The Madness Continues

I am scrambling to finish things before I leave next week, but here are some photos of a warm-up I was working on this weekend.

These were the first "paintings" I have done in a while - confining most of my artistic pursuits to drawing in the past few months.  Color has never been my strong suit.  Drawing - love it.  Value - bring it on.  Color - ah . . . wha . . . is this . . . I don't  . . .

Yeah.  Color doesn't make sense to me.  I pick up the brush and look to my pallet and I'm . . . just lost.

When I was in school, my professors would make fun of me for limiting my pallet so much.  But it was the only way I could control the colors and the structure of the finished piece.  Fortunately, I managed to incorporated some reds and yellows in a few projects and they stopped harassing me.

Now, I don't want you to think that they didn't try to help me with my color problems - they did.  They tried very hard.  And conceptually, I thought I understood the process they were trying to get me into.  But whenever I took up the brush and applied the colors I saw them using . . . well, it's probably better not to talk about it . . .

Windsor Newton watercolors on an Arches cold-press block.

Victor Ambrus and Project X

So I was checking up on what Justin Gerard had been up to and discovered a new illustrator!  Mr. Gerard is headed to Washington at the end of March for a workshop that I am highly desirous to participate in - if Amazon would stop stealing my money by tempting me with their capacious amounts of fantastic art books.  And books in general.  Anyway, where was I?  Ah!  New illustrator!

Well, actually, he's not "new" he's been around for a while - and I'm still trying to figure out if I should have known who he is . . . But that's beside the point.  He's awesome.  Watercolors, pen and ink, AND he recreates ancient civilizations on site for some BBC program!  And has books on how to do that.  I'm telling you angels are singing here, right now.

His name is Victor Ambrus; he was born in Hungary and fled to England after the failed Hungarian Uprising against the Soviets.  If you look him up on Wikipedia, it has a very extensive list of books that he's illustrated or contributed to.

As might be suspected, I have now given Amazon more money - money that I told myself I would not being giving them again.  At this rate I might as well just sign over my first child - second, too, maybe.  But I have 4 new(ish) books by this guy coming my way! So excited!

Part of the reason that I am excited is that my mind has been infected (again) by an idea of epic proportions similar to the other two ideas that my mind is still under the effects of (which you can see here and here).  It has the potential of being significantly more epic than either Silkwood and Co. or The Robin Hood Project (if you can believe that).  It involves being able to illustrate life from several different periods of history, and so you can see why Ambrus' books Drawing on Archaeology and Recreating the Past are such a cool find for me!

I'm not going to tell you what my idea for the new project is - I really want to jump right into it but it involves a lot of planning and research and I need to finish the first two before I start on a new project.  But you can see some of the character ideas here (as well as a kind of hint about what this project is about on the page):

I can't help myself - they started talking to me and telling me their stories and then I got a download of ideas . . . I just couldn't help myself!  I had to do some drawings for them!

New Sketches

I've been drawing a lot lately.  Not from life, unfortunately.  But I have so many stories and pictures running around in my head I have to do something with them to be able to get any sleep or peace at night.

I scanned in everything new last week, hoping for once to make my weekly updated deadlines for Silkwood & Co. and Robin Hood Project.  But for some reason that I have yet to explain, I color corrected everything wrong in Photoshop.  And not just  - "Oh, you're being a perfectionist" wrong.  More like the "what were you smoking" kind of wrong.  Ugh.  I think I'm going to have to re-scan everything, too.  Annoyances.

Of course, I didn't realize this until I had uploaded everything on the blogs.

To punish myself, I'm posting some of the less horrific ones here for anyone too lazy, or kind, to go to the blogs to see what I mean.

Marcus, from S&C

Marian, from RHP

Sketches, from S&C

Sketches, from S&C

Can you see what I'm talking about?  The drawings on brown paper are ORANGE!  How did that pass the sniff test?!

Breathe. Okay.

Season's Greetings

Is that right: do you put an apostrophe before the s in "season's"?  That's the impression I always got when people wished somebody "the season's greetings", but maybe I'm wrong . . .

Anyway.  I can't sleep.  Again.  So I decided to post a quick something because I'm really excited about it and I'm a geek.

It's finally here! Now I just have to wait until NEXT CHRISTMAS to see it.  And then the Christmas after that for the second part.

Yeah.  It's so worth it!

Also, new doodle:

Technically it's for S&C, but I've been trying to put together a Christmas card in a more "cartoony" style and the concept sort of bled over into what you see above.  Done in Illustrator.  I always seem to head over to that program when I want to do something "fun" and "quick" and "mindless", and it always turns into something not quick and finicky and draining (sometimes in a good way).  But I did have fun - and that was the main point.

Real Life Applications

My brother sent this to me today:

And I thought the point behind the piece was awesome enough to warrant better design.  So I made a new one.

There are still a couple of things I want to change, but it was a fun stress reliever for this morning.  Illustrator and I are finally getting along a little bit better after last holiday's fiasco with the Christmas video for work.

Flash and I still hate each other, though.

Platoon Logo Designs

My brother asked me to come up with some logo ideas for his platoon and company. The mascot, or whatever you call it, is "warpig" and "wolfpack". Don't remember which ones for the platoon and which one's the company.

Yes. I can hear you sniggering. I didn't come up with the names. Remember, they're a bunch of teenage boys who have been stuck out in the summer heat in Georgia for weeks now. Give them a break.

I haven't heard back from him on what he thinks. I hope he likes something; he's asked me to do things like this before for his airsoft teams and I've kind of dropped the ball on him several times . . .

Illustrator Doodle

One of my co-workers is moving to California. I threw this e-invite illustration together for her (and her boyfriend's) going away party.