PEM kabuki poster

The Nightlife Is For You

Tom Waits

The back-alley god with the chainsaw throat.



I'd like to work more with caricature; this is a decent likeness all things considered, but I really want to work on straight up portraiture without going too far into abstraction. I'm probably going to try another one in paint, to get the gritty feel of his persona nailed down.

I also really want that hat.

[edit]: I made a bunch of improvements on the original, and am much happier with it now. Horray!

Jalopy Dance

So the very fine people at MadAtoms.com have used my drunk-driving skeleton illustration on the relaunch of their new website.

Help me thank 'em by checking out their hilariously colorful jibberings.

Bill O'Reilly will eat your face!

This was a quick caricature experiment from last year that I thought i might include here:



Bulging head-veins are really fun to paint.

Quick color sketch

Full painting in the works, with such sweltering hot weather outside the past few days it's nice to sit in the shade and just paint...

The Wandering Jew

This is a modern interpretation of the biblical character of the Wandering Jew. I'm really interested in the concept of extreme longevity and thousand-year old people walking among us (see also the Count of St. Germain, the Bodhisattvas, Li Ching-Yuen, etc.) and I wanted to show what I would imagine the mythical figure to look like in his current state, doomed to walk the Earth until the Second Coming. I based the overall composition on Gustave Dore's representation.



And I haven't forgotten my painting/drawing a day pledge; I've been busy plugging away and will upload some work by the end of the week.

Nocturnal

A nocturnal from the Maritime collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, drawn for a collections booklet for my internship project. Nocturnals were maritime instruments used to tell time at night, using Polaris and a number of other reference constellations.


(Adobe Photoshop)

Painting Factory

Alright, so over the summer I'm going to try my damnedest to do a painting a day. I know a lot of people do this after graduation to keep themselves in practice and to keep themselves from being lazy bastards, and since I feel like I'll probably need both I'm going for it. I have a feeling that with work at the museum it may end up being more like a painting a week, but I'm determined to keep my paintin' brain in good shape this summer.

My dictatorially self-imposed rules:

1. One small painting/fully-realized drawing a day, any medium, any subject (imaginary or from life, but preferably at least partially from life)
2. If I have a painting started that I particularly like, I can forgo a painting a day to work on that painting for a week
3. If I miss a painting one day, I have to do two paintings the next day, and so on

I'll probably officially start after graduation, cause I want to get at least some laziness out of the way before then. If anyone wants to come over and paint with me, any time, just give me a call or shoot me an email.

One of the reasons why I'm so excited? This painting:


When Edward Hopper painted this, he was standing in the exact spot where my car is parked, across the street from my apartment.

[edit]: If anyone has any requests, let me have 'em. I can't guarantee I'll get to them (especially if I allow myself to get lazy) but I'd love some ideas, and if you bother me enough maybe I'll get more motivated.

Natural Science Illustration show

Pictures from our Natural Science Illustration exhibit late last semester. The first image is a gouache painting of a Chinese Chestnut tree. The final project for the class, a Northern Woodland scene created in a grid with one square per student, is shown in the other images, with my contribution highlighted. This show was a blast to work on: