Fuchsia

Model Stairs

Check out these fun stairs! I used to do a lot of scale model work back when I was a scenic designer, but these I made on a whim just to play with geometry in space. 

1/4" = 1" scale. 2 1/4" tall. Balsa wood struts, cardboard plus card stock base, and the treads are made from the frosted plastic cover of an old notebook.

Tree Rescue Pencil Test

Here's a pencil test I did with Ariel Gitomer. We collaborated on the story and split up the characters. She designed and animated the little girl, and I did the cat doll.

Bananas

Some Fun

Look, I'm a walrus!

Fear & Sadness

Fear 17" x 9 1/2"

These from-life self-portraits were meant to depict the specific emotions of fear and tragedy. Fear went fairly well, but I just couldn't get a handle on tragedy. My drawing only expressed sadness. 

Later it dawned on me: I had failed to sufficiently define and understand my terms. Tragedy is a concept that can only apply to circumstances or situations. An event within a narrative can be tragic, or the whole narrative can be tragic. One can have an emotional reaction (like sadness or catharsis) to tragic event, or feel emotions (like self-pity, despair, or anger) about falling victim to tragic circumstances, but tragedy itself is not an emotion. It is a characteristic of a narrative. Without a story, there can be no tragedy.

So without a narrative, my drawing was doomed to fall short of "tragedy" and became "sadness" instead. So there it is. Enjoy.

Sadness 17" x 11"

A Tale of Two Tealights

I wanted to tell a story with my props, so I ended up recreating that scene from Titanic with candles.

Lampshade with Vase

Ian's Feet

Chopsticks

Shadow Puppets

Skin Tone Painting Challenge

I'd been doing exceedingly well in painting class, so the professor pulled me into her office one day and told me to really stretch and challenge myself on the next assignment, our first color study of skin tones. I ended up spending something like 8 hours shriveling in the bath.

This was a challenging painting for many reasons:
1. While I support the idea that if you're going to regularly ask someone else to pose nude for you, you should be willing to pose nude for yourself at least once, I was also very aware that I'd have to present it to a class of my peers. Bad body image and insecurity about whether that was an appropriate choice for a professional environment plagued me the whole time. I purposefully didn't leave myself enough time to do a second painting to ensure that I'd follow through with my original plan.

2. Any painting where a subject of that scale starts that close to the eye is going to be a perspective nightmare. It is pretty much impossible to use the standard proportion-measuring tools, and it is really easy to get a wrong impression about relative sizes due to the fact that you're translating spherical vision to a flat canvas. This isn't as much of an issue when the subject is further away because you're dealing with less distortion: the smaller the picture plane relative to the total surface area of the visual sphere, the more it resembles a flat plane.

3. To further complicate things, I wanted to play with warm and cools to set up contrast between the wet and dry bits. I started with hot water so that my skin would warm up, both literally and in color terms, but I was in there so long that my water kept cooling off, which would change the skin color.

4. Physical limitations of painting in the bath. I'd secured the bottom two corners of my painting board to either side of the tub, and I ran a big duct tape loop up the back and fitted over the tap. I had a whole set-up of tubes and mixing trays along the edge of the tub and on boxes within reach, and I tried really hard not to splash or drip when getting in or out of the water.

While I don't think I'll be doing any more paintings like this again, I'm glad I tackled it this one time.

Fun with Apples

Bath Time

Anatomy of the Hand

Egg with Pyramids

Stylized Self-Portrait

Happy Thanksgiving!

Enjoy this tasty mixed-media cheesecake.

Old Main

This is a top-floor room in Old Main, a building on the Macalester College Campus in St. Paul, MN.

Corkscrew

Winged Lion Plant Stand

I found this white lion plant stand at an antique shop and thought it would make a good subject for a value drawing. He's more interesting than geometric primitives, that's for sure.

Lion Grotesque

These are two of the projects I did as a scenic painting intern at The Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Sculpture 1'-6" x 2'-7" x 5"

I started the sculpture first. After building up layers of aluminum foil on a plywood base and applying a protective coating, I started the marble painting. I researching different types of real life marble, and then pushing the color and contrast in my painted rendition. Then I lit the unpainted sculpture as a model for a charcoal value study and the final trompe l'oeil painting over the marble base. After finishing off the sculpture with its distressed and textured paint treatment, I was eventually able to remove the plywood backing and replace it with a simple frame. 

Fantasy Marble 3'-7" x 6'

Portrait of Lawrence Lee after Anton Raphael Mengs

3'-0" x 4'-0"

This was one of my internship projects at Seattle Repertory Theater. The idea was to swap a contemporary person into a historical painting, as if you needed an on-stage portrait to both look like the actor/actress playing the role and be period appropriate. Above is my painting of Lawrence Lee, a friend of mine, after a self-portrait by Anton Raphael Mengs, circa 1775 (below). Note: the reference I was working with was printed in a book. It was darker and didn't quite match the web copy I found for this blog post. 

To get a rich black background which would stay dark under bright stage lights, the painting is on a black velour. I started by overlaying a transparency grid on the reference and stretching a corresponding string grid over the canvas. Then I transferred the drawing over in white chalk and carefully dry-brushed an under-painting in white; a heavily loaded brush would just clump and mat up the nap of the velour. The grey scale pass was essential to getting any of the other colors to read since the black velour so voraciously sucked up any available light.