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

Sketch dump with fancy costume and tricky paper.

Been moving towns, and finishing projects and a myriad of other time-sucking things that keep me from my sketchbook. On the plus side I've been refocusing on more observational work and figure drawing. (See the racy nudey stuff on DAS )
I also had the opportunity to draw some dope burlesque models at an event my buddy, Frank Stockton (people have heard him for some reason), knew about.
He even did a lil ditty in my book. I think he dug my brushpen.


And here are some more straightforward sketchbook pages of my girlfriend's pitbull, and my family. Both enjoy spending time on the floor.

I spent some time playing with Yupo paper again. Still one of the strangest surfaces to paint on. I used the ugliest model I could find at 4am to do some lighting studies in watercolor.



Lastly, I had the chance to speak to a kindergarten class about drawing animals. After the talk, I did some requests out of my head of the more popular animals. You may notice the chimp looks a bit exasperated... possibly similar to how I looked when the whole class requested I draw a tiger out of my head.
...Then I requested some of my own.
Thanks for reading,
S

Flowers and Chipmunks

Some more work from the book project I'm working on. Trying to play up the adorable in these paintings.
Also seeing how many flavors of green I can use at once without failing too hard. I had some opportunities to really play with light and value, which I think were somewhat successful.

More to show coming very soon. Thanks for reading!
-Scott

Then I chose to expose myself

So I hit the century mark on my Photobooth library and figured I should pay a lil tribute to the beautiful convenience of Mac's built-in webcam application. I recently learned I'm not entirely alone in exploiting this for reference sake, as my buddy, Marc Scheff, recently covered the same topic. And while I don't go to the extremes of posing and lighting as he does, Paolo Rivera dedicates his wednesday blogposts to showing how limber he is in his reference.

So, in the interest of solidarity, here is how I spend a good chunk of my average day... posing spastically, alone in a dark room.





I've learned a couple things about myself in the process.
-I rarely adjust the light for any of these pictures to relate to what I'm painting. This usually is more from deadline constraints than laziness, but I should probably give a little more thought to it.
-when I'm trying to get a single hand just right... I pose my entire torso and face.
-if its over 65 degrees, I tend to forego a shirt.
-my hair is ridiculous

Lines and colors!

I almost forgot! The nice folks over at Linesandcolors.com were kind enough to feature my work! It was an unexpected and awesome surprise to know some folks were paying attention to my work, my rollovers in particular. My article is here but make sure you explore the blog. It.is.awesome.

Thanks again to Charley Parker at Lines and Colors for the generosity.

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