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I Hate Jim
graphite and colored pencil on paper with digital coloring, 5" x 8"
here's a new one. can you tell which part of the yellow background is hand-drawn and which part is digital? if you can, you win...um...a sense of self-satisfaction, i guess.
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Self Portrait with Floral Motif
pen and ink on paper with digital coloring, 5" x 7"
here is a self portrait i made recently. the first version is a simple pen and ink drawing, without the color bits. i made it for my friend mike freiheit's new project, in which he is enlisting several artists to do portraits of jesus. my first sketches were of a truly semitic jesus, as opposed to the anglo-jesuses we see here in the west. but then, while i was working, i happened to see my reflection in a window, and thought, "hey my beard is looking jesusy, i have a shorter haircut (which my research had revealed would probably be more accurate), and i happen to be 33 years old right now. also, i was wearing a hooded sweatshirt at that moment, and i figured it would be a good stand-in for a shepherd's robe of some sort. and maybe it could be read in a "jesus is in all of us" sort of way, as well. i certainly do not mean to say that i am the messiah or anything, so don't look to me for salvation or anything--i'm fresh out at the moment.
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it's been a while since i've put up anything with scenery. i love doing the portraits, but every now and then i need a change of pace, you know? this drawing was inspired by a photo i came across on the adventure 16 blog, which you can see here.
i'm still working mainly in colored pencil, but lately i've been throwing in a few change-ups here and there (more liberal use of graphite, pen and ink, digital manipulations, etc.)
i've really been pushing to get commissions as of late, putting myself out there as much as i can. i joined hireanillustrator.com, spraygraphic.com, stars-portraits.com, and so forth, in hopes that the right person is going to discover me soon. grad school ain't gonna pay for itself, folks!
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here's conan o'brien, in his royal canadian mounted police uniform, from the week he did the show in toronto. i loved the look of the white gloves against the red jacket, though i think the real guys usually wear brown gloves for the most part.
i did something a little different this time, using black and red ink in the belt and jacket areas. i used the ink for the base layer, then added colored pencil over it. it really makes the color all bursty, don't you think?
some of you out there may have heard me at some point tell a story about myself as a young lad of about seven years of age, sitting in my driveway while drawing a car that was parked across the street. i remember this moment as probably the earliest inclination i might have had about being an artist. i remembered being very proud of that drawing, and i would take it with me wherever i went for the next several weeks, showing it to people.
i thought that the drawing and any evidence of it was long gone, but lo and behold, i happened upon the photo you see above while visiting my dad over christmas! in the photo you can see my brother and i in the treehouse our dad built in grandma davis' front yard, and there i am, clutching that already rough-hewn sheet of construction paper. i must've had it in my pocket, as the six fold lines would indicate. so a big thanks goes to former me, for thinking to whip out the drawing when my dad went for the camera.this would have been enough to make the present me happy, but when i voiced my excitement about the photo to dad, he said that he probably still had the drawing itself stashed away somewhere. and after two minutes of shuffling through a dresser drawer, he produced this:
holy crap, right?
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here's a fairly new one of daniel day-lewis and paul dano, stars of there will be blood. i just saw mr. dano as dwayne in little miss sunshine last night, too. i'd seen it before, but it came on television last night, so i saw it again.
julia and i had been away from home for 12 days until we finally arrived got back yesterday morning. we had intended to get a lot of work done this weekend, but when we got here, we found that we didn't want to do a thing except vegetate on the couch. we ended up watching three movies in all, so i feel like we accomplished something, no?
