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)