A chip off the ol’ block. Destined for a life of self-doubt and criticism, yet overcoming it all to live a life of blissfully willful ignorance. The child is the father of the man, as Brian Wilson would say…
I’ve been sploshing around in an oil painting course at The Bay School of Art here in the Tremont Hotel. It’s fun! I haven’t painted anything since college – um, 13 years ago? Holy crap. I’m older than I feel, ’cause I’m giddy as a schoolgirl, I tells ya. All this tactile stuff feels like fingerpainting again…gooey blorps of smelly hues splotting on the palette. It’s like life. It comes at you as an amorphous blob and you’re forced to shape it or be absorbed by it. Meta, non? Anyway, here’s the first assignment – tonal study. Painted upside down.
As you can tell by the clever title, here is a guy. Well, a study of a guy’s face. I painted this study upside down in one colour only, because we had to…instructor’s orders plus I have zero colour theory…there’s some stuff I’d do differently, but I’m calling it done enough because that’s how I roll…and I’m too chicken to touch it now.
I can’t wait to get better at this painting stuff and kill that PANIC I get whenever I stare at a blank canvas…or screen…or…page…oh wait.
That’s never gone away. For 13 years.
…what kind of life is this?!
When my pal Chris Mitchell asked if I could contribute something to the group show he was putting on at his new store Q Pop I was all over it. He always was a good egg, lots of fun and a genuine dude, for reals. I’m used to hipsters acting ironic and cynical, and The Critchell is anything but. He’s a guy worth making time for. His store opened before Christmas, so go check it out if you’re in LA!
So what the hell was I gonna do? Had no idea. The idea was to do something on ‘What is Q?’. Well, that’s easy. It’s him & his lovely GF.
First thing I did was scour for images. I pulled one or two off his FB page, some from his Flickr set and kluged them together to this mess. Chris is just a weird looking dude. I had to use him. His lovely GF might not think an effed up drawing of her would be funny, either. So I stuck to the boy:
Then I drew my own version of it like this on Pshop CS5:
And I took the Q logo he made up and did some damn thing with the CS5 3D tool and it exploded into this funky shape. It’s the Q…Popped! So I used it :
So I did the same thing with Chris’ face and it popped into this:
Don’t really remember what exactly I did to get it, but I know a happy accident when I see one. Andrea Rinaldo, an artist down the hall from my studio, does some cool stuff using Japanese paper and resin, so I was toying with the idea of coating this image with some kind of clear coat, pasting it to wood somehow. Here’s her stuff, I like it:
Turns out the resin is a chemical combo of a couple of buckets of goop and you need a blowtorch. Too involved, I’m strapped for time as usual. So I experimented with a workaround, and that, my friends, took some messing around. And a few trips to Jason Alexander’s store in town.
Here’s what it looked like originally – it’s a Photobooth image, so it’s not too hot, but you get the idea. On a 9 x 12 board, a little bigger than the 8.5 x 11 Chris had asked for, but as close as I could get:
Here’s what happened after I printed the images out onto some Avery clear labels (to give me some translucency and to see the wood grain beneath), stuck ‘em down and poured some self-leveling acrylic medium over it:
Totally disintegrated it! Like, ate it. Weird. I pulled up some of the shapes just to see if the bond was loose enough for me to save the board, but it was stuck to the bare wood like glue.
Naturally, that was the last board I could get my hands on that was the right size for the show. Dammit. So I had to go one size up (sorry Critchell) and get another glaze on. So I grabbed a clear coat varnish spray and used it out on the deck. I also had to use up the negative space differently to accommodate the new shape, so I stuck in some of our mutual friend and co-worker’s work. Justin K Thompson had designed almost everything for ‘Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs’, including fonts! So I glommed those and stuck ‘em in for an inside joke, kinda.
So, the 3D Q Pop logo is exploding from Critchell’s head and a 2D version lurks behind him, in the form of a font that was created for ‘Cloudy’ where we worked together and I met these guys. Klunky concept, but it works for me!
Here’s the results:
Unfortunately, some snow got under the varnish and caused some bubbling. But what’s the point of sending something from Canada to LA without packing in some of the magic?
Anyways, I’m sure the show will be totally amazing. That Critchell knows a lot of hotshots, so it’s an honour to make a fool of myself in their company. I’m toying with the idea of going to LA just for the opening of the show, but the cost of flying a family of 4 is making me rethink it. But you never know!
I’ll post some links to pics of the opener after it happens. In the meantime, here’s more on Q Pop and all it’s awesomeness. I wanna shop there myself.
Just finished up on an assignment for the Bay School of Art here in the building. Michelle, the director, just wanted me ‘to whip off’ a caricature of a couple of blues singers coming to her studio. She sold tix and everything, about 50 + people showing up…no biggie. Right?!…umm…
Too bad I can’t do them very well! I’m not fishing for compliments, I’ve just got zero practice at it. And I’m not much of a portrait artist, which is a HUGE advantage if you do this kind of work often. But, since we’re to exchange skills (i get a painting course out of her) I told her I’d give it a go…so here went, well… nothing.
First, some crappy doodles/studies over a couple of nights of digging up ref on interviews, etc of these two fellas:
I wanted to sit down and seriously done some portrait work on these guys first, but since I was to squeeze the two of them on an 8.5 x 11 sheet I didn’t get too in depth, just worked with main impressions on what made their face THEIR faces, and not anyone else’s. I went for tweaking overall proportion instead of high contrast shapes within the faces which would have resulted in much more of a likeness, and more detail overall.
Since they’re performers, I’d be remiss if I didn’t use some of their typical habits too. The one guy often hunched forward while playing, and the other would do the rawk out, leaning back with his awesome hair and sweating all over the audience. So I began tweaking how to marry that quality into one image. I sped things up in the rough by using the Pshop ‘Warp’ tool (Lasso somethin then Edit -> Transform -> Warp).
I had put highlights and colour in the caricature itself and placed it on a white BG, but it just broke up the image to the point where it wasn’t quite as legible nor as much fun to look at (it looked like everyone else’s work, besides). Without something to stop it, my eye kept sliding off the page. I needed some kind of BG design for damage control on a poor character composition, and I was short on time, as always. A demanding day job in feature animation and a couple of rugrats shortens your hours left over for this kind of thing.
After that kind of messing around for a few hours and getting frustrated, I was listening to interviews with them about how much they liked Stax Records and Sun Records, two major blues/soul/honky tonk labels. I used that info and turned out this little ditty, using the Stax logo as a pseudo ground plane and using the Sun Records logo to tie up the composition. It’s klunky, but some kind of rhythm was achieved. Next time, I gotta plan it better!
The Stax logo was pretty high contrast, but I liked how the fingers pointed the eye back into the image, so I tried to balance shit out with the spray bomb effects and dampening the channels on the Stax logo…dunno how successful that was, but I was out of time. So the comp has kind of a circular thing reflecting the nature of two musicians jamming, and the high contrast splotches kind of triangulate the eye, hopefully the viewer gets caught in the jangle of lines that make the caricature as the eye traverses. Dropping in a warm, yet neutral undercolour served to pop the linework into higher contrast and avoided having the caricature compete with the logo designs for attention. A little contrast left in it I liked as I felt it added some kind of tension.
They’re playing tonight. We’ll see if they liked it. Part of me suspects most people don’t LIKE caricatures of themselves, but simply tolerate them. Whatever, it’s done!:
Look at that face! I didn’t forget you. I’ve just been – well – busy, you know. Got a job, two little kids, bla bla bla. Don’t look so down….you know how you always wanted to be a cowboy?
Well HERE YOU GO! Your very own cowpokin’ get-up!
And I made you a horse, all by myself!
That ought to keep him busy.
~w.
But just for today. And on a freelance basis.
I think I’m allergic to parts of Asia…
This just in! I stand corrected:
You are Spider-Man
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You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
For a couple of years, I did a comics/cartooning class for my neighbours downstairs, The Bay School of Art. I might be doing a weekend workshop sooner or later, so I went looking for old notes. I found these among others…if you can’t think of using anything to draw with your kids, try these, mebbe? Designed with 8-12 year olds in mind, after we’ve covered contour lines, simple perspective & building characters from basic shapes (beans, cylinders, blocks, spheres) …click to enlarge!
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That was quick! Only six months ago I was a storyboard artist on this fun project.
Kelly Asbury (dir), Baker Bloodworth (prod), Stewart Kojima, Amanda McNiece, Sam Banack (co-ordinators), David Stoten, Johnny Rice, Patrick Collins, Dean Roberts, Nelson Yokota, Gary Dunn, Ricardo Curtis, Scott Santoro, Lyndon Ruddy, Charlie Bonifacio (story crew), Catherine Apple, Maurissa Horwitz (editing queens), Pam Coats (studio rep), and everyone else at Starz Animation (there’s hundreds of lovely people there) were GREAT to work with over the 9 months or so they let me jam with them. It was a fantastic experience overall, in spite of the crunches, etc. that are just part of the job.
Hope it does well – as always, there was a lot of hard work and relocation from family just to give normal folks a good time for an hour and a half.
iTunes portal is here.
(A little more about it in this old post)
Dug up some old baddies from a Comic Code-friendly comic book I’m writing about a superhero who has greatness thrust upon him. Set in Toronto. Added them to the ‘COMICS’ gallery, but thought I’d show ‘em here so you can find ‘em easy!
