Since I’m not a SCAD student, I didn’t participate in any of the challenges, but I did keep myself busy all night drawing a few endemic Puerto Rican birds. The one seen above is the Puerto Rican Nightjar, a very rare and critically endangered bird that inhabits the southwestern part of the island. The Nightjar’s plumage is mottled with browns and blacks to help it camouflage itself with the forest floor.

The second bird shown here is the Puerto Rican Tody, a very small bird with bright green plumage on its back, white on its belly, and bright red on its throat. This bird is widespread on the island but is generally too small to be seen easily. You know one is close because of their loud and nasally beep calls.

The last bird that I drew at the challenge was the Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo. These birds are quite large and are easily identifiable by the large white spots on their tail feathers. The rest of the bird is grayish tan, but they have red eyes and a reddish underbelly. These birds can be found in forests throughout the island but might be a little hard to see because of their very slow movements. Despite being so slow, they’re actually very good at catching lizards, which are their main source of food.

In all, I was at SCAD from about 8PM to 6AM, so I spent about 10 hours on these (though I goofed off for a while as well, so the actual working time was about 8 or 9 hours). All of these were drawn with technical pens - I mainly used a 0.7mm for outlines and a 0.1mm for shading and small details.

The birds are shown here in the order that I drew them, so if you notice any declining quality, it’s probably due to exhaustion.

Why did I choose to illustrate Puerto Rican endemic birds? I’m a bird maniac and I’m Puerto Rican, so it’s a match made in heaven! Also, I wanted to supplement my portfolio with some technical illustrations because the style comes more naturally to me than editorial work (I am an engineer after all).

I’ve been experimenting a little more in gouache since it can offer both the transparency of watercolor and the opacity of acrylics depending on how you treat it. In this piece, I first covered the paper in very dark browns and greens. Once that pigment was dry, I went on to splatter a very bright magenta all over the page. I did this so that when I painted in my highlights, the shadows would still have these interesting bright spots.

After drying the red splatters, I started giving the shapes volume by adding lighter tones. I then finished it up by painting in some scales and other bright highlights, and also adding blues where the intense shadows should be.

This piece turned out pretty well, but I would have liked to plan the colors out a little more because it seems kind of flat in some areas.

As a side note, I’m very happy to have used my own reference photo for this piece. Every time I go to the zoo or the aquarium I bring my camera and take pictures like crazy, and this is the first time that I’ve actually used one of those photos for a painting.

Darren Di Lieto, who conducted the interviews for LCS, wrote a recent blog post about the whole event: how he found out, who he has contacted, and he even put up a gallery of the book so that the affected illustrators can rally together and try to get this book off the shelves.

Since the book was published in Hong Kong, Darren has run into a lot of trouble trying to contact the publisher to notify them of the copyright infringement. Sadly, copyright infringement in China is rampant and has been covered several times in the news; there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it though.

If you do see this book in a store somewhere, please don’t buy it. Even better, let the book store manager know that the entire contents of the book were plagiarized and kindly request that the book be removed. None of the illustrators featured in this book (or in the book’s CD) have been given a single penny for their work, so don’t help the publisher make money either!

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.

UPDATE: Twidget is working again! The instructions have been slightly modified to account for the changes that need to be made to get it to work correctly.

If you’re like me, you struggle with keeping a myriad of online services up-to-date with your latest photos, projects, and status information. I recently signed up for an account with Twitter, and I’ve been using this great service for updating my status on everything from my Facebook profile to this blog.

Sadly, MySpace doesn’t offer any way to integrate its status with Twitter, and I haven’t found any satisfactory way to do this with a third-party tool, so I decided to make my own. I’m calling my funky creation a Twidget, and you can see it in action on my MySpace profile.

In order to to implement the Twidget yourself, you’ll need:

• a web host
• a Twitter account

That’s it! A web host is necessary because you’ll need to upload the Twidget files somewhere that MySpace (or any other web page) can access later.

Once you’ve uploaded the Twidget files to your web host, you can use the following code to view your Twitter feed:

It might be best to copy and paste this code into a text editor to see what’s going on:

• http://www.YOUR-URL.com/twidget.swf - This is the URL where you’ve uploaded the twitdget file
• http://TWITTER_FEED_URL - This is the URL of your Twitter Atom feed. Please note that this is NOT the same as your Twitter user page (which looks like this: http://twitter.com/twitter_username). To get the URL for your Twitter feed, navigate to your Twitter user page and click the orange feed icon beside the URL in your browser.
• TWITTER_USERNAME - This is your user name on Twitter

Once you have changed all of the appropriate values, you should see a Twidget like the one below:

Once your Twidget is displaying correctly, you can apply CSS styles to it in order to get it in the right position on your MySpace page. For my profile, I used the following CSS:

You may have to tweak these numbers a bit to get it in the right position on your page.

If you have any suggestions for the Twidget, please let me know in the comments!

Download the files and try it yourself: Twidget v0.5.

In addition to drawing and painting, I’ve also been putting together several CSS hacks in order to create accessible image rollovers. Traditionally, image rollovers are created with JavaScript or maybe even Flash, so less capable browsers are crippled when trying to view a page that depends on these technologies for navigation. I’ve also been experimenting with making text links available on the image rollovers for text-only browsers or browsers that have disabled images.

Given the technical nature of the work, I was reluctant to publish them here and mess with the Visual Arts theme of this blog. However, since it has been such a long time since I have been able to scan my day-to-day visual work and upload it, I’m beginning to think that it wouldn’t be so bad after all. Plus, it’s either that or nothing at the moment.

Besides, I think my CSS image rollover hack would a beneficial read to other artists who use rollovers on their site. I’ve seen hundreds of artist portfolio sites that depend on JavaScript to function that are completely crippled when JavaScript is turned off. I bet they would be interested in an alternative that makes their content available to an even broader audience.

The Sketchbook Project, which I had written about in several previous posts, finally concluded and had its exhibition on October 27. Over 200 notebooks were returned of the 500 that had been sent out and the exhibition was a great success. I was truly amazed at some of the entries; events like these show me how far I have yet to go to achieve true success in illustration or art in general. I feel like I am only at the very surface of my potential at the moment.

The image I chose to close my posts on The Sketchbook Project represents my fear of deep water. I’m not talking about the mere 10 or 12 foot depth of swimming pools, either. I’m afraid of deep water. The kind you can only find in the ocean, where you can feel the cold currents sweep up from below. Who knows what’s lurking down there, so far beneath you?

To view the rest of the images from my sketchbook, visit my Sketchbook Project portfolio.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I completed three portraits of my husband for a friend’s photography project. This image is one of the results of the photo shoot.

I thought the idea of having a painting of the subject in the portrait is a great one, and I love how the final images turned out.

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.