G-G-G-G-Gamigin!

Here's a peek at the drawing I done did for the 72 Demon's Project.

Next step... COLOR!

some figure studies i did

a couple of self portrait studies I did tonight for project I am working on. The torso burster is pretty much unrelated to the actual illustration, but sometimes you gotta do.

cheers.

Sketch Post

Here's a sketch page for yer eyeball holes. One of them isn't a real person.

MEGAFAUNA!

Since I missed Friday's post, and am late for yesterday's I thought I would make a new piece to make up for it. I wanted to do something adorable. So I did.

Behold, Glyptodon, Giant Armadillo of the Pleistocene Epoch!

kisses.

According to Wikipedia: [Glyptodon] was roughly the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle, though flatter in shape ... Glyptodon is believed to have been an herbivore, grazing on grasses and other plantsfound near rivers and small bodies of water.


The little guy is 8x10 in watercolor. I sometimes forget I actually like watercolor a little...

sneaky peeky

Here's what's on the ol' drawing board:

7 figures + 1 demon = matt excited to work on project.

YURMBY love!

Hey everybody! I thought I would share with you one of my favorite tools for picking colors and making color gamuts. It's the YURMBY wheel, a creation of the wonderful James Gurney, and is the most complete and accurate color wheel I've found yet. Many of you are no doubt already with the wheel, but for those of you who aren't, it looks a bit like this:

This ain't your momma's color wheel.

Note that it includes both RGB and CMY(K), this is because it is both awesome and perfect. If you'd like to have your very own delicious PDF version of the wheel I made, you can download it here (Illustrator PDF, so it's all editable and swatch-makin' ready).

I've found the wheel to be endlessly useful in both my painting and digital work, as it provides as close to a full (and accurate) spectrum as you can get. Because it consists of 6 primary colors, instead of the standard 3, it is able to show the true complements to each of the colors we see. This allows for more compelling (and, indeed, more accurate) color schemes than the standard red-yellow-blue primary wheel we grew up with. A tetradic built with this bad boy will blow your friggin mind. 

That is all.

Le Cadavre Exquis

Here are a few cadavers my poker club and I made. Enjoy.

WARNING: ADULT THEMES AHEAD, BITCHES.

Influences.

I had someone ask me the other night who my biggest artistic influences are. I rattled off the names of a few artists I like (Rick Berry, Phil Hale, Justin Gerrard, Jim Gurney, etc. etc. etc.), got a weird look (who?), and that was that. But then I reflected on it for a while. What really are the biggest influences in my art? Sure there are a number of artists I admire, whose techniques I draw from, but they aren't really the responsible parties for what I choose to create.

I suppose I owe a lot to my father, and his father, who would draw with me as a child. But then what about my friends in elementary school who would make maps and monsters with me every day? Or all of the pets we had growing up (and we had a few)? The sunny days spent on the lake? The stormy ones? The bugs that would crawl across my knees, or the clouds making their paths across the sky? What about every scraped elbow, every stranger's laugh, every flu I've ever had? Are these things any less pivotal to the way I see things - the way I create? I began to contemplate that all of these memories and experiences don't just shape my history, or my understanding of the world, but they are also entirely responsible for what I create as an artist.

Sometimes the influence is obvious - flatworms and paramecium informing a creepy monster, or an old man at a cafe turning into a hero born of a song, but more often I cannot pinpoint where my visions come from. I can assume that they are bred of countless images and experiences conspiring silently to make me make this or that picture. Endless faces seen morph into the one on the page. All the trees of my youth ripple and twist into the one on the canvas. Everything I've ever know coming together in my effort to relay the beauty I see in it all. It's odd to think about, but now I have a better answer for the next person who asks me what my influences are. I will smile, and tell them:

Thank you for reading, and for just being. You are all the reason I make things, and the reason life is so damn wonderful.

More art next time. I promise.

Power Down - Sketch On

We had quite the storm roll through this past weekend - over 12 inches of very wet and heavy snow overnight. There was mass power failure, and I had no heat or light at the house, so I went to a coffe shop and doodled. For 10+ hours. Twice. I thought I would share with you one of the spreads from that adventure.

Got m'self a red drawin' stick.