Tattoos, Greek style.

Caffeine helps with those Monster vibes.

 

Dancing Girl

Two minute sketches from life.

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It's been a long time since my last post so I thought I'd post some drawings I've been doing from life recently.
Two to ten minute poses from the model.

These are two pages of  watercolour studies for a personal project. Taken from photos and video, of course. It's hard to get this close to a live owl; if you can find one! Size 8"x10"

Two pages from my sketchbook. Sketchbook drawings seem to be more honest and less contrived than some other work. I like that.

Libra and Virgo

I'm trying to stretch the envelope of my predictability with these. I'm not sure where it's all going but I'm having a lot of fun. Collage and acrylic on canvas.

Playing cards

Some more fun with the cowboy theme.
Each card 36"x24". Acrylic and collage on canvas.

These are a couple of pieces I've done for sale at a Rodeo at the end of March. I've gone for the show-biz cowboy/girl rather than the gritty real thing. Part collage, part paint on canvas and bigger than my usual stuff; 24X30 inches.

landscapes

Seasons Greetings

Now for something completely different!

Sometimes I want to move forward by trying something a little bit beyond my comfort zone. It's also nice to take a break from the same old 'same old'.

Here are a couple of sketchbook pages from my trip to England this month. I use quite expensive Namiki pens and mechanical pencils and I have this, probably irrational, fear they will confiscate them at the airport lest they be used as weapons to hijack the airplane!

Spooky Castle

It's that time of year again. Spooky stuff abounds. Here are some Maya sketches from a project I was working on a couple of years ago. Characters by David Feiss and some input from Luc Desmarchelier on the tower.

Elephant sports

I have to confess, mine is no occupation for a grown man!

Concept pieces from Over the Hedge. I always liked the idea of the mice watching a horror movie on the stolen laptop.

A few characters I sketched at a La Jolla art show this weekend.

Shrek's house. Early concepts.

Shrek first lived in a garbage dump near a human village called Wart Creek. At one time it was thought that he lived with his parents and kept rotting fish in his bedroom. Here are more of my early concepts  for the first Shrek film, circa 1996/97.

Most of us, if not all of us, were used to designing for flat 2D animation. It seemed to me that our gouache paintings, delightful as they were, with their brush marks and paper textures, were not going to get us near to the CG look that Shrek was going to have so I started building models, photographing them and working with them in Photoshop. Using Photoshop was a fairly new concept in those days though I was by no means the first to do so.