Greener Guy as Popeye

Greener Guy was a character I came up with while attending a very liberal arts college. He resembled many of the students who went there. After coming up with my first parody piece using this character, I later used it to reinvent the Popeye characters. I watched Popeye after school a lot when I was younger, and for a reason I've now forgotten I sketched some concepts of the Popeye characters in this vein.

I came up with a super-villain that tried to sell sneaky credit cards with high APRs on the college campus, and went very "Mr. Burns" with the design:

Finally, I had the idea to use the Popeye-version Greener Guy in a cartoon about the WTO riots in Seattle (aka the 'Battle in Seattle') that I witnessed in 1999. It ran in the Evergreen school newspaper.:

Sketchbook: Clothed Pictures of Famous People

Here are some more selections from old sketchbooks that I scanned recently. The first is the author Zadie Smith from her great novel White Teeth:

 

After looking through some old sketchbooks, it turns out I've drawn Edward Norton twice:

 

Key facial features of 4 famous women (2 singers, 2 actresses). Can you recognize them all?

 

Clockwise from the top left: Angelina Jolie, Fiona Apple, Natalie Portman, Bjork.

Stylized portrait of Terrence Stamp from one of my favorite movies, The Limey:

Quick sketch of the godfather of noise, Rahzel:

 

Sketchbook: Classical Art Studies

This assortment is from a range of books from different years, but are pretty good examples of when I would try to focus on classical art through line drawing. The first page was done in 2002 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The top figures are from Cezanne's The Bathers, Hopper's Nighthawks is cropped on the left side (I believe it was temporarily at the Art Institute at the time), and the bottom right quarter is a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh:

Speaking of Van Gogh, I drew a sliced mango in the way I imagined he would in the top right of this page (circa1998). The left side is a line-by-line recration of a drawing by Picasso (whose title and internet link escape me) that I did in 1999. The woman's profile in the bottom right was taken from an art school flyer I had handy at the time (2000).

Rounding out this post are two more artist's portraits. On the is a portrait of the young artist prodigy Amedeo Modigliani (2000). On the right is a quickly-drafted Wasily Kandinsky below a recreation of his signature, both done by brush pen in 2000. I take Kandinsky's philosophies on painting to heart each time I try to work on something abstract.

Unfinished Blue Line Pro pages

This pair of unfinished drawings were done on Blue Line Pro pages. I had high hopes for this rendition of the Drew Struzan poster for The Phantom Menace, but never finished inking it.

This comic book splash cover was done a year earlier, if memory serves. It's of Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon comic, which my friend Sean got me hooked on when I was a teenager.

Pope vs. Castro

Pope vs. Castro. 1999. Pen and Ink. 22"x17".

This was another piece taken from a National Geographic article and copied in pen and ink. If I could do it over again I would lighten up Castro's skin tone, since he's hard to recognize with the heavy hatchwork.

Bjork: Bachelorette

Bjork: Bachelorette. 1999. Oil on Canvas. 14"x30".

This is the first piece I painted with a synaesthesia motif, a phenomenon where music and text are assigned inherent colors. The condition exists for a small number of people, which I learned during my research on a paper in college. In making the Bjork painting, I would close my eyes, listen to her song again and again, and create shapes that represented each part of the song. After that, I would assign each shape a color that best represented the sound to me. The final piece is a straightforward portrait of the Icelandic singer Bjork surrounded by swirling colored shapes that each represent an instrument or sound effect in the song. Here is the key to each shape:

light blue line: vocals
orange lines: violins
green shapes: "scratchy" sound effect
red line: piano
purple shapes: bass
maroon dots: jingle bell

The shapes along the "song stream" were placed with respect to when they actually are heard during the song's timeline. It is my goal to do a series of paintings using this concept, through the lenses of different artists and songs.

I didn't have an easel or worktable in my college dorm, so I had to put the canvas on my bunkbed and paint it while standing. It makes me appreciate my current drafting table all the more.

To hear the song, click the link below. Try isolating each layer of sound in your mind as you listen, and see what shape and color appears for you:

Bachelorette (Family Tree Version) - Bjork

Eddie Vedder Shirt

This is a shirt featuring an Eddie Vedder drawing I did in 1999. This is the final image, after some Photoshop love and the Eddie Vedder name and signature at the bottom. On the back by the neck, I also added an "Alive Man" image (for those PJ fans that know what that is).

Breakdancers

Breakdancer Kids. 1999. Graphite on paper. 9"x11"

I got interested in breakdancing my senior year of high school. It wasn't until college that I actually started learning moves, but I always liked the fluidity of movement, control of power and balance, and general style that dancers worked into their moves. When I got more familiar with the dancing, I decided to incorporate it into my demo reel for film school, once I was accepted into the Vancouver Film School for August 2000.

Goodness

Goodness. 1999. Oil on canvas. 24"x24".

I think it's finally time to add a painting to the mix. Although I had made one other oil piece before this, I consider this portrait of the band Goodness to be the first real shot I took at oil paints. Before that I had done acrylic and watercolor, which dry much faster. I like how forgiving oils are and the length it takes to dry gives a lot of flexibility and room for error. Drawbacks are the ventilation that's needed and waiting three weeks for the piece to dry, however.

Stanley Kubrick (and a hello)

Welcome!

Stanley Kubrick. 1999. Graphite on vellum. 11"x14".

For my first blog post, I'll start with my favorite high school piece; a reproduction portrait of film director Stanley Kubrick. To me it symbolized the first time I really got a hold on realistically rendering a figure. If you look closely, you can see my initials and the year it was done near the center of the camera he's holding. Kubrick remains one of my favorite directors, and the attention to detail he was known for was on my mind as I worked on it. This blog will serve to display the works I've done in the past, as well as works in progress, and I will include my thought process for each piece as well. I hope you enjoy it and become a Blogger follower by clicking in the Follow section on the right column.