October 2007

This is my husband, Goñi. I had never done a portrait of him before, and last night I completed three (this one is my favorite).

The paintings are part of a photography project assigned to one of our friends, Sharma Shari. Her assignment consists of experimenting with the lighting on a person in order to achieve the best possible portrait. To spice things up, she asked me to do several life-sized portraits of her subject so he could use them as masks. I think it’s a great concept and I’ll be sure to post the results of the portrait session here as soon as I can.

Another post for Amateur Illustrator’s weekly sketch contest. This week, the topic was ‘controversy’. I thought of going for something that addressed current events, or perhaps some Bush-bashing, but ultimately decided against it in favor of something sillier.

My controversy is “The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon”, based on the well-known Mother Goose nursery rhyme. Inter-dinnerware relationships are a pretty controversial topic to me.

This sketch was completed with a ball-point pen and then scanned and colored in Paint.NET (it’s what I have installed at work). Given that I had to color the thing with a mouse, I think it turned out pretty well.

“Juggle” was the topic for Illustration Friday a couple of weeks ago. This is the first piece that I’ve ever completed for IF and I’m very happy with how it turned out. Obviously, the whole point of Illustration Friday is to complete the illustration in a week - I’m way off on that part - but at least the continuously updating topics are a constant source for ideas and inspiration.

I was thinking hard for several days on what I could use for the “Juggle” topic. I could have rendered a more common idea much faster, but I wanted to be as far away from cliché as possible. I’m not sure exactly how I arrived at the idea of a fat man juggling fast food, but once I had the concept, I sketched out some face and composition studies and then got to work.

This illustration is acrylic on bristol board. The acrylic didn’t curl up the board because I used it with caution. I suppose I could have just used a canvas, but I find that it’s harder to define details that way. Also, my main motivation for using bristol board was that I could print out a copy of my pencil drawing on it without ruining the original.

This sketch is for a weekly sketchgroup at the Amateur Illustrator forums. This week’s topic is “Costumes”. Each week, a new topic is chosen based on the suggestions of everyone who posted a sketch that week. As a bonus, whoever suggests the topic to be used in the next week’s sketchgroup will win a free T-shirt from Bountee.com.

I completed this sketch with a Sharpee in a notebook that I keep by my desk at work. The notebook is pretty empty because I’m usually busy, but today was a slow day so I doodled away. Once I finished, I scanned the sketch and colored it using Paint.NET (it’s free so I installed it at work). I’m used to my Wacom, so coloring with the mouse was a pain, but I’m rather happy with the result.

This is not an irrational fear. Automobile accidents are the highest cause of accidental death in the United States.

But what scares me isn’t that I die in an auto accident. My biggest fear is that I kill someone with my car. That’s why I drive such a tiny car. It’s about as safe as a mid-sized car but it’s much less likely that I kill someone with it. Large SUVs and trucks, on the other hand, are safer for the driver but much more deadly for everyone else.