and I vaguely recalled he and Kirk Cameron trading bodies some some awesome 80's movie. But, Peter Cook was completely new to me.

After watching Bedazzled (oh that movie with Brendan Frasier? ...no ), I found I'd missed out on a plethora of awesome. And discovered just how hot Raquel Welch was in her prime. The movie on Netflix, I highly suggest you get there. 

    Duncan's story made a lot more sense after getting familiar with the source material, obviously. Being very British, the plot was mainly the two characters chatting over tea, in a ship, in spaaaace.

 

Many bad likeness sketches later, I had a couple arrangements I was happy with. I dug the idea of them orbiting each other, or in a very sterile overly lit clean room with space portholes. And the more I could hint at the 60's/70's idea of the future! the better. Irene loved the first sketch since they were drinking tea while wearing helmets, something that didn't actually occur to me while drawing it.

 

Netflix helped me out again with easy reference screen grabs. And a some quick searches led me to the supremely campy jumpsuits from Lost in Space.

The tightened sketch I printed onto watercolor paper. I recently discovered Marvel badass Paolo Rivera works in a similar method but with gouache. But.. you know, he's a lot better at it.

And just to prove my job is easy, my fiance, Bonnie jammed this out in under an hour. She made a solid point.

Submerged Gothic

Lindsey Burrows at The American Interest got in touch with me looking for an image to convey the current state of the real estate industry. She and her colleagues were pretty set on a parody of Grant Wood's American Gothic, but underwater. I committed to adding my name to the list of artist's who've riffed on that painting (CF Payne, Mark Fredrickson, and a slew of Mad magazine guys are darn good company). 

Conveying the sense of light streaming through water was perhaps the biggest challenge and the most enjoyable part of this painting. I gathered a bunch of reference, only a fraction shown here, and leaned hard on James Gurney's Color and Light to figure everything out.  And, my buddy Lars's kraken painting (above right) was a badass guide as well.

In other news, I recently found out my literate squid painting created for Tor.com's short story "Ch-ch-changes" by Michael Bishop was accepted to Spectrum 19! Huzzah!

Thanks for reading,
Scott

Microvisions!

This is my contribution to this year's Microvisions Student Scholarship Auction.  I can confidently say that I've never fretted and worried over a painting like I did with this. A mix of intense intimidation, seeing the other artists' work trickle in, plus being too busy to start this earlier, and a couple sketch snafu's led quite a bit of self-doubt and panic.

After some exploration, I knew that I wanted to depict a love affair between a gorilla and his banana. I had this whole Gone With the Wind inspired scene, with the gorilla's hair tussled in the breeze, cooing at his unpeeled love. I sent this sketch to Greg Manchess to see if he got the joke and he kindly pointed out that it looked INCREDIBLY phallic.  I really don't know how I missed that. The issue was easily resolved by zooming out and making it very clear that it wasn't attached to the primate's groin. A big thanks to Greg. That could have been awkward.

And here are the rest of the ridiculously gorgeous submissions. From l to r, top to bottom: Rebecca Guay, Brian Despain, Scott Bakal, Terryl Whitlatch, John Picacio, Peter de Sève, Julie Bell, Scott Gustafson, Dan Dos Santos, Chris Rahn and Nathan Fowkes

You can find more info about the Microvisions auction here. It's a great fundraiser for students, and I'm proud to be a part of it.

Alice's tea party and something about sports

David Bamundo of the Wall Street Journal gave me a call with an overnight deadline. Luckily, he had an assignment that was right up my alley, so instead of preparing for a painful night of coffee and paint, I prepared for an awesome night of coffee and paint.

The story was about how Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, created the modern bracketing format used in sports tournaments. Nice and straightforward, lots of imagery to choose from (even if, due to my ignorance of sports, I needed David to send me an example of a tournament bracket).

And as a bonus, it printed larger and better than anything I've had in the Journal this far. 

Also, recently, I had the opportunity to do my very first live demo with my buddies at Awesome Horse Studios.  Feel free to watch me ramble about what I'm doing. A fair amount of my friends chimed in to mock my thumb ring, my taste in music and my existence. It was quite fun.

Here is the result:

value guide on one side, the result of a very distracted painting on the other.

And now I have my Microvision is in the works, so stay tuned...

Thanks!

New stuff and Microvisions!

Between drawings I've been trying to play with different papers, rather than the cheap stuff I'm used to. Here is the result of one experiment with Fabriano 300lb Hotpress watercolor paper. Extremely nice to use, but tends to suck in the paint, demanding more layers to hit darker values. On the flip of that same quality, the variations in value are very easy to manipulate. 

But I digress. I drew the devil, a giant ape, my dog, a lion and other nonsense. Let's not get too heady. 

In other awesome news, I've been asked to contribute to this year's Microvisions auction. I'm honored while trying not to panic. It's not enough that top talent in the fantasy/scifi art field are asked to do these small paintings, but they usually kick major ass. Just a quick google search will show the quality of years past.

Now I just gotta figure out what I'm gonna paint, then not screw it up.  (Suggestions welcome.)