Live! Models! Sketching...

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

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

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

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...

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

Packing...

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

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

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.

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

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.