Sunday, November 7, 2010

Personal Project Process Page


On a recent trip to L.A., I visited a friend of mine at his place of work. When we weren't chatting, I was able to get some work done on my painted story. Here it is in progress.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Thank you Wellesley College!


I would like to take the opportunity to thank Wellesley College for inviting me this past week to give my lecture on "Mythophoric Character Design." It was a genuine pleasure to spend the afternoon with all of you and my family and I had a lot of fun walking the paths of your beautiful campus. For more on the visit as well as more photos of the event, be sure to follow this link to The Jewett Art Gallery

A special thanks to my RISD colleague and former classmate Clara Lieu. It is always a pleasure, my friend.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Roque Ballesteros

One of my best friends from RISD, Roque Ballesteros, was featured in a video about his exhibition at 63 Bluxome Street!


63 Bluxome Street - Roque Ballesteros from SF Spots on Vimeo.

63 Bluxome Street - Roque Ballesteros from SF Spots on Vimeo.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Why You Should "Murder your darlings"

"Murder your darlings," is a popular expression used in creative pursuits. Often translated to the less poetic, "Murder your babies," this expression is used by artists to express our need to be willing to throw out ideas or elements in our creative pursuits that we have grown attached to, because they do not serve a particular work's needs.

As many of you will recall, I painted an image for a personal project that I titled, "Seqouian Muircow."

It was an interesting image, that was competently rendered, but it never felt right conceptually. Worse still, was when I created the character called "The Shucking Squid," from the same story, and it became obvious how uninspired the ideas behind my first pass of "The Sequoian Muircow" were. For a while I tried making small changes to the image, in an attempt to not have to lose all the work I had put in to the painting. In the end, there was no acceptable partial fix, and I solved my problems with a sponge and a lot of blue paint.

Starting from scratch is difficult, but one of my former RISD instructors, Tony Janello (whom I am proud to now call a colleague), taught me over a decade ago how to properly search for an honest expression of yourself. I scribbled in marker and gouache until I started to see forms that spoke to me and I pulled them out of the fog.

The character shown below is what I arrived at.


Monday, March 1, 2010

MUAD'DIB stage 3/end day1


Just after midnight and my brushes are down for the day. I'm happy with certain parts of the central figure , and I need to resolve and rework others. At this point, I'm still drawing into the painting with markers and making notes. Trying to stay loose, and scribbling over anything that seems incorrect. Nothing is sacred.

MUAD'DIB roughed in.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010