One of the items on my to-do list recently has been to expand my ‘texture library’. Since I have moved over to doing all of my color on the computer, texture is more important than ever. If there is a large area of flat color, and it is just ‘paint-bucketed’ in Photoshop, the flatness screams “Computer!”. The look I am trying to achieve is one that is more hand-made. I try to use custom brushes with my Wacom tablet as much as possible, but sometimes an area needs a bit of real-world texture to break the flatness…
The swatches above are from a few of the textures I worked up this week. They will be much more subtle when included in my work, sometimes only a tiny corner of one, but having a variety on hand is a valuable part of the illustrator’s tool-belt.
I just completed this illustration for The New York Times (Thurs. April 20th, Style section), dealing with women and A.C.L. (anterior cruciate ligament) knee injuries.
The reference came from Eadweard Muybridge’s classic “The Human Figure in Motion”, which is an invaluable resource for how the body moves.
I couldn’t resist whipping up a quick animation of these nine frames from the illo.
My wife Julie Kirkpatrick is having her first solo show at Black Dragon Society on Chung King Road in Los Angeles. The show opens Saturday April 15th and runs through May 20th.
These are my first illustrations for The Hartford Courant. They ran a series of stories this week covering the college application process. The drawing on the top ran with a pair of stories that dealt with how both the students and the parents deal with the anxious waiting period in different ways.
The story that the bottom drawing ran with was about a new breed of private consultants who promise to help get your kid into the best school, starting very early on.
You can see larger versions here and here.
I’m working on the second drawing of a two-part newspaper illustration series tonight (due tomorrow morning!)…Just wanted to share how much I enjoy the underpainting part of my process…Working out the values alone can be very satisfying. Then, you must wade into the unknown currents of the color. Exciting, but can be scary. At this stage, I try to stick to the burnt sienna hues, just liked I used to in ‘traditional’ paintings. Texture is key at this point…Gonna be a long night!
Here’s my Dad surfing at York Beach in Maine, back in the late seventies. Any more pictures of parents in water?
If you are in the Washington D.C. area, be sure to check out our pal Nate Peek‘s band DoS (like the spanish number two, not the operating system).
I whipped up this Land of the Lost flyer for the show. Totally had a blast doing this, as I have been meaning to do a LOTL illo for a while now…
This show had a real impact on me as a kid, and I recently bought the DVDs, which were a treat to revisit. One listen to the awesome banjo-filled theme song, and you’ll fall in love with young Holly all over again…
I have an illustration in Tuesday’s Science section of The New York Times (2/13/06). The story was written by a Parkinson’s patient, who suffers from “audio illusions” as a side effect of his medication (or perhaps just because of the Parkinson’s). A woman laughing too loud in a restaurant is transformed into a neighing horse, and a man with a booming voice becomes a circus ringleader with a megaphone.
This was strange, fascinating story to draw. I chose not to feature the primary ‘illusion’ of the story, Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday Mr. President”, though it probably would have gone with the headline more. The author experiences illusions that his brain creates after hearing real sounds, which I felt was best represented by the more surreal laughing horse-lady and ringleader in the restaurant. I’m most satisfied with the composition, as I really wanted the shape of the room to appear as ‘sound waves’ focusing in on his ear…
Also, my palette for this was fully inspired by the electric gouache paintings of the master Lou Romano.
I’ve just finished up a pair of sketchbooks, and I’ve posted them on my sketchbooks gallery on my website. These books are roughly from 2005 to present, and I felt very good wrapping them up. I am now moved into my new handmade book, and the paper is so much better than these Moleskines. I love the form of the Moleskines, but the paper is just crap. Watercolor fights to be absorbed, and ultimately fails. That is why there is such a lack of color in these books.
LINK: Jon Keegan’s Sketchbook Gallery
Living in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, one of the biggest issues hanging over our community is the specter of Bruce Ratner’s planned “Atlantic Yards” development. By dangling the prospect of a glitzy new Frank Gehry-designed stadium (to be occupied by Ratner’s own New Jersey Nets), the pro-stadium minions have largely succeeded at convincing Brooklynites that it will be nothing but good for the community, and everyone should rally behind it. However, the stadium is just a small part of the whole plan, and this brings me to why you are seeing a post about this on invisibleman.
As a resident who will directly feel the impact of the development surrounding my home, I haven’t felt that I have seen an accurate portrayal of the sheer scale of this project, in the context of the existing neighborhood. Enter Google Earth.
I have been majorly geeking out over this amazing program for a few weeks now (as has my brother) , since they released a beta of the Mac version. One of the things you can do is place image overlays on top of the satellite imagery (like the PDF I used), and then draw polygons to extrude your own 3D buildings, knowing their heights (requires the use of the ‘Plus’ version, which is now available for both Mac and PC).
So I set up a placemark that will allow people to see this proposed development, to approximate scale (using the developers’ own figures), in context with the existing buildings. Also, make sure you check the “Buildings” checkbox below the viewer to see the heights of the existing buildings in grey.
So if you haven’t downloaded Google Earth yet you can do so here (both PC and Mac): DOWNLOAD GOOGLE EARTH.
Once you have that set up, you can download my Atlantic Yards placemark below…NOTE: if you click on the following link and get a garble of letters, just go back and right-click (control-click on the Mac) on the link, and save the file to your Desktop, then just double-click on the downloaded file.
DOWNLOAD THE ATLANTIC YARDS PLACEMARK
