Hourglass Figure...

well... i wanted to challenge myself and see if i could make a figure from start to finish in an hour. so i started working on it at 7:30pm and ended up with the final figure by 8:25pm. take a look:











i think it came out ok...

To Die For...

I've been sharing some of the stuff I've been working on in the last few months. The other piece that I did for the Sumter Artists' Guild was To Die For. It's a drawing dealing with the extremes that young women sometimes go to to be considered beautiful. I wanted to convey the disturbing things that I have been seeing on television and movies that have been shaping the minds of girls for the better part of the last 50 plus years. Where does beauty end and horror begins? At what point do we give up our humanity to become perfect?

The first step was drawing the main object of the piece in pencil. It was then retraced in ink, and the pencil was erased from the paper. The image is drawn on Bristol Illustration Board. It has a very nice surface, and it holds up well to wet media:

Then some more fine linework was added to the figure and some of the other elements:

After the central piece is finished, the background is started, and I start going nuts. This kind of insanely detailed background stuff is where I lose all sense of time and space. I kind of zone out and create from some place in my mind I rarely deal with:

The piece is then painted. I only added paint to certain portions of the piece to emphasize the difference between reality and the perception of reality in the mind of the subject. This is the final image that was submitted to the show:

Thanks for stopping in and looking!

From the ground up...

This is the history of the first collaborative piece between Billy Parker and myself. We wanted to make a piece to put in the Sumter County Artists Guild annual show. The fact that we had never actually created a finished work together inspired us to take a stab at it for the show. Several hang out sessions and a few burritos later and we had decided what we were gonna make: a portrait of Cthulhu.

Next step was to decide how he was gonna look, how he was going to be presented, and how best to compose the piece. Billy championed the idea that Cthulhu was sitting in his throne awakening... just about to destroy the world of men. I wanted a more action oriented pose, with him standing as his wings unfurled. It wasn't until I set the two ideas down as sketches that the sitting pose was clearly the best one of the two.

Early Development

The next step was creating a maquette to better envision the character and for reference on how the light reacted to the tentacles on his face. I sculpted the head out os Sculpey and used it to draw the pencils Billy would paint over in the final version.

Maquette

The maquette was then painted as a reference for Billy's final paint application.

Painted Maquette

The next step was drawing the pencils that would lay the groundwork for Billy's painting. I had never drawn on canvas board before... trust me... it's a pain in the rump. Smudges VERY easily... I reccomend using gloves and/or a paper shield to protect the drawing while you work.

Pencils

Gave the maquette a thick coat of varnish to give it a wet, slimey look. Even though the maquette was just a tool for reference, it still makes for a nice piece to keep... and enter in the show!

Finished Maquette

And here's the final piece! It's one of the best things I have ever taken part in... watching Billy turn my humble pencils into the finished piece below was unbelievably cool.

Finished Painting

Well... i want to appologise for the less than detailed images of the finished painting, but I don't have a scanner big enough to accomodate the painting... I'm looking into scanning it properly eventually.

Well, thanks for dropping by and taking a look!

Charlie

Bring me the head of Batros!

Batros was a character from the old He-Man cartoon. He was kind of a lackey for Skeletor who looked like a lackey for Hordak... but he totally wasn't. His major claim to fame was the fact that his greatest crime was stealing all the books on Eternia. Yeah... the books. Shut up.

Well... I've been threatening to share my head sculpt for Batros... and here he is:

Once again... I was trying for a Mattel-ized version of the character. I like to think of it like Mattel made the toy first, and then the cartoon designers created the animated character from that toy. It helps me to give it an authentic Mattel-like quality, I think.

He's fresh out of the oven, so he's still a bit rough... I'll have him all polished up soon enough though.

Any suggestions as to what character I should sculpt a noggin' for next?