Fremonsters

Last night was the Fremont Zombie Walk. They were attempting to break the world record for the most zombies gathered in one area or some such thing. So like a busker I cobbled together this idea at the last minute thinking that this might be a great opportunity to A) Promote my website and book B) Draw from life (or from death whichever you prefer) and get paid a little C) Draw zombies so that if I messed up, nobody would know and D) Get out into the public and mix it up a little. I mean, I figured why not try it at least once?

So how did it go?
I worked my ass off!
It was a non-stop flow of people from 6:30-7 until 9:30. I never looked beyond the clients I was drawing and so I really couldn't tell what the heck was going on. It was a blur. I so wanted to chill afterwords but was too damn tired so I left the masses to feed on themselves.

Ryan Reiter and the people that volunteered were real pros. They were organized, friendly and really had their act together. To be honest though I stood out like a sore thumb. I think I was the only person there who wasn't covered in blood or viscera.

Anyways, thanks to those who stopped by.

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Down in the Digital

Doing the digital thing with my own Cintiq this time. It's been interesting as I've been bouncing around from traditional illustration to illustration these past few weeks. Jumping onto the Cintiq I tend to want to paint everything and not let the layers do some work. Regardless I think my color seeing is helping me make choices instead of searching aimlessly for solutions.

More to come...

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Werkin' In the Studio

This is currently in the pre-production stages as I'm trying to solidify my synopsis and story. Getting people to read a story and give valuable feedback is quite difficult. I always run into this and short of hiring someone I usually rely on a few trusted people. Not trusted in the sense of I want them to tell me how great it is, but in the sense that they know what I'm trying to do and are not trying to recreate the story in the way they think.
I'm also developing another project at the same time as it helps to keep from getting stale too early on in this lengthy process. At the very least I have two stories that I can hang some illustration work on, which for me is absolutely necessary. Illustrating anything without a story causes me to wander aimlessly.

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Droll Troll

Just a quick study to cover a bad one in my sketchbook. I don't paint people enough from life and it's getting to the point where I've built up an anxiety about it. One of the things I'm doing to counter this is to get back to just painting still lifes and self-portraits. If I can get my paint handling down again then as Sergei Bongart puts it, "If you can paint still life you can paint portrait."

Yeah, we'll see. Dead russians are always trying to make painting look easy.

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Winthrop Washington

We got back a few days ago from a family in-law outing. Everywhere you look you could set up and paint. I was busting at the seams to get to it. The tough part about these things is getting enough sleep, but if you want interesting light early morning is one of the best ways to go about it.

Getting up early is never a problem for me but getting to bed earlier certainly was. Never seemed to get enough quality sleep especially with kids and a dog around. There's never a shortage of noise. At least I had a bed all to myself which sort of made up for it.

The sky was the hardest to get right. Without mixing the correct blue the time of day doesn't really hit you right. I fell down a few times but some of the studies did prove to work out okay. I figured out what I did wrong with the water only until after it was finished.

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Digital Mountainscape

Spent some time this weekend in Winthrop, Washington at a cabin near a river. Did some gouache and watercolor paintings while I was there. Got inspired to throw around a little color after the fact though I wished I would have spent more time doing some better layouts.

I'll post the traditional stuff here in a bit.

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Throw Away

While straightening up the studio and putting a lot of work into storage I got inspired to ink. Of course when that happens there's very little forethought or study of what I'm going to do. Besides I'm waiting for some computer stuff to get here so I can continue some of this digital painting again.

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