Copycat

I was recently lucky enough to get a grant from the folks at The Puffin Foundation to create booklets that teach incarcerated men and women the fundamentals of observational drawing. I wanted to do a portion about the value of copying as an exercise, boring though it is. I'm really dislike copying, but it is good practice and not so bad if you've got a few This American Life episodes to catch up on. For not being traced, its relatively close.

This is a Roman sarcophagus from the Roman National Museum. It recounts the victory (depicted more as a slaughter,) of the Romans over the heathen Gauls, or some tribe. Judging by the ancient sculptures, it seems that those poor Gauls had a pretty miserable millennium.

Click to enlarge

Twenty-Four Months at Sea

Here are some older concept images from two different portions of a large and pretty broad story. First up are two views of the deep, dark jungle. Its permanently night, and there's something else stalking around these parts...
Click to enlarge them.
These images are from the same jungle story as the paintings on my website.

...After some fantastic escapes and tough choices, we come to a big, lumbering, never-say-die robot that lays siege to a man-o-war ship and its scurvy crew.


Click to enlarge them.

This salty dog endures the robot with ease, but not so for his addiction.

My Girl is the Queen of the Savages

A sketch from PDX done with Conte', king of all the crayons...Click the pic to see the full sized goodness.
"My girl is the queen of the savages,
Instead of money we trade yams and cabbages,

She doesn't use a fork,
I don't think I'll go back to New York."
~The Magnetic Fields~

The Madness at Main Line

"...Like all the racial groups, they [the Native Americans] have their own table and keep all the seats for themselves. They don’t want to look soft, so Poncho’s business is now theirs. He’ll loose his seat, and if you don’t own a seat, you don’t eat."

Click the pic to see its full-sized glowering-glory.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

These salty dogs are each part of a larger image, which I will probably post up tomorrow. By drawing the figure separately, I can pose them in a more natural way rather than trying to fit the background guys into the remaining open space. But the down side is that I eventually have to cover up some nice details. So here they are individually... and yep, these guys are also ink-n-brush work. Click to zoom.

Problem Child

-Click to enlarge the image. I didn't tediously perfect each pixel for nothing!-

This illustration took forever because it really ended up being ten images. I'll probably add some background texture of a cork-board , but I'll leave that until the end to see how well it works with the overall layout. Again, this is ink and brush with some digital assembly and it belongs to the same short story as the toiletries image from earlier. I'm getting pretty close to finishing this whole project so more scrumptious images are on the way...

Postage Not Included

This image is a small bit from a work in progress so the arrangement and drop-shadows are just temps. The stamps are from a larger collage illustration of a character I wrote about. The actual image is just about finished. Again, these are done with ink and brush and some digital assembly.