Ink Monsters

Inspired by Stefan G. Bucher's DAILY MONSTER (which is really cool and I recommend everyone check out) I did a few quick little monster drawings with ink. The initial form is created by putting a drop of ink on the paper and blowing through a straw to create organic shapes. Then it's just a matter of what your imagination sees. Fun and easy.





~Adam

Finished Triptych

Well it's been several weeks, but I've finally finished up the triptych that I posted sketches for a while ago.

I started off as I do with most paintings, drawing right onto the canvas. For this project I used canvas boards, mostly because they're cheaper.


I began painting right over my drawings here. I tried to go back and forth between each piece so they would all develop at about the same rate and keep some of the same colors.


Here they are with all the major elements.

And finally after I added details, this is what I ended up with.


The piece has a theme of confusion and being lost in life, which is a very serious idea and thought it would be interesting to put that against a cartoony, light-hearted style, adding more to the confusing feeling of the work. Obviously the crossroads piece holds it all together and most clearly relates that theme. The city piece is meant to give a busy and overcrowded kind of feeling. The buildings can't even fit into thier own area. And finally the home is supposed to be the most peaceful of the scenes, yet nothing is perfect, hence it has the darkest sky, a more subtle discomfort.

I also had the idea of making a larger series of paintings with this structure (you may notice the edges of each are nearly identical) that could be placed and rearanged in any order, giving it the ability to take on varying stories and themes dependant on the configuration. We'll see...

~Adam

Captain Hal's Followup

We're at the end of the semester so I've been pretty busy with stuff, sorry about the lack of posts. Here's my suite of items I created for Captain Hal's.

First, a flyer that you might find in a newspaper. I took the photo myself with a McDonald's fish sandwich and fries. I wanted one of those red basket things they use at some restaurants but the bowl was all I could get a hold of. Did a tiny bit of photo editing in photoshop then slapped it into the InDesign page I made and voila.


Here's some coasters. No explanation needed.


And finally a kids menu / placemat. The final version had a bunch of bubbles placed randomly on it to make it look more festive, but I forgot to email myself that file, so, whatever.


That's all for now.
~Adam
(oh, and just in case you were wondering about the "Captain's Shake" click here.)

Clay People - Figure 4

Looking back, I seem to have forgotten to snap shots of my third figure, oops. Well, you didn't miss anything. I felt like that was my weakest one so far... and my teacher seemed to agree. Awesome.

Anyhow, here's my recently completed 4th figure. I think it's my best yet, but for some reason the teacher doesn't think it's as good as the "B" I got for figure 2. Well, whatever, sculpture is not really my thing.



As for the triptych painting I'm working on, well, I'm still working on it. The final version of it is due next Tuesday by the latest, so I'll have something up here by then. Good news, my friend saw my progress on it over the weekend and he said he really liked it, and he has before said that he doesn't like art. So it got a response from someone that usually doesn't respond, I thought that was pretty cool.

~Adam

Triptych Sketches

My next painting is going to be a triptych on canvas board. I got the idea as I was driving home from a friend's last night and had to put down some sketches at around 3am. Here's what I have so far. The fish in the sky for the second panel were ideas for my Captain Hal's logo, obviously they won't be in the painting :)






I started working today, hopefully I'll have something I'm happy with in a few weeks.

~Adam

Liberty

I recently went on a daytrip with my family to see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was a good time, and educational. The buildings on Ellis Island looked awsome, but we were moving around to much for me to be able to take the time to sketch them. Anyway, I decided to use one of the photos I had take as a background for my next painting. It was taken from the top of the Statye of Liberty's pedestal. We could only get so many tickets to go up there, and Anne, unfortunately, was not one of the few that could go up. But this is basically what I thought would be a cool tourist-y photo.

You can see my references taped to the mirror in the first shot, the pose is from a photo of the two of us on a cruise we took a couple years ago. Though I'm only using that for the layout, I am painting the faces from life, hence the mirror, and I had Anne pose while I worked on hers. Obviously I've again shown some of the progression as I've worked on it. I like seeing it, so I'm going to continue doing it.



I've been working on this on and off for the past week but I really need to get started on my final project so I'm going to put this aside for now, hopefully I'll get back to it and finish it soon.

~Adam

Captain Hal's

I designed a new logo for an imaginary seafood restaurant. Captain Hal's. I'm ultimately going to make a menu, and an ad for it as well.

What do you think?
~Adam

Addiction Problem

It's been too long. I'm sorry. I've been.... distracted. Thanks Lorey for trying to kick me into gear. I'll do my best to keep the posting up.

My most recent painting is my first self portrait with the medium. It was fun and interesting. I'm growing to like painting more and more. I took several pictures throughout the process so you can see how it came along. Maybe nobody else cares, but I always enjoy seeing other artist's work that way. I'm not going to describe each one, just check them out yourself. (Color differences are due to poor lighting, sorry).






~Adam

On a side note, I just finished reading David Mack's Kabuki Volume 2. It has some great visiuals and recomend checking out his website.)

Peter Paul Rubens - The Straw Hat

Well, It wasn't fun the first time, and it wasn't fun the second time. But at least I think it turned out a little better looking. My adaptation of Ruben's The Straw Hat.

Here's what I did in the first night. I didn't get much detail in the face yet.

And here's how it looked after the next day, pretty much finished.

A week later I painted a black border around it to cover up my guidelines. I need to redo that better I think.

Hopefully I'll be done with the old masters for a while now.
~Adam

A Renaissance Master, I am Not

No, I can't really compare to Tiziano Vecelli, (aka. Titian) but I was asked to try anyway. My assignment this week for my painting class was to choose a renaissance painting and copy it. I chose The Penitent Magdalene, for some reason I thought it might be one of the easier options. "Easy" being relative, the Italian Renaissance is when just about every one of the well known masters of painting was active, including all the Ninja Turtles :)

I spent about 5 hours working on it between two days. Titian of course probably spent months working on it. But anyway here's what I ended up with.


Trying to redo someone else's work is not my idea of fun. I think the best part of my version is the "happy little tree" at top right. Hopefully this is the last time I need to do this.

~Adam

Clay People - Figure 2

I just finished my second clay modeled figure. This one looks a lot better than the first, unfortunately the pictures don't really do it justice.


~Adam

I've Been Lazy

I painted this a week ago, but I've been lazy... and distracted. I think this is probably my best painting so far. I had a lot of fun just finding a good spot to paint, and the painting itself was, of course, fun as well.

And here's a shot of the location, with my blank canvas.

There was some huge bird that came by at one point, I was thinking about adding him into the painting, maybe I'll still do that... sometime.

~Adam

Some Simple Photoshop

I'm learning a little about photoshop in my computer media class. Hopefully I'll be able to do some really cool stuff one day. But for now, here's my latest little project.


I cleaned up a few of the little dust and scratches and then added some color. Looks pretty neat I thought. Many of you should recognize the location, thought the photo is probably over 20 years old.

~Adam

Five OH!

Yes, that's right, welcome to my fiftieth post in this blog! Woohoo! To celebrate I updated the gallery to include a lot of the stuff I've done in the past few months. (It's a tedious process and I don't like to do it often) So if you haven't seen everything, please check it out.

I finished my first full color painting today. It took me somewhere between 5 and 6 hours to complete over 2 days. Here's a shot from the end of day 1:

And here's the final product :

(A photo of the real thing if you want to compare)

Looking back at some of the older things in the gallery it's clear that I've gotten at least a little bit better, hopefully I can keep it up. Thanks for sticking with me.

~Adam

Drawing and Splash for Painting : Week 5

I decided to start working a little early on my painting for this week, the last few I had done the day before they were due. I looked around for a good spot to work from with an interesting view. I went with the porch of the master bedroom, as seen in my recent diptych. I did a couple sketches of different view to see what looked good.


I decided the view of the clematis and the side of the house looked better so I did some further study by doing a couple quick splash paintings. Here's one :

I'll get started on the final painting tomorrow. It's going to be 20"x20" on canvas. The layout will obviously be slightly different because it's square instead of rectangular. Hopefully I can keep a similar composition because I like where it's going.

~Adam