Illustration

C.F. Payne, one of America’s best-known contemporary illustrators, bases his style on multi-layered technique that he invented. Known as the C.F. Payne multimedia technique, the process consists of creating a very detailed pencil drawing of the subject to be illustrated and then covering the drawing in several different layers:

• Acrylic wash - used to give the subjects their lightest base color.
• Watercolor wash - gives the subject their medium tones. Generally, a neutral brown-orange color is washed over the entire image and then lifted off of the the subject’s highlights.
• Oil wash - gives the subject their shadow tones. A transparent mix of purple and green works great for this, especially in portraits. Again, the color can be washed over the entire image and then lifted off of the places where there should be no shadow.

Once the layers are in place, fix the entire image with some clayboard fixative (which leaves a good grain) and give the final coloring details with colored pencils.

I decided on trying to do a portrait of Mike Rowe, from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, for my first C.F. Payne attempt because he has a very expressive face that I thought would be fun to work with. Overall I’m very pleased with how it turned out and I’d definitely try another portrait using this technique soon.

“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 may seem strange to most people, but I have a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico. The truth is that I love engineering: I have an innate knack for solving problems. To be an even better engineer, I signed up for the COOP program at my university a couple of years ago and got sent off to Boeing in California for an internship. While I was there, I became good friends with a fellow intern, Kristy.

Kristy is a spunky little woman, and funny as hell, so we got along right away. Interestingly enough, she’s a rocket scientist, so she had always wanted a rocket design to use as a sticker on the rear windshield of her car. Once she found out I could draw, she drew me a little picture of the rocket she wanted and I then refined her idea to make it cute and unique.

Using her idea as a reference, I first drew a cleaner and more polished version of the rocket in pencil and then I scanned it and cleaned it up in Illustrator. I like the result very much, even though it’s not what I would generally consider “my style”.

I used to work at Puerto Rico Sea Grant as a web and graphic designer and I really enjoyed what I was doing there. My job offered me an opportunity to illustrate stories about nature and science while trying to make those stories appealing to a wider audience. This illustration was going to be used for a poster announcing a conference about endangered whales, dolphins, and porpoises and what people could do to protect them. In the end, the illustration was never used in the poster because the conference organizers wanted to pack so much information into the publication that I could barely fit any images.

The entire image was drawn and painted in Photoshop. I started with drawing the general shapes of the figures and then added the speckled background to use as a base for the painting. Then I went on to paint in the figures using transparent washes so that the background would show through and affect the colors of the final image.