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:

Earlier work

These are some acrylic painting works from last semester and junior year that I hadn't had the chance to upload earlier. Horray!

Acrylic portrait of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, for my Advanced Figure Drawing class:

llustration for "Forgotten Cookies" recipe assignment, also acrylic:

Geothermal Crater Tower from the "Cityscapes" independent project, part of the Geothermal piece posted earlier:

The photo of the crater city is pretty subpar, I know, but I haven't had the time set up better ones yet, what with the Sisyphian task of finishing up college. A post about my summer plans is upcoming, as there's a lot I have laid out...

LOVE sculpture illustration

This is an illustration of Robert Indiana's LOVE sculpture, done for the Peabody Essex Museum. Originally, they commissioned it as a museum shop tag for chocolates being sold for Mother's Day, but discovered that color versions of the sculpture are on shaky legal ground, so in the end they decided to go with a silver foil imprint of a flat version (Indiana didn't formally copyright the image when he created it so it's used all over the place, but apparently he eventually got some form of protection on 3D color versions):

Creature design

More digital work, this time a creature design from earlier in the semester. This was the first serious thing I did with the tablet, but I'm not unhappy with it:



I devised a stupidly complex design for it; it's an amphibious animal that has a symbiotic relationship with a plant component, like algae, and it shoots seeds from the bumps on it's back. They're led around by this sect of monks who plant and nurture the land and live in a mountain monastery where they gather a massive vault of the world's seeds (I adapted the idea from the Norwegian Doomsday vault).

Alien Landscape - Subterranean Laboratory

This piece is also for Sci-fi Illustration. In this assignment we had to create a strange or alien landscape, so I came up with a mysterious structure in the bowels of a cave, possibly some secret laboratory dabbling in bizarre and disturbing experiments.

It still needs work, so at some point I may take this down and upload a new one, but I just wanted to show the initial design.

The People's Automaton

This assignment for my Sci-fi/Fantasy Illustration class involved designing a robot and creating a setting for it; I designed a top secret Soviet robot designed in the 1980's who was left all by himself in the abandoned military base he was created in. He basically wheels continuously around the base shouting Soviet slogans through a loudspeaker on his back.

This was also an experiment in Corel Painter, which I just got last Christmas.