I am busy busy busy drawing exploding buildings and exploding shoes. But in the mean time I did this interview with my new agency, which cant be seen here. All of my art school prickdome seems to come flooding out when ever I sit down to talk about my work, it's a bit embarrassing.

I haven't felt this good about things in a while. Maybe drawing exploding things makes my mind feel a little less exploded. (officially the most awkward sentence of the season)

3 posts in one day? If I do this once a month will this technically be considered an "active" blog? Hopefully my life and job will be picking up enough soon that I will actually have something to write about. In the last month basically all I have achieved is written a thousand emails, gave up on growing out my hair, cleaned the hell out of my apartment, fixed some poorly neglected taxidermy, resized file after file after file, played "Black Jack Davey" repeatedly on banjo, watched horrible bootlegged dvds, tried to sneak around the new tobacco taxes, read the first 3 Harry Potters again (and by again, I mean for the 18th time), changed my ringtone to the Mighty Morphin Power Ranger's com device beep thing, listened to Jason Molina albums on repeat, and sat in front of turtle tanks unblinking for hours on end. The fact that I can summarize a month's worth of activity into a horribly long sentence is proof that I don't really deserve to have a blog.



- As mentioned a few hours ago, I did go back into this. Adding some more shaping into the face (though how effectively, I am not sure), and messed with the color balance some more. At this point I need to just leave something like this be, or I am just going to run it into the ground.



- I did this last week, in attempts to freshen up my work for my Jed Root portfolio. This was the first time in a long time that I actually had FUN drawing. Unfortunately I lost a lot of detail after scanning and threshholding the image. I think my poor old scanner that has to have books put on top of it to scan things well is finally starting to give out.



- I also FINALLY finished this Type Records cover for the new Peter Broderick album that I had started months back. I ended up doing this whole thing entirely in Photoshop, and while normally I am not pleased with the end results of doing this sort of thing...I am supper happy with the way this ended up. The gleam on the mandolin was such a happy accident, that I have been trying to breakdown how I did it in hopes of replicating it again and again. I also realized while making this that I have been using the same wood texture over and over again, that I made for a Penthouse illustration about 2 years ago. This is the sort of thing that leads one to having external hard drives stacked on top of each other.



- And finally I did this quick 24 hour turn around editorial piece for New York Magazine last week, under the always watchful and helpful eye of AD John Sheppard. I am usually no good when it comes to drawing likenesses, especially well known likenesses. These are (supposed to be) Lindsay Lohan, Jimmy Fallon, Spike Jonze, and Michael Phelps. But hey, for 24 hours these came out pretty well...just pay no attention to the perspective on the lock of the Lohan piece.

I was also informed by my new rep today, that my portfolio is now live on the Jed Root website. Go check it out, you might see something you haven't seen before. And feel free to mock me for my ridiculous profile picture (and yes, that's a real elk skin).

Oh, and thanks to everyone for letting me know that my RSS feed was working...especially Jen Hellige, who informed me of this while pulling out of a hug in the street.

A fun fact about Alligator Snapping Turtles:

For those who don't know, ASTs have a peculiar way of feeding. They don't necessarily hunt as much as they "fish". What they do is sit at the bottom of the body of water with their mouths wide open, they then proceed to wiggle their tongues which happen to look like worms. The fish go for the "worm", and wham.

Unfortunately, my turtle is a complete moron. He likes to sit with his mouth open facing down "stream", or with his face half an inch from a rock, or half an inch from the water's surface. I have only seen him actually catch a fish once, and I am assuming that was dumb luck.

So now I have taken to catching the fish in his tank with a net, skewering them on a long t-pin and wiggling them infront of his face until he happens to notice that they are there. This can take up to 5 minutes...like I said, he is a moron.

Or maybe all turtles and tortoises are morons, considering my Red-Footed Tortoise has taken to biting the glass when you walk past his tank.

I swear, I will try to keep the turtle talk to a minimum.

So as promised, here is a break down of how I usually work. I decided to use a much simpler image than I have done in the past, to hopefully make things a little less confusing for people who are interested in this:



- The first step is obviously the actual drawing. This was done with brush (and a little quill here in there) in India Ink, on bristol at about 14X17. I have been working really hard recently at trying to make my inked images just as interesting as my final colored images (a skill that I have seem to have lost over the years). I can't really say that this is a very successful attempt at that.



- Then using a light box, I ink out where I want the shadows to lay on the final image. This used to be something I did pretty rarely, but has become second nature in the steps I take to get to a final piece. There is a little bit of Photoshop in there to clean some lines up, but for the most part it is just ink on paper.



- So let's forget about the inked shadow template for a while and go back to the line work. Here I just laid in flat colors; a layer for each color to make things easier to work with. I used to rely heavily on post-production color adjustments to make everything work well together, but anymore I usually just eye it from the beginning.



- This is also kind of a new step for me. I have been really interested in how the color of skin actually looks, which is not something that can be easily translated through how I do my digital colors. So really it's a lot of experimenting. Here I just used a very soft airbrush in a deep red color and screwed with the layer opacity. Oh, and there is also some shaping in the lips that I figured could get lost once I went further into the shadow layers.



- So here we bring back that shadow template and place it over the colors we have. I usually use a blue hue to make the light a little more realistic, and place it as a multiplied layer (this one is somewhere around 30%). Now I can really start seeing what I need to do. Here I can already see that both the face and breasts are looking pretty flat (no pun intended).



- So here I add some more shadow and light layers. I usually work with 4, but go up depending on how intense I want the lighting to be in the image. Here we have the original shadow layer, another deeper shadow layer, a lighter layer, and a highlight layer. The light layer will be screwed with a lot in the next few steps, and I almost always leave the highlight layer at 100% white. I don't even know if most people see the highlight layer, but i feel it helps add a bit more glow to skin and especially hair. All of these shapes are basically done the same way as I handle the color filling of the rest of the image, with obviously a little more focus on trying to match a brush stroke. It's a pretty boring process of using the pencil and fill tools in Photoshop. I can't believe there was a time I did this without a Wacom tablet. There are still a few pieces on my portfolio where all of this was done with a lasso tool and a mouse.



- Shadow gradients are a bitch. There is a very thin line of when they look decent, and when they look horrible...and unfortunately I ride that line a little too often. I try to make my gradients as subtle and natural as possible, which is a little easier said than done. Here I am doing two groups of layers with gradients, one for the figure and one for the background. My gradient layering is incredibly stupid, because I really don't know what I am doing. I rely mainly on my experience with layering watercolor washes. In the end it's usually a mess of blue, brown, green, and red gradients all at different layer opacities and properties, and all at slightly different angles.



- Here I lay in the light gradient layers. There are 3 here; background, figure, and then another one over the light layers of the figure. I use the main light layer that I placed on the figure as a template for a light gradient layer, and then remove the initial light layer from beneath it. This is something new I have been doing, and I think it helps with when it comes to making natural looking ambient light. At this point the whole thing just looks like a muddy mess, and I am usually on the verge of giving up.



- So you might not even be able to notice the changes here. But I went in and added some extra gradients to push things back and pop things out. There is a darker shadow over the face now, and some rosey gradients here and there throughout.



- So here is the last step. Throwing some scanned texture here and there to make it look a little less digital, and then some slight color adjustments.

That is basically how I do everything now days. All of the line work and shadow templates are brush and ink on paper, and then all the color is basically the pencil and fill tools on photoshop with a shit load of layer property tweaking. Looking at all of this now, there are still a few things I would like to do to this image before it is "done". The face is still a little too flat, and unfortunately putting a shadow gradient over it didn't help much. I will probably go back in and add another shadow layer somewhere between the other two to help flesh the face out.

Oh, and a special thanks to a little lady from the north country for helping me remember why it was I drew in the first place.

These were taken for a piece a friend of mine is doing on home studios. These will not be the photos used, but I thought someone out there might get a kick out of them. Can you find all the animals alive and dead? I highly doubt it.

So as mentioned previously, there are a lot of big things coming up. Though I am unfortunately too lazy to post about them at the moment. But I can say there is a lot of new work in the air, both professional and personal. There is also a new website in the works, as well as some other odds and ends.

I don't know how many actual clients read this blog, but I thought it would be appropriate to mention that I have changed representation agencies. After many fine years with the Art-Dept, it came time for a change. I was brought on with Jed Root by the always amazing Christine Cavallomagno, and as of yet could not be happier. Her contact information can be found on my main site but I will post it here as well:

Christine Cavallomagno
Jed Root, Inc.
61A Walker Street
New York, NY 10013

Web: www.jedroot.com
Tel: 212.226.6600 (x160)
Fax: 212.274.0258
Email: christine@jedroot.com

I am currently working on a piece that I will be posting on here with a break down of "how-to" steps, considering all of my other half-assed tutorials on here are now lacking images thanks to the great blog file massacre of aught eight. Hopefully I will stop getting so many emails asking "Hey bro, how you get those linez wit Illustrator?" And for future reference, I hate everyone that has ever asked me that question. I mean seriously, have we gotten to the point where people can't tell the difference between a brush stroke with ink and a vector line in illustrator?

Oh, and on a side note...is anyone out there actually able to get my rss feed to work? Once again another victim of the great blog file massacre of aught eight, if it ever even worked in the first place.

Oh, the ways of the modern world. Did you know they send turtles through the mail? This seems incredibly risky, and I will be stunned and amazed when I receive a package with a turtle that hasn't been dead for hours.

I promised myself I wouldn't talk about music nobody wanted to hear about on here, and now I am rambling about turtles.

I had a dream the other night that I converted all of my money to Canadian dollars. I guess I was planning for a trip. There are few things that would make me happier at the moment.

This week has been a culmination of many many things. I will have more to say about it next week, along with a handful of new work both professional and personal. But regardless, I think I am finally on the road to being happy. It is a refreshing feeling.

Fun Fact: Speaking of Canada, my brother informed me that it was Canada Goose and not Canadian Goose the other day. Go figure.