Commission: Heirloom Tomatoes

Here is a drawing of some juicy heirloom tomatoes that a friend commissioned as a wedding gift for his wife. By the time I was done, I was having to invent most of the biggest tomato due to rotting. Prismacolor pencil on toned paper.

Monday Night Portrait Sessions

In August 2009, Friday Arts Project (mostly Stephen Crotts and I, and two to four other regulars at other times) began meeting in a dark room with one light shining on a friend or family member or practical stranger to practice drawing the human face. A few months after we started, we had enough work to put together a show, and we called it Countenance One. I have literally dozens of portraits from drawing one almost every week for the past year and a half. Here is the most recent portrait:







I might post others from time to time.
I usually draw with Prismacolor pencils on a medium-value matboard or paper, usually a chromatic gray or something between brown and another color. (Brownish pink, for example) All the drawings were made in 2 hours or a little less.

After doing enough of these drawings I've noticed that I'm about twice as fast as I was when we started practicing. I used to not even get both eyes in, much less something indicating the shoulder, values, much development of the hair. I'd say this has been a pretty valuable weekly exercise for me.

Studio Fundraiser Show

Space 157 is having a fundraiser show in the Loading Dock gallery in the Gettys Center on Main St. of Rock Hill, SC, this Thursday, Aug. 26 at 6:30pm. Here are my entries:

Commissioned by Carolina Ethanol Partnership

I have a friend who has started a business recently, with the above title. You can check it out here. Right now they are investigating growing kelp in the ocean near Charleston, SC to produce ethanol from it.
Two things that CEP wanted to show were a curtain/fence device that would keep the kelp from floating out to sea, and a sonic repellent device to drive marine life away from the kelp during harvest time so no animals are harmed.

The floating/anchored fence:




The sonic repellent:




Process: Sketched, penned by hand, then scanned in and handled in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Pumpkins: bought by a fancy lady

These are some recent things I've made- sorry for the low quality cell phone pictures.

Wedding Invitation

Recent wedding invitation for some good friends. His last name is Fox, and her chosen personal symbol is the dandelion.

More portfolio pieces.

Digital illustration executed in Photoshop with Wacom tablet. More of an exercise than a well-thought-out conceptual piece. The thing is, it was never completely thought out. So it stands as an exercise.

The concept was 'magic' and it was for a class, so we were restricted in some ways: no animate objects (so I used coats), monochromatic color scheme. I chose to show magic in a city scene, with chanting and an enchanted trash can. A very large enchanted trash can.

A botanical/nature illustration in watercolor, and I used a tiny bit of white gouache for the highlights on the berries in the middle. These are American beauty berries, two different varieties. I painted the wood grain background on watercolor paper first, masking out the berries, then painted the berries on top.

A screenprint on tea-stained paper. The whole class was assigned to make a print titled "The Most Offensive Thing Ever," and as you can imagine, most people took it literally, some did something like a mirror or something slightly more mysterious (a Virgin Mary with a bullet, for example) but I was the only one who managed not to show the Offensive Thing.

An illustration showing Life and then Death. Executed in colored pencil; type and border added digitally.