Memoriam Tattoo Update

Hey all, I'm back from vacation and I have a few new images to post for you soon. For now I'd like to share a follow-up on that tattoo I designed. I just got this image of the completed tattoo. Take a look! (To see the blog post about the initial design take a look HERE.)

Found it!

(Ink, Watercolor, and Guache)

Well I had done this painting a while ago - but it had somehow learned to grow legs, walk away, and misplace itself. The good news is that I found it! I'm glad I did, this was one of my favorites. It's based on a forest landscape, I don't really like doing landscapes all that much, so I decided to take it another step and use the landscape as the basis for the painting, but not solely rely on realism or being a perfect match to the original image.

On a side-note, I'm going to be away for the next week and it's questionable if I'll have internet access. But no worries, even if I can't get a blog post up - I'm definitely going to be bringing my art supplies and whipping up some new stuff.

Definitely a time waster

(Ink and Pen)

Well here's a quick sketch for the quote:

"Time is what we want the most, but what we use the worst."

- William Penn

I didn't have a whole lot of time to squeeze this one in, but the quote made me think immediately of what I waste a lot of time doing. I would say it's a safe bet that I can get lost for hours stumbling or browsing the internet, but facebook takes the cake when it comes to things that I spend too much time looking at.

New Ideas

(Ink on Paper & Colored Digitally)

Hey all, I know it's been a while since my last post - and I still have a bunch of new stuff to put up, but if you'll bear with me while I get stuff scanned, I do have this new image today. This illustration is for the quote:

"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

I really enjoy creating illustrations for quotes, or at the very least, ones that are inspired by quotes. It's a fun challenge to come up with something interesting that speaks for itself and yet relates back to the original text. I personally like to stretch it a little and not create something that is too literal to the quote. Anyways, enjoy! I'll be posting new work soon!

Memoriam Tattoo

(Digital Media)

Hey all, I know it's been a while since I've posted anything, but rest-assured, I've been pretty busy and working on a bunch of projects - so I'll be posting a slew of new images in the near future. Today I have a tattoo design that I created. Someone had asked me to design a memoriam tattoo. My only instructions was that the design was a "heart with wings" - I kept this design a simple one color using very minimal lines, and going for a less "illustrative" look. I wanted to make this design unique and a little less of the standard 'heart with wings' tattoo design. To personalize this design for the client I created the center heart out of the departed's initials "SR". I kept feathers of the wings light in order to help keep the focus on the "SR" heart in the center of the design. Just as with any process in creating a design - the image you see here is the final product of tons of brainstorms, sketches, and scrapped designs. The final image was created in digitally in order to keep the design symmetrical.

**Update** Check out the completed tattoo:

I usually attack it with a spoon. . .

(Digital Media)

I really like drawing inspiration from quotes, so today I looked up some random quotes and found this one from Kurt Vonnegut:

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae."

For whatever reason, I got a fun image in my head and decided to sketch it out. The above image is just a quick sketch and was done in about 30-50 minutes (I suppose I should start keeping better track).

Well, I finished it

(17x11 Ink and Watercolor on Illustration Board)

After spending hours and hours and hours of painting, I've finished coloring my illustration. If you haven't already seen it, take a look at the post below for a picture of just the line-work while it was still in-progress. I'm quite pleased with how this came out. As I mentioned, this 17x11 illustration is done on 300lb illustration board. The linework is done with ink, and I colored it using watercolors and ink. I started by laying down some very light local color and slowly building up the shadows from there. Below is a picture of some in-progress coloring. Enjoy!

(In-Progress coloring)