Terrible Yellow Eyes: Drawing

Terrible Yellow Eyes

Recently, Cory Godbey put together a collection of paintings inspired by Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. It showcases the works of a number of really brilliant artists and is a great tribute to Sendak. 
It is one of the most outstanding stories that I can remember from my childhood. It is a great pleasure to be able to contribute to this collection.

Preliminary Sketches

I've always loved the characters of the Wild Things. With simple, clear design they manage to communicate the perfect balance of emotion for what you would imagine giant wild animals on a far-off island might look like.  

I love that Sendak doesn't fill in all the details, he leaves it just vague enough so that it is a pleasure to wander around in the world, and to imagine the possibilities for yourself. I respect him for this restraint. 

European Tour

I recently did some traveling abroad to visit friends and see some of the galleries in France and the Netherlands. I have always wanted to see Paris, to see the galleries, and to see the city itself and experience the culture. But most of all to see if everything that everyone said about the place was true; that the food is spectacular, the art is legendary, the city is the most beautiful on earth, and that the people are all very rude.

We found that the food lived up its reputation, that the city was indeed beautiful, and the people were only rude if we ran around like drunken apes. 

In general people in Paris were wonderful, and really helpful. And using my astounding knowledge of the french language, I was able to successfully negotiate my way through at least three meals, two subway rides, and get myself completely lost everywhere I went.  

Here I am on the phone, lost.

If it weren't for the kindness of our friends Olivier, Loren and Annebelle over at the Daniel Maghen Gallery we would have spent most of the trip lost in the subways with the drunken apes.  

Aside from the stunning palatial quality of the city, (touring Paris from the Senne river one would think that it was built of nothing but palaces,) it was the statuary that was the most strikingly impressive for me. I would love to spend several months drawing and doing studies from these. There is so much knowledge to be gleaned from these works. They are some of the finest examples of the human form in art that I have ever seen.  

The Hunt For Petar Meseldzija

After leaving the wonders of Paris, we journeyed to the Netherlands to seek the counsel of the mythical guru, Petar Meseldzija. 

We saw him in the distance, biking over the fields and canals and windmills in the far north. We tried to catch him, but after days of unflagging pursuit, our legs gave out and our bikes fell apart. As we lay exhausted in the marshy fields night came. It had been a wasted trip. The next day we would return to france, defeated.  

But as the moon began to rise we heard the creaking of an old bike drawing nearer and nearer. A shadowy figure came through the tall grass. Petar Meseldzija. He stopped in front of us and laid down his bike, which was magical and had only one pedal. He told us that we could not have caught him, had we ten thousand horses, or dragon's wings, or even canondales. He had a magical bike. Then he sat down with us and explained the mysteries of time and space and served us flaming hot Serbian coffee.

 

The next morning we ate belgian waffles and toured the Rijksmuseum with him to veiw the Rembrandt paintings. 

It was a privilege to see these paintings with Petar. Along with being a mythical guru, and owning a magical bike, he is also a phenomenal oil painter and hearing him explain the methodology of Rembrandt's work was worth a decade of college education.

This is Rembrandt's, Jeremiah Lamenting the Burning of Jerusalem. We sat in front of this painting for hours. There is the wealth of a thousands of years of artistic knowledge wrapped up in this single little gem. I hope if you ever have a chance to go to Amsterdam that you will stop to see these paintings.  

MicroVisions Auction

The Ebay auction for the Microvisions show is up! 

Check it out here. 

The Mad Bull Developmental Work

Concept Development work of city scene

Early production still from city scene

Building our city and assembling the Minotank

This was most complicated scene in the project and was the one I had the most fun assembling.  It was like building cities with legos as a kid. 

The purpose for building lego cities is self-evident; they are built to be destroyed. 

The real tragedy for me is that all this work is only up there for a few seconds. 

The Minotank was also great fun to assemble.  I love steam-powered, clockwork machines.Or at least, I love the idea of steam-powered, clockwork machines. 

Danny, who constituted the entire animation team on this project, worked some real magic in making the Minotank come to life.  I gave him a baffling assortment of gears and plates and pistons and smoke and I think it nearly killed him, but he pulled it altogether. It was really exciting to finally see this thing stomping around, knocking over buildings and billowing smoke.  

Early storyboards

There is a story contest for this on the Portland Studios Blog. 

I am really curious to see what people submit for this. 

The Mad Bull

The Mad Bull is a spot animation that I have been working on Portland Studios.  Its a mini commercial of sorts, involving the efforts of several magical creatures who work here at the studio.  

 

I provided the imagery and conceptual development work. I am not really much of an animator, and most of the moving elements are thanks to the effects work of our in-house, digital guru Danny McNight. 

Although I am relatively new to the animation field, I love working with moving pictures and sequential art. There's something wonderful about making worlds come to life with movement. And although painting imagery for animation has many similarities to the illustration I am more used to, it is interesting to me just how different an undertaking it is to doing static images for animation. 

I will be posting some of the development work next week.  Until then, drop in over at the Portland site and check it out.  

MicroVisions Final Four: Cast Your Vote!

No. 1

No. 2 

No. 3

No. 4

MicroVisions No 4

MicroVisions No 3

(click image for larger version)

I tried to take a few more photos for this piece to detail the steps. I like to keep a record of the steps of my pieces. I hate doing something in a painting that turns out amazing and then going to try and recreate the effect in a later piece only to find that I have no idea how I did it before.

So I often take notes in the steps to help capture it.  

In this piece, you will notice a lot of reworking, specifically in the color changes from the 3rd to last and the 2nd to last pieces.  A glaze kind of got away from me there, and the image changed pretty drastically. (Now, where's the control+z button on this canvas thing again?) 

In the end I am still pleased with how it turned out, but now I know what medium not to use when glazing in the future... 

MicroVisions No 2

MicroVisions No 1

For those of you who missed last Wednesday's post, I am going to be entering a single 5x7 oil painting into this year's MicroVision's show. This piece is going to be done without my usual digital trickery. It will be a completely original, unmonkeyed-with painting. 

I will be a Jedi with no mind powers, a samurai with no sword, a man without any pants on. 

(Some of you may say that pants, swords and mind powers are all overrated, but still, I feel a bit naked without my tricks.)

I NEED YOUR VOTES

Now, this series is going to be a little different than past series because I would like to ask everyone's feedback to decide which of these I should send in. The main question is, which of these paintings will do the best at an auction?
My deadline is next Tuesday, the 24th. So, with that in mind I am going to break with tradition and post these pieces very quickly, with their development stages all at once. I am going to post a new one each day. Then I am going to post the final 4 Monday morning at 9 AM. If you can make it, swing by here Monday and cast your vote!

MicroVisions No. 1

Cory Godbey Show

Cory Godbey has announced that he is having an art exhibition April 3rd. Prepare to have your socks rocked off.  If you are in Greenville, SC around thereabouts you should stop in and check it out.  

I have been able to go over and spy on him as he has been working on the show a few times in the past few weeks and it is looking really great. (He did most of the show with his arm in a sling. See example here.) 

He has posted a lot of progress on the paintings on his Lightnightrains blog as well as the back stories to these images.  One of my favorite aspects of Cory's work is his really wonderful sense of color theory. These thumbnail color comps for the show are really splendid: 

This show will be rather unique in that he will be displaying a lot of this developmental material at the show itself. It should be a really great insight into how he develops his images. I'm really looking forward to it.