Store!

Hey, I have an online store with inPRNT now! It's not quiiiite in time for the holidays, but I'd be happy to provide you with quality fine art prints any time of the year! :) Also, please let me know if there's a piece of mine you'd like to see up there that isn't already. I can always add more prints, but I thought i'd start with ones I know people have asked for previously. Take a look!

I also just wanted to say that I appreciate each and every comment you've all made, and am thankful for your continued support! I hope you all have the happiest of holiday seasons!

Happy Hanukkah!

Since Hanukkah starts this evening, I wanted to put up an illo from this past weekend's edition of the Boston Globe. The article was an interesting essay written by a Jewish mother struggling with her son's fascination with Christmas.

My sketch ideas all seemed to flow out naturally and quickly, which was a nice surprise (especially since turnaround time was short).

Color took longer to figure out, but I had fun using colors that I don't often choose, and I'm really happy with the results. I have to use neons more often! Thanks again to ace AD Ryan Huddle for another interesting assignment! (and another chance for me to bone up on my square compositions!)

Snatched!

Hey everyone! Over the past few months I've been working on and off on some different personal projects for fun, and this is one of 'em. I've really grown to love backgrounds, and wanted to draw some images that place a lot of focus there. I also wanted to draw something mildly dangerous! Combining those ideas, it seemed like a good solution to illustrate an imaginary heist inspired by the sculpture garden at the Louve.

Of course after I finished the image, it dawned on me that, with a few tweaks, this could easily be an illustration of a sweet biker-Catwoman and Batman, so here you go!

I've been looking at these so long, I don't really feel like I have much to say anymore. They feel a little too tight and more realistically colored than a lot of my other work, but it was fun playing with texture and trying something a little different.

I don't have it shown here, but the very first step of my process was finding lots of inspiration photos, which included these sculptures at the Louve. My sculptures aren't exactly the same, and I don't think they're all this big or next to each other, but it was really helpful to get the lighting right. The rest of my process is as follows:

First I lay out the general shapes, lighting, and tones/colors.

Then I created a rough idea of the wall moulding, and refined the figure a little more.

I added a rope to create more of a story & diagonal, and started playing with how texture could look on the statues and wall.

I turned off my starting texture layers and basically just went back in and cleaned/refined everything--thief, guard, statues, etc.

Then I turned some of the textures back on and changed/added more of them (on different parts of the image in different layer modes, like overlay, color burn, etc.)

I added some color & contrast adjusting layers on top, like 'curves'. I always waffle around at this stage. I could go nudging color sliders and opacity and layer modes around forever. A few more were added between this stage and the final image

When I was done it dawned on me that this fit pretty well into the Golden Spiral! Cool bonus!

If I were to do this again, or do more like this, I think I'd like to place even more emphasis on the surroundings, and get more action in there. Or maybe a crowd of people? I don't draw enough crowds. We'll see!

Society Of Illustrators 54

I found out that I got 2 pieces in to Society of Illustrators 54! Woo! I'm honored to have both my 1200 Posters contribution (Institutional) as well as my Savoy Affair drink recipe illo (Uncomissioned) accepted! Thank you, judges!

Since Sam won the silver in Institutional, we will definitely be showing up at that exhibition--I hope we see you there!

Squares Squared--

--also known as "The Anti-Social Network" and "I Lied to Stephen King", both assignments done for my great AD Ryan Huddle in different issues of the Boston Globe!

"The Anti-Social Network", about an avowed introvert struggling with the constant barrage of people and accessibility in internet social media.

"I Lied To Stephen King", a humorous essay about a struggling writer lying to Stephen King on the phone and feeling so bad about it that he made the lie a truth and changed his writing career for the better.

(Any day I get to include some film noir melodrama in an image is a good day)

I don't get many square assignments, and they present a unique compositional challenge...to offset the staticness of a square canvas, one trick is to use a lot of diagonals to lead the eye around the page and create a more dynamic space. Squares also lend themselves more easily to centralized images (which I took advantage of in the Stephen King piece)

Introvert sketches & color studies:

As you can see, I had a tough time figuring out what sort of coloring choices I wanted to make! Sometimes you just have to keep starting over again and get all the crummy stuff out of your system. It wasn't until the last image that I realized what was really missing was a lightsource to tie everything together and create a basis for complementary colors.

Stephen King sketches & color studies:

I had a poll on twitter for which color study I should use.... I was leaning towards A, but C is more classically Film Noir and I liked some of the blue tones in B. In the end the majority voted for A, but with some verrrrry close results for B & C! Ultimately I felt justified using the reddish light from A-- it's a little more menacing and relates to this gut-wrenching lie the author is telling Mr. King, and it fits with the overdramatic mood I was going with for the humorous aspect of the article.

All in all, some fun assignments! Plus, I was able to use some of the compositional experience I gleaned from the Introvert image to make the Stephen King piece work better overall. Woo, learning!

Apocalypse Coffee

Hooray! The Cloudy Collection 2012 Calendar of the Impending Apocalypse released yesterday! It's a special edition of 50 calendars screenprinted in 3 colors and filled with every way you'd want the world to end.
Each month was illustrated by a different talented artist-- Emory Allen, Joe Alterio, Ana Benaroya, Amy Crehore, David Huyck, Adam Koford, Joe Lambert, Phil McAndrew, Luke Pearson, Vincent Stall, and Jamie Zollars. I had the pleasure of drawing September's apocalypse! I'm also so tickled that the wonderful Luke Pearson simultaneously illustrated October with a fully flooded town--looking our months side by side reads like a story!

Apocalypse or not, when there's crummy weather I love the feeling of being snug inside with a good book and I figured my protagonist would appreciate that as well. At first I thought of doing a fiery inferno outside, but it took me a while to get used to the rules of setting up layers for screenprinting, and none of the sketches were working for me:

When something doesn't work sometimes you just have to start over, and a change of scenery (and flooding!) worked out better for me in another sketch (and although those socks would be cozy, I thought they were too distracting from the coffeshop/maritime theme):

Some photos of the screenprinted set:

You can buy the calendar yourself and browse some of the other fine Cloudy Collection sets here!

TUMBLR NEWS

Just wanted to let you guys know--I'm on tumblr! But I'm not getting rid of my blog here either! I'm going to post doodles (like the above) and finished work on tumblr for sharing, but I'll be putting up my finals & process posts on blogger for those who want to read a little more. My tumblr is: http://kalidraws.tumblr.com/, seeya there!