What These Are Supposed to Look Like

These images were originally done at 38x50 inches. Which is enormous. I tried to take photos of them. I tried to get other people to take photos of them. The photos sucked. So I finally broke down and scanned them. Piece by piece. It took the better part of one weekend and one day to scan and reassemble these. The tree took about 30 scans and the elephants about 50. Finally I have decent images of these. The tree was scanned at 600 dpi and the elephants at 300, and were assembled at actual size. The object was to make clear enough and large enough images to make decent-sized prints.

So now you can see that the tree isn't so dark, and the elephants not so brush strokey, and the buildings in the background do not look like mud. I changed the lines in the buildings to a dark red so that the buildings would be more pink, and so the windows in the background wouldn't get muddy. So this is pretty much what these are supposed to look like, and soon I will make prints out of them.

The Future of "The Blue Kid"

Whoever you people are, you shan't see any more of "The Blue Kid" comic strips at this particular locale. Have I given up the ghost?

Touche!

Soon, very soon, my dear reader, you will be joined by other readers if you venture to this site.

Not yet though.

For those not in "the know" the above "this" will lead you to Top Shelf 2.0, online comics from the much esteemed alternative comics publisher, Top Shelf! The folks at Top Shelf have recently deemed my strip 2.0 worthy, and so, if all goes as planned, once I've knocked out a few more of these things, the first installment will appear and be resumed there. By their request, so that the content will be "exclusive" to Top Shelf (assuming it's being seen at all at this point)I'll be removing the strips from this site shortly.

But that might be a few weeks. Continue to watch this space for more news!

In the meantime you may feast your eyes on these two handsome devils from Chefferey's Bistro:



Ever since I stopped actively seeking out Freelance, it seems to be finding me. In this case, the fine folks at Sac News and Review have asked me to do a couple of caricatures for a local ad.

The second guy came out a little toothy. It's so weird that a big white boxer's tooth guard-like mass with a few vaguely defined gums at the bottom ends up looking like teeth in the cartoon vernacular. Inexplicably, when you put the gums at the top of the white mass the teeth end up looking very wrong. This is no joke! Try it at home!

Sacramento News And Review "Re-Thinking Green"

Update: was out of town for a couple of weeks (more on that later) so I'm just now getting around to posting this.

This is a cover and some interior illustrations for The Sacramento News and Review. Andrew Nilsen was the art director--he was very easy, and very accomodating--the only stipulation was that I include a green brain in the composition. The headline was "Re-Thinking Green". I'm not sure if I came up with the best solution but here it is:





This is my favorite portrait of the three:



Its the first time I've applied a combination of pen and brush work to my illustrative figures, and I like the lines. They seem kind of Hirshfeldesque to me. I like the sharpness of penwork, and I'm including pen more and more in my work.

These two were a little less sucessful, but more or less resemble the people they're meant to. The theme was "different shades of green" which is why I decided to go black and white with the fleshtones. I thought it would be nice and graphic, and there would be continuity on the page.




Another update: Nilsen gave me a very gracious call after all was said and done, saying that the writers editors and subjects were pleased with the results. I don't usually get calls like these--usually its just a "thanks" or a "good job" and the checks in the mail, so that was very gratifying.

Chesire Cat

I'm having fun now, updates probably every week

Another image I just knocked out that I'm pretty happy with. Not portfolio material, but definitely having fun.

Matisseish

This is the result of a couple of hours of fooling around. A sort of Matisse-like thing.

People Portraits!

This is My friend Jeff Faerber, also a very good painter:



You can check out his work Here.

Jeff's room mate Bryant, and another friend from school. This doesn't quite look like him, but it still came out pretty nicely:



From photos randomly culled from the internet. My original idea here was to do portraits at events, sort of like what caricature artists do, but I gave up on this to focus more on the dog portraits. In retrospect this seemed a little ambitious; it would've required a little more social endurance than I actually have. The idea at the time was to show enough of a range to demonstrate that I could draw pretty much anybody:




Ken, one of my favorite people. The visit on which these pictures were taken Ken managed to get me lost in my own neighborhood as we finished off an entire box of lime popsicles. It was kind of fun. Here's Ken:



So the new pet portrait site is up. I got the domain name, chinesebrushportraits.com, just in case I wanted to use it for something other than just pet portraits. My friend Ethan Miller, who's a whiz at this stuff, put together the simple but clean website. Ethan is currently in the MFA program at San Jose State university, where he's doing some interesting, I guess what you might call, "fine art" programming, which is basically programming that has no practical purpose whatsoever, and it's pretty cool stuff. Here's his site.

More Pet Portraits

So here are some more animal portraits for my soon to be animal portrait and people portrait site:






So--custom pet portraits, some as big as 24x30--how much do you think I should charge for these things?

Chinese Brush Paintings

Illustration hasn't been treating me all that great these days, so I've taken up the idea of painting people's pets for $$. It's a little kitschy, but there's got to be some way I can make a living off these grossly impractical skills of mine, and the pet portrait thing seem pretty popular these days.

So here are my first few attempts, using a Chinese brush as my exclusive painting implement:







I find that I enjoy this quite a bit, so who knows, maybe this could turn out to be an alternative source of income? More portraits soon, plus: human portraits. More on that later. (I've actually been doing quite a bit of work lately, just haven't gotten around to getting it all scanned and photographed)