posted: August 17, 2008

This is me, still struggling through "Moby Dick." Actually, I'm currently finishing Frank Herbert's "Dune" and have Paul Bowles' "The Spider House" on deck (although I would rather read his "Let It Come Down" but can't find a copy).

I just finished this illustration for Johns Hopkins for a story about a sleep study procedure that can be done in the comfort of your home. The client wanted a "homey" feel with the addition of a graph that represented the procedure. To keep the image more general, I designed it without the graph, just an image about sleep, and then worked in the graph for the client. So above is the non-graph version.

The cat is a combination of my daughter's two cats, Misty and Lue. Misty likes to sleep in this position next to me; Lue modeled for the ears and paws. And even though I'm moving toward the use of more reference, the figure and the rest of the scene were drawn from my imagination.

Above is the version with the graph.

And here is the sketch.

posted: August 2, 2008

I did a portrait of Samuel Colt for one of my Hartford Art School classes (taught by Nancy Stahl and Jean Tuttle). First, I made a sketch using a couple of references and then reduced the distortion in Photoshop. I blocked in the color using Illustrator and combined it with the sketch in Painter to introduce some painterly textures. After messing around with that for a while (my Painter technique is tentative and clumsy), I posterized the image in Photoshop, about two dozen variations.