Foolish Endeavors

Facebook profiles 5

2012-01-31T23:27:00.002-05:00

See: http://chodorow.blogspot.com/2011/09/facebook-profiles.html for details.

Lillian and Glenn

2011-12-19T18:20:00.000-05:00

Present for two coworkers who are retiring. Trusty #2 on Bristol while watching football yesterday.

Eowyn and the Nazgul

2011-12-11T23:12:00.001-05:00

Drawing I started months and ago and then got sidetracked. Debating whether or not to bring it to final.

Facebook profiles 4

2011-12-10T02:56:00.001-05:00

See: http://chodorow.blogspot.com/2011/09/facebook-profiles.html for details.

Facebook profiles 3

2011-10-31T18:24:00.000-04:00

See: http://chodorow.blogspot.com/2011/09/facebook-profiles.html for details.

Goalie Mask designs - redux

2011-10-23T17:15:00.000-04:00

A while ago, I designed my brother's goalie mask:

Which ended being put on to the mask like so:

However, the mask died recently so my brother has asked me to do a new design for his new mask. I wanted to push the Chinese dragon idea further. Thinking similar to the old Any Moog Bruins mask, but basing it off the Chinese dragons you see on the streets on Chinese New Year. My initial sketch was this:

However, I didn't like this. Seemed to Meso-American to me. I think because of it being so geometric and lacking any roundness? Took another stab:

I liked this better. So this will be a good jumping off point. I'll post the final on here when I've reached that point.

More Facebook Profiles...

2011-10-23T03:07:00.000-04:00

Facebook profiles

2011-09-18T23:14:00.001-04:00

So, a while ago a person did some quick pen sketches of everyone of his Facebook friends. Then not too long ago, a friend put up a profile pic that I really wanted to draw. This, and the lack of drawing I'd been doing recently, spurred me to try to do some small pencil drawings. I started at the top of my friend's list and am working my way through it. I decided not to limit myself to just drawing whatever the person has as their profile, some are quite faithful to a photo, some are more out of my head. Also, as they are meant to be quick, small, and essentially warmups... they're not all exactly gems. But I'll post a few of the ones I like on here as I progress, starting with these:

Subway it up

2011-07-27T22:16:00.002-04:00

I've had a score of dental appointments recently. So a lot of opportunity to enjoy the subway...

Wedding (part 2)

2011-07-25T23:26:00.004-04:00

Here's the final Illustrator file I sent to the letterpress, minus the text, for the wedding invitation (Eloise lended her Illustrator skills to creating the leaf pattern):And here's a scan of the invite after the letterpress did its thing:

Subway Sketching

2011-05-26T23:46:00.004-04:00

Grabbed some awesome BBQ at Red Bones tonight. Got some sketching done on the subway on the way there...

Warming up again

2011-04-21T14:32:00.004-04:00

Another warm-up portrait. Didn't turn out looking like the person unfortunately. But I like it as a drawing. So figured I'd share it.

Weddings

2011-04-21T14:06:00.007-04:00

Currently working on a wedding invitation and a wedding portrait (unrelated weddings).

Here's a sneak peek of the portrait:

These are from the Save the Date that went out for the wedding invitation I'm working on now...

Is it Spring yet?

2011-03-23T21:41:00.004-04:00

Quick sketch I did of Eloise getting ready to head out to her knit night.

Warming up

2010-12-09T21:01:00.002-05:00

So my time/energy to get to any art has been sporadic at best over the last while. Consequence of that is most of what I then generate is... not my favorite.

I knew I had some arting I had to get done today, so I thought maybe warming up first couldn't hurt. So I did a quick self-portrait sketch. And surprise, it's the first thing I've done in a while that I actually like ha.

Riding the T

2010-05-25T20:38:00.005-04:00

Sketches riding on the T...
*4/21 - Added in a couple I did on the way to the movie theater to see Hanna...

So many weddings

2010-04-26T20:58:00.005-04:00

We've received some amazingly awesome Save the Dates from friends this year. My friend Jason asked that Eloise and I decorate the RSVP to his wedding before we sent it back. Unfortunately Eloise was too busy prepping for the Alumni Sale but I took her idea of a kitten air guitaring (Jason just won the San Diego Air Guitar Championship) and extrapolated it.

Which Witch?

2009-08-27T23:45:00.003-04:00

My friend is working on some pieces for a character design portfolio and he sent me a witch he was working on. I was trying to critique it but I think I may have failed to get across what I was trying to say so I tried taking a stab at doing my version of his design.

This didn't end up being successful in the ways that I had hoped, however, I was enjoying doing this type of drawing, which I haven't done in a while, so I decided to finish the doodle while watching Top Chef last night.

My friend's Tumblr: http://rorydraws.tumblr.com/

Nash

2009-06-10T16:47:00.005-04:00

Drawing I did of Nash. He was the coolest cat I've known. Sadly he passed away over the winter holidays due to virus he contracted from his mother. Number 2 pencil.

Live! Nude! Model! Sketching...

2009-05-13T20:39:00.002-04:00

I was able to grab 15 min in the live model class during lunch on Friday. Banged this out... was pretty happy with it, considering the limited time.

We have nude models again after a long hiatus thanks to the model coordinator at MassArt hooking us up.

Live! Models! Sketching...

2009-03-18T13:08:00.006-04:00

Still working on that other piece when I have time.

But here are some quick sketches I've done recently when I've had 20 min to pop into the live model sessions at work:

Nice to be getting this in. I've missed it.

Work In Progress

2009-02-15T19:21:00.003-05:00

A glimpse at a piece I've been working on and off on for the last few weeks:
Came back to this for the first time in agessssssssss. Kind of stalled out.

CHOW

2009-02-15T19:06:00.003-05:00

So I decided to get involved over on ConceptArt.org's Character of the Week forum to try to keep myself producing new work on a timetable.

This week was Baba Yaga, which I was pretty excited about. Unfortunately after coming back from NYC last weekend I was fighting a cold all week so I didn't quite get as far along as I wanted.

Here's the concept for the character. The illustration I was going to do is still in sketch phase.

HOCKEY

2009-01-08T18:09:00.004-05:00

So my brother asked me a while ago to help him out with a goalie mask design. Never done this before, so was a bit of a challenge. He wanted something that referenced Prince Edward Island (where we're from), his half Asian heritage, and that he lives in Chicago now.

So gave him the Chicago skyline, a chinese dragon, some chinese design work, maple leaf, and the PEI crest. Also threw in the Cornell logo for good measure.
Not sure whether this will work as a mask, but here ya go.

Still jobhunting...

2008-08-26T15:08:00.003-04:00

Here's a quick piece I did as a warmup yesterday. A Benedictine monk.

Packing...

2008-06-28T19:15:00.003-04:00

So I'm packing up all my worldly belongings and throwing them in storage while I figure out where I'm headed and what I'm doing next. It's a bit daunting.

In the process, I found these two pieces from the last year that I had never scanned. This is was preliminary sketch for an illustration to go along with an article about 2 clowns being assassinated in a circus in... Columbia I think?
And this was from when I was TAing the drawing class. Some of the students were complaining about one of the perspective assignments, so I did it alongside them. It involved doing a lot of reference sketching and then compositing the sketches into something fantastical.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Lance Thunder

2008-06-24T19:51:00.009-04:00

For the second open assignment for Cover to Cover, I decided to do a comic that my friends Keith and Art had developed, initially as a joke. The premise was to do the most manly over the top character. They came up with Lance Thunder and the Megariders. He rode monster trucks like steeds, wielded a chainsaw, and was just generally the most manly barbarian ever.

This was the initial pencils I did and posted on my DeviantArt page:I did a pretty quick digital paint job for class, but a friend showed the pencils to a friend who showed it to friend, and I was contacted by the ABC TV show DirtySexyMoney to ask if they could use it in an upcoming show. Apparently Donald Sutherland's kid in the show had a stack of comic books and they wanted to use Lance on top. So I asked my friends Chris McInerney and Erica Henderson if they'd take swings at coloring it. Ultimately the show ended up choosing Erica's version, but here are both.

Chris's:And Erica's:Also about the same time I worked on the poster for our Senior Show. Our Senior Show consisted of Katherine Batiste, myself, Rory Keller, Angela Gram, Keith Grassmick, Art Wu, and Stephanie Olesh.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Dune

2008-06-24T18:51:00.004-04:00

Our last two Cover to Cover assignments were open. For the first one I chose Dune by Frank Herbert. Freaking love that book. I was up in the air between it and Ender's Game. However, Ender's Game struck me as incredibly hard to illustrate heh.I was 50 - 50 about which one of these sketches to pursue. I ultimately chose the one on the left, but in retrospect, kind of wish I'd done the one on the right.

I had a digitally colored version of this, however the file became corrupted. Crit was kind of harsh on this. I made the mistake that I was looking at an actual earthworm for reference, and forgot to take in to account, that it was shiny because it was wet... which a sandworm wouldn't be. Also, my professor wasn't a fan of what he felt was my going overly graphic with the worm, and composition... although another professor who wandered in during crit said he really liked that about the piece. Regardless I do have to agree with Jon that there's kind of a large empty space in the middle.Like the Wolverine piece, I'm hoping to get at this with some paints...

RISD III Spring - Misc., sketches, etc.

2008-06-24T18:30:00.006-04:00

Some random stuff from the year unrelated to classes.

First, some good ol' Colbert fanart:
A poster for the RISD hockey team, the Nads. Our mascot is a giant penis and balls wearing a cape:Sketch for Children's Illustrators group on DeviantArt. The theme was striped socks:And some pen sketching around Providence:

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Wolverine: Netsuke

2008-06-24T18:05:00.005-04:00

One of the last assigned covers for Cover to Cover was Wolverine: Netsuke. This was a return to a comic book cover. However, while many of us were initially excited at the idea of doing a Wolverine cover, the enthusiasm palled a bit after reading the comic. Someone in our class pointed out it was like doing a Superman comic and having him walk everywhere. Bring out the claws, Wolverine!
I personally wanted to do the thumbnail in the top left. However, Jon felt it wasn't "cover-y" enough. So I went with one of the ones he and I both liked. I decided to try out a new media/style, doing a charcoal drawing with the intention of either then coloring it digitally or sealing it and then doing acrylic on top of it. Due to time constraints, I did some very minimal quick digital color.The crit I received was very adamant about fixing the shoji screen background to be more accurate and felt the female face was neither abstract enough to approach brush making nor realistic enough to approach the drawing style of Wolverine. I'd been attempting to match the way the artist had drawn the woman in the interior, but agreed that it didn't work.
I went back in and made some of the suggested changes. I recently sealed it and I'm hoping to get to doing some painting over it sometime soon.

RISD III Spring - Character Creation - Titan A.E.

2008-06-24T17:30:00.009-04:00

So the big group project in Character Creation was to do a redesign of the characters in Titan A.E.Our group, which consisted of myself, Keith, Art, Stephanie, and Elisa, had some issues working as a team, but after some outing of some issues, we managed to move pass it and Shanth, our professor, thought we had some of the best designs in the class. Ultimately, I was pleased, as the two of the three designs he really liked were the ones I had the most input on (Akima and Gune) , and I loved the third one (the Drej), which I'll also post here, which design-wise was predominantly my friends Keith and Art while I came up with the logic that helped rationalize the design.With the Drej, they appeared to make no sense in the actual movie... they were pure energy beings who flew energy ships who for no apparent reason had decided on genocide for the human race. The problem with the whole energy being thing was that they still used guns to fire energy beams, they still had humanoid bodies, and the human characters had to interact with their various energy ships and buildings. Oh and when they were shot with energy beams by the heroes, they died. So we decided the Drej needed to have some more corporeal aspect to their form that the humans could disrupt. They also needed not to be humanoid while still having some kind of face that the viewers could identify with... and then we needed to figure out some kind of reasoning as to why they had this mad on for the human race. We eventually settled on the fact that they used the ruins and shards of a fallen advanced race to focus their energy beings around and then would travel by throwing out a shard and pulling themselves towards it. They had been the energy source of this advanced race but had gained sentience and overthrew their masters. They were out to get the humans, because in the humans they saw the potential to become their former overlords, and they'd decided to take preemptive action.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Misc.

2008-06-24T17:20:00.007-04:00

Some sketches and whatnot from assignments where I didn't end up liking the finals.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - The Goon

2008-06-24T15:49:00.005-04:00

I was pretty jazzed for this assignment, considering it was a straight on comic book cover. I had never actually read the Goon and had to do some research for this. I decided I wanted to go old school sci-fi movie poster.These are the scanned pencils from the final, with text and whatnot added in.And this ended up being the final. The main crit here was that too much of the direction in the piece was a diagonal line between the bottom left and the top right. Also there was some argument over whether the robots were imposing/scary enough. Everyone seemed to agree that the guys in the bubbles were awesome heh.

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Animal Farm

2008-06-24T15:35:00.005-04:00

This assignment for Cover to Cover probably yielded my favorite finished piece. I love old propaganda posters and I really enjoyed going to town on this one.

The assignment was George Orwell's Animal Farm. My mind immediately went to old school Russian propaganda. I whipped up some sketches, including four finished sketches. Everyone was pretty jazzed about the one with all of the animals. While I had a lot of fun taking it to final... it took forever. Everything in the piece was drawn by hand with the mouse, mostly using the polygonal lasso and the airbrush tool. Even the lettering was done with the polygonal lasso and the fill bucket. I rolled into class completely sleepless, but Jon really liked it, so it was worth it.

RISD III Spring - Character Creation

2008-06-24T14:51:00.010-04:00

Before continuing with Cover to Cover...

I also took a character design course with Shanth Enjeti. Sadly the course was at the end of the week and I was always completely exhausted from my 3 other studios, including the project with the Story Hat, Inc. So it seemed to always get shafted in terms of the amount of time I was able to put in. I'm gonna skip around a bit and only post the ones I happened to be somewhat happy with. Most weeks we had two characters due.

The first assignment I did was probably my favorite. A monster from Northwest Indian myth:Then we had to do one for a positive trait we like about ourselves:
And then one for a negative trait in other people we didn't like: For this one we had to do a rounded organic character that was offputting:
This was preliminary sketch of the antagonist character for my final, in this case I chose to do Morrigan from Irish myth:

RISD III Spring - Cover to Cover - Moby Dick

2008-06-24T14:03:00.007-04:00

So I probably produced the stuff I like the most in Jon Foster's Cover to Cover class. So we'll start with that.

First assignment we had was Moby Dick. I remember reading Moby Dick back in high school and thinking it was the driest thing in the history of the world. Jon's instructions were to do a Moby Dick cover for an older teen male audience. With each assignment, we had to do 9 thumbnails and take one to a finished sketch. That was critted, and then we took it to final. I'll try to show you as much of the process as I have documented on each one. Here are the initial thumbnails and an alternate finished sketch I didn't use.So this was my proposal sketch for Moby Dick. I actually over developed a bit for the finished sketch. I was going for a graphic novel style approach. There are two whale bones arching in from the border and the whale skulls which are attached to the prow of the ship are represented in the design work towards the bottom. However, as you may have noticed I forgot to put them on the actual boat in the background.
I couldn't decide really where to go with it. General consensus seemed to be that the whale skulls needed to be more obviously skulls. But I felt they then started to look like teeth and liked them more as vaguely skulls/vaguely design elements. I still gravitate to one or another depending on my mood that particular day.I ended up using this one as my final:

RISD III Fall

2008-06-24T12:15:00.018-04:00

Over the summer, I took a break from art, after being so burned out from the year before, and worked in the Residence Life Office dealing mostly with the RISD Pre-College Program.

So I did an ISP with Mary Jane Begin (http://www.maryjanebegin.com/) where I wanted to do some cover illustrations for some books I loved when I was a kid. I'll post both the finished black and white sketches and then my attempts at doing color versions... although they didn't scan that well.

Here are some of the preliminary sketches. You'll notice that things were either flopped to read left to right, or characters ended up being omitted. Or in this case of the Greenwitch cover, I didn't get to it in the final stage (although I still intend to).

First, I did a cover for the Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. Lee Scoresby's hat and the profile of Lyra's face gave me fits:Then I did one for Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone. Part of the Dark is Rising series. This one I banged out pretty quickly.Then I did a cover for Ursula K. Le Guin's Tombs of Atuan, part of the Earthsea series:I also did a quick Snow Queen interior piece for the Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe.

I also TA'd a sophomore drawing class for Fritz. I had a lot of fun doing it. While we were criting or in between helping the various students, I'd do my own sketching.

RISD II

2008-06-23T23:04:00.011-04:00

Over the summer, a friend asked me to do a piece with dinosaurs. While I love dinosaurs, I was having trouble thinking of something that hadn't already been done to death. So I asked my friend Temma, who is a wee bit obsessed with Jurassic Park and raptors, what I should draw. She immediately replied a "a velociraptor serving ice cream to other dinosaurs."
So my second year at RISD hit a snag when I came down with mono during the fall semester. I tried to fight through it, but that ended up being a mistake and I was quite ill for a while. I ended up not making it back to school til the spring. It took me all semester to catch up on my incompletes and I feel all of my work that year suffered for it.

This is one of the few things I liked from my comic class.I also took Editorial Illustration with Chris Buzelli (http://www.chrisbuzelli.com/) which was an awesome class. I wish I could have put more into it. This was the first assignment I did, to go along with an editorial piece about the show "Path to 9-11." Apparently the show laid a lot of the blame at Clinton's doorstep. While not my viewpoint, it was fun to draw.I had a lot of fun doing this piece as I do enjoy drawing elves and fairies and whatnot. However, I do wish one of my other thumbnails had been chosen, which involved a lot of pandas and red pandas playing instruments. It was for a section called "Bells and Whistles" in the magazine Plansponsor.
For Artistic Anatomy, I did a lot of drawings of myself. Probably the best one I did was this one of my wonderfully sculpted rear and legs heh.

Fritz Drury (http://www.fritzdrury.com/), our Artistic Anatomy professor, told us a story during the class about how he'd fallen out of shopping cart when he was a little kid and broke his head. As a result he had to wear a football helmet around. I found this image to be quite hilarious and for my final, I did a pair of illustrations, one depicting Fritz as a kid, making an anatomically accurate man out of his toys. And one depicting Fritz as an old mad scientist, bringing the big yellow man (the écorché we used in class) to life.

RISD I

2008-06-23T21:25:00.011-04:00

So, not surprisingly, my first year at RISD was a year of firsts, using charcoal, nude models, exploring color and color theory, and painting for the first time in 18 years.

Oh and of course I continued to doodle in class.

Limbo before RISD

2008-06-23T21:09:00.007-04:00

After University of Toronto, I spent a few years working in childcare and teaching. I drew a bit less during this period, but I did this piece for my friend Alex as a gift, since she'd been there for me when I'd been going through some rough times. She loves dragons:I also did some drawings for some friends of mine in gaming circles. I'd started beta testing games and gotten involved with some guilds that were heavily into online gaming.

Apparently someone submitted this drawing to Blizzard as their own. I was totally unaware, but a lot of people complained to Blizzard and they contacted me, asking if they could leave it up on their site with my name.
About this time, I started trying to figure out how to color my pieces of the computer. This was my first attempt. Bear with me, it's a bit oversaturated, etc.Soon after this, with a lot of encouragement from friends and family, I decided I would pursue art as more than a hobby and basically made a portfolio from scratch in a couple months and applied to RISD (Rhode Island School of Design). Here's my version of the infamous bike drawing and one of the other application drawings:

To my surprise, I got in heh.

Schooling or Drawing?

2008-06-23T20:59:00.005-04:00

Then I headed off to the University of Toronto to major in Celtic Studies. I still doodled all of the time.

I did this while I was taking a Religions survey course during the fall of my first year. It started as a doodle and despite the fact that it's 8.5" x 11", I managed to squeeze a fair amount of detail in.
I ended up doing a drawing each year of everyone on our floor and our friends based on the friend drawings from High School. This is the one from second year:
I had a lot of fun with these, working in all of the bizarre and crazy stories from the school year into them. I still enjoy looking back at these and being reminded of hilarious events I'd forgotten.

Then I made some friends...

2008-06-23T20:49:00.004-04:00

In high school, I got away from drawing superheroes and whatnot and started drawing my friends.

This is from Sophomore Year. I did it on a lark, but the style of this became quite popular among my friends and classmates.

I reapproached it senior year to do an "update" to the original drawing. By this point I'd started to get sick of doing these type s of drawings.However, when I presented two different versions of the Italy and Greece trip (the other involved a quilt of realistic portraits of the people from the trip), everyone really wanted me to do it in the original style. So to try to make it a little more interesting for myself, I threw in some architecture and a lot of the people are posed in reference to various pieces of art we saw while on the trip.

Then I got a little older...

2008-06-23T20:40:00.004-04:00

So here are a couple from Junior High:

So I've been drawing for a while...

2008-06-23T19:33:00.000-04:00

Figured I'd start off with with some drawings from elementary school:

Late to the party...

2008-06-23T19:18:00.002-04:00

I realize I am a tad late to the blogging party, but I figured I might as well throw my hat in the ring. These first few posts are going to be a series of trips down memory lane as I post a variety of the art I did before and during my time at RISD.

I'll try to talk a little bit about them as I post them.

Enjoy, feel free to comment... I always appreciate feedback.