Worx in Progress: The Unabominable Snowman

Here's a piece that started out for the Art Order holiday challenge where artists were asked to interpret classic holiday characters in whatever way the wanted. If you unfamiliar with the Art Order community that was started by Wizards of the Coast AD Jon Schindehette, it's a great blog to follow for not only those interested in fantasy/sci-fi genre illustration, but there's a lot of wisdom on business and professional development in general. I ended up being a few days late on the challenge deadline, but I can't argue with getting a portfolio piece out of my work.

I did a take on the abominable snowman. A hunter, who I imagine to be French Canadian for some reason, is looking to bring back Mr. Abominable dead or alive... well, actually, he's just looking to bring him back dead. Much to the hunter's chagrin, the abominable snowman is a friendly, good-natured creature and wants to celebrate the Yule season with a big sloppy kiss under the mistletoe. Below is a bit of the process work from beginning to end, starting with sketching.


I think I have some sort of disorder because I can't seem to do much of a sketch with a composition I like unless it's something around 3". I'm a little disappointed that I didn't carry the sense of scale between the snowman and the hunter through to the finish, but some times you learn as much from messing up or more than your successes alone.





When I started to think about what this abominable snowman could look like, initially I thought of older renditions of the character, the old Rankin Bass holiday stop-motion movies, where he's kind of ape-like. I wanted to come up with a slightly different look even if I wasn't going to deviate too far from the color palettes traditionally used for an abominable snowman, so I developed my sketches while looking at pictures of sloths. The snowman eventually ended up with a bit of a teddy bear look to him with a hint of the original sloth concept.


The color study above was done quickly for my own reference while I was building for the shoot. It's essentially the sketch I did earlier, traced over with a little refining to closer resemble my characters and some colors laid down in Photoshop.

As luck would have it, the theme for Illustration Friday is "winter", so I'll get a bit more mileage out of this piece. I also hope to post up some shots of the puppets from this one, I really like the way they turned-out!!

Belated Dia de los Muertos...

Back in November I joined in with other members of the Autumn Society for the "8 Bit Calavera" show at Ground Kontrol in Portland, Oregon. *Note: calavera is the spanish word for skull and is significant in decorations for the Mexican Day of the Dead holiday- and who said blogs can't be educational. The artists worked under constraints for creating pieces for this show, we were to use old Nintendo cartridges to create faces and after all 40 individual calavera's were created, they were installed at Ground Kontrol to make one mega calavera.

My piece for the show was "Barracho Nacho", "barracho" being a word for drunk and "Nacho" just being a name that rhymed, I thought it worked with the lolling tongue under the teeth. The format for creating work being outside of my usual style, I just was looking to do something fun. The eyes are made out of some bling'ed out buttons that I found, the teeth are just clay covered over with aluminum foil, its painted with acrylics and I think my favorite touch is the curled moustache, which is made from a couple of craft feathers.

Here's some shots of the final installation thanks to the people at Ground Kontrol:

Delightful Pets

Here's a piece I did for my recent show at Jinxed in Philadelphia, PA. It was a part of a series of fantasy creatures I had conceptualized. I'm also going to repurpose it for an Illustration Friday challenge, "Cage"- shhh, don't tell anyone.

Holiday Craftiness: Penelope Penguin

I made this little penguin stuffed animal for my niece Kayla for Christmas and I thought I would share it. The whole thing took about 6 hours from designing her, to making the pattern, to the finished penguin and was completely hand-sewn. As a side note, Kayla was very happy with her present.

Hellboy 15th Anniversary Group Show

Last Friday, Dec. 4th, I had the pleasure of showing in the Autumn Society's Hellboy group show. It was a fun night and I would like to thank everyone for their hard work in organizing the show. I decided to make my own rendition of Hellboy's gilled side-kick Abe Sapian. The piece is titled "Two Lost Souls Swimming in a Fishbowl". I liked the basic design of the character and I enjoy his quirks, Abe's love of classical music for one. Along with the finished illustration, I've included some work in progress shots and detail shots.

-Poster by Peter Wonsowski & Justin Grey

-Basic sketch and color study. I couldn't find the right object to make the phonograph have that nice arcing fluted shape. This is the down-side to working with found object elements, you have to find the parts of things to use them. As I was working in time constraints, I had to settle for a smaller cone shape. The composition has also changed somewhat from the sketch to the finish.

-On the right of this photo is a kind of "visual shopping list" comprised of collected reference and I also attached a couple of swatches of fabric that I knew I was going to use to make the main figure, Abe Sapian.

-This is a detail of the phonograph in the shot. I wanted to include it because it is out of focus in the finished illustration and I like the way it turned-out. It's constructed from a ring box, armature wire, K&S aluminum pipe, the top of a cone incense burner, a washer and a couple of nails.

Internet Marketing, The Sh**head Edition

Why is it that companies/independent entrepreneurs can only muster forum posts and blog comments that if not blatantly spam, smell like and look like it?  Like when someone posts a reply to your blog, but it actually has absolutely nothing to do with the original post.  Here's a tip, a hint of sincerity goes a long way, and if you actually had anything truly insightful to say, people would back-track to your blog or business venture.

I love seeing the posts on Linked in and the like where the discussion topic is "Hire me....blah, blah".  Here is a two part question:  what part of that actually constitutes a discussion and second, why should they hire you?  Apparently you have nothing to contribute to the group you belong to, what does that say about your abilities to contribute to that prospective employer that your poorly marketing to/spamming?

There is no formula to making it in business and especially not in this creative field, but I can note one truism, the people who have made it worked hard and have done so sincerely.  Bobby Chiu of Imaginism Studios, pioneer of the global phenomenon of subway sketching, has said, "...the best things have come from the things that I wanted to do, not for the money, but just because I wanted to do them."  For my own piece, I'd say that just doing quality work and getting it out to your market are the key ingredients to success.  A little networking never hurt, but all the same, if you cannot generate any interest in your work after taking care of the producing and marketing aspect, you may have to answer some hard, honest questions to yourself.

My Secret Modeling Career

So I guess it was last summer that I modeled for friend and tremendously talented illustrator Jonathan Barkat.  Our friend Kevon, who is also an illustrator,  came to man the lighting while Jon shot and helped lug the metric ton of gear, most of which was there "just in case".  We drove down to Cape May, NJ at 4am and it was a beautiful drive, we reminisced as we took in the solitude that only that hour of the morning could give.  We arrived a little too early, the sky was too dark, Jon wanted the sky to function like a giant softbox while being able to control the direction of the light with his studio lights.  Before too long I changed in to a wet suit and put on regular clothes over the wet suit; man, I'll tell you, wearing that thing was a work-out!  It gets water-logged and you get sand in places sand isn't meant to go.  To get the right kind of shots, I had to walk into the waves (should I mention I'm not the strongest swimmer?) and at one point Jon puts on wading pants and comes out and shoots from in the water.  I think we were all holding our breath as the waves at various times, got pretty close to Jon's camera.  Here are the results of that day:  shot one, shot two, shot three *all images are copyright of Jonathan Barkat

The "Join the Revolution, Nuclear Disarmament Art Exhibit"

    I created this image for the BANG-USA [Ban All Nukes Generation, the youth outreach branch of the Project for Nuclear Awareness] disarmament show.  I was thinking along the lines of ticking time bomb and trying to capture this sudden realization as this guy is reading about nuclear weapons in the paper.  A great many honors came out of this exhibit:  I received an honorable mention from the jury, was chosen for the audience choice award and P.N.A. purchased my framed print to gift to Seymour Hersh!  In addition to that, I was invited to a dinner with P.N.A.'s trustees to hear Mr. Hersh speak very candidly about the situation in the Middle East.  It was very scary when you couple the instability of many middle and far east countries with the destructive force that a nuclear weapon could bring about.  No matter what political party you are or faith, nuclear weapons are a bad idea- they are the end of everything everywhere.  If you support a Pro Life point of view, a Green movement outlook, an animal lover, if you are a parent or grandparent, you are betraying your beliefs by doing nothing. 

I uploaded some of the other works in the show to my Flickr- I promise that artist credits and proper titles are coming soon!!!