Merry Christmas

The White Rabbit

My obsession with fairy tales continues. Here is some first progress on painting #2 of my Tea With Alice series.  I'm working in light washes of acrylic on canvas - to give it a kind of sepia, antique-y look.  A friend of mine referred to this as a 'creepy easter egg.' Ha!  I think that's kind of a good thing.

Illustration Friday; Freeze

Digital Painting; graphic novel style

I'm at work on a graphic novel (which I hope to debut here at some point). My first revelation?  Writing is hard.  Really, really hard.  But I remain determined - hopeful that eventually the zillions of bad ideas I have will distill themselves into the good ideas I'll need to make my story work. Writing resembles illustrating in that, much like making art, when you attempt to fill up a blank page, there are infinite possibilities. For success and for failure.

It's maddening, but when it works, it's magic.

So along with writing, I'm working to create a visual style.  This is a promo piece, hand-drawn and painted in Photoshop, which will go out to publishers.  I feel like it has something of the look I'm going for.  Maybe not totally there yet, but getting there.

A new painting - Violets

Here's a new addition to my flower series, which started with Jasmine.  Originally the headdress on these two ladies was going to be made up of masses of violets - which may still happen.  This is a digital painting and serving as a study for what will most likely be a 24"x36" work on canvas.  So the happy accident here is that I did a quick photoshop squiggle to indicate the headdress, but everyone seems to like it as is.  I'm thinking the larger painting will beg for more detail, and will likely end up looking quite different, but for now I like the look of this.

59th Street Pond, Central Park

Recently I was painting in Central Park.  I hadn't counted on how busy it would be; hordes of people walking about made it difficult to focus. I wasn't getting great results with my watercolors.  Then I found a quieter spot near the 59th Street pond, and this duck sitting calmly at the shore.  Zen moment.

Alice painting; stage 1

Yes I'm painting with real brushes again.  I love digital but there is just really nothing like the feeling of working with a brush and real paint, on real canvas.

This image has a bit of history.  I drew it onto the canvas last year, probably around this time of year.  But I wasn't ready to paint it.  So I packed it up and took to New Orleans, but didn't paint it there either.  So back it came to New York with me, unpainted still.

Some combination of the days of rain and I don't know, I'm finally feeling it, here. 

This the underpainting.

Icarus

I'm working on a book cover for a friend's second book.  The cover image is going to be based on the legend of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun...

so I'm doing some color sketches...this one i particularly like.

Jack and the Beanstalk

So I've been working on scenery and such for a production of Jack and the Beanstalk (by the New Acting Company - the show opens this week!)...it's exhausting work, but fun.  Never a dull moment in theatre.  Here is an ad I made for TimeOut New York.  Also a promo piece I did which was not for the show, but influenced by it.  I do love fairy tales.

Spring

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

sketch for a new painting

digital painting...Jasmine

This past year I spent some time in New Orleans.  I'd often sit on my balcony, enjoying the shade and watching horse drawn carriages roll by.  It was here I could smell the scent of jasmine; exotic and sweet, wafting through the trees.  Such a gorgeous scent.

I wondered what Jasmine would look like in human form...I did a pen and ink sketch, which was set aside and forgotten.

I found the sketch again, crumpled a bit and sandwiched between the pages of an old book. It seemed time to either throw it away or do something with it.  So I decided to turn it into a digital painting.

That's jasmine in her hair.