Whoa. PA and I walked out of the Pixar exhibit at MoMa today (Thanks Susannah!) fully humbled, delighted and inspired. There was so much to take in…I’m at a bit of a loss. All I can say is MAKE SURE YOU SEE THIS SHOW! It goes untill Feb. 6, so you still have some time to catch it.
Some of the highlights: The gorgeous, glowing pastels by Dominique Louis; Lou Romano’s unbelievably luminous / slick / tight gouache paintings; the flawless grey resin macquettes of all your favorite Pixar charcters (especially Violet and Mr. Incredible’s different expressions)….and then there’s the zoetrope.
There aren’t many words that I could use to convey to you the sheer delightful joy you will experience when you lay your eyes on the spectacular Pixar 3D zoetrope. Once it starts to spin, and the strobes turn on, you will giggle with joy and you won’t believe your eyes. It is a miracle of illusion, motion and animation. Possibly the highlight of the show. Go now. And by all means get there early. This show gets mobbed and you should really see this with as small a crowd as possible.
Pix by : mnemo, fudj and hseikaly .
I did this little test image based on a sketch of NYT reporter James Risen when he appeared on Meet The Press recently (side note, make sure you catch MTP every week, and if you miss it, you can nab the audio from the whole show in their handy podcast here). Anyway, I’ve been trying to refine my ‘formula’ for coloring drawings in Photoshop, by keeping my dozens of unnamed layers down to a minimum, and all of my ‘Mulitply”, ‘Normal” and ‘Screen’ layers all neatly labeled and grouped in folders. It;s amazing how quickly I can forget a step, so I’m taking care to document it in my sketchbook. So I guess that’s my nugget: Be sure to always document all of your processes and tricks. It can come in handy later.
A little late on this, but I vowed to do a post on my favorite music from 2005. Here are my favorite albums from 2005:
Laura Veirs – “Year of Meteors”
Aimee Mann- “The Forgotten Arm”
Calexico & Iron and Wine – “In the Reins – EP”
The Decemberists – “Picaresque”
The Frames – “Burn the Maps”
M.I.A. – “Arular”
Mary Timony – “Ex Hex”
The New Pornographers – “Twin Cinema”
Rogue Wave – “Descended Like Vultures”
Stephen Malkmus – “Face The Truth”
Sufjan Stevens – “Illinois”
Some other music NOT from 2005, that I listened to nearly constantly:
Arcade Fire – “Funeral”
The Magnetic Fields – “The Charm of the Highway Strip”
Tilly & The Wall – “Wild Like Children”
Luna – “Rendezvous”
Here’s a link to an iTunes mix I made of some of the best songs from these albums I have mentioned in this post: iTunes: Favorite Songs from 2005
I just finished these silkscreened octopus shirts for my adorable nieces for our post-Christmas get-together. I did a few silkscreens in college, and have always been meaning to do more, and beef up on my silkscreening skills. These came out alright, but I have much work to do…I went through three sets of screens before getting the exposure just right for the photo-emulsion / transparency transfer process.
If you have any interest in doing any silkscreening, be sure to nab the very helpful “Re” guide to reproduction. More silkscreens to come in the new year!
Just finsihed up a series of drawings for U.S. News & World Report, which will be on newsstands on Monday, Dec. 5th, in a special section titled “Teaching Your Kids About Money”. The above drawing is from an article in that section about when kids graduate college, then move back home, avoiding financial independence.
You can see the other drawings on my website here.
I’m working on a series of illustrations this week for US News & World Report. Here’s one of them in progress as seen from a Keegan’s-eye-view. I’m always amazed at the sensation of working on a high-resolution image at 100% on my 23″ Cinema Display. Based on this 300dpi piece of artwork, the size on my screen is the equivalent of working on a detail of a drawing that is 5 1/2″ feet tall! I cannot wait until we have drafting table-sized displays, that we can lean on…and draw directly upon…and spill our coffee upon…
Click to see a detail at 100%.
I drew President Jackson upside-down. Click above for a larger view.
One of the things on my to do list the past few weeks (umm…years?) has been to make some of my own sketchbooks with all of the nice paper I had imported from London’s Faulkiner Fine Papers. They used to sell the BEST sketchbooks, the “Rivoli”, when I studied in London back in the early 90’s. At some point, the fellow who made them went out of business, and they haven’t been seen since.
My efforts to recreate the glory of these sketchbooks have been mocked for years…But now that I have been schooled in the foundations of flatback case bookbinding (Thanks Nancy Loeber & CBA!), and I am in possession of a large stock of Rives’ “Artist” paper (the successor to the famed Rivoli paper used in Falkiner’s sketchbooks), the moment is soon approaching.
I am making a batch of these sketchbooks, as kind of a “beta” release to see how they hold up in the field. I’m reasonably sure that I screwed all of these up to a certain degree by gauging the paper grain’s direction wrong. Any errors in these sketchbooks will be corrected in future versions!
These books currently consist of a series of signatures of paper stitched togerther (Herringbone stitch), with the endpapers and book-cloth hinges sewn on. The next crucial step is a meeting with the mighty and unforgiving guillotine at CBA, where they will all be chopped into neat, flush proto-books. Then I need to build their cases with binder’s board and cover them with bookcloth. Then these neatly chopped text blocks will then be glued into their cases, ready for finishing.
I was quite delighted to see so many posts late on a Saturday night, that I had to post a shot of these books in their naked, pre-case state. When importing the photos, I thought it wise to make an alternating “poor-man’s-3D” view of the books, as I am fairly drunk after returning from a neighbor’s fun party. Enjoy.
Tonight fellow Invisibleman PA and I hoofed it up to East 63rd and Lexington to the Society of Illustrators to attend one of their storied Tuesday night drawing sessions. It’s quite a cool scene there, though it may be a bit shocking for those used to more serene drawing environments. Grab a cold beer or a glass of wine from the raucous bar, then grab a chair and start drawing. There is always live music, and we’ve read reports of burlesque dancers as life models. One red feather boa was about as burlesque as it got, but both models were excellent and looked quite nice posing against the original artworks of some of the greatest illustrators in American history (NC Wyeth, LC Leyendecker, Norman Rockwell, et al). Drawing is every Tuesday night from 6:30 – 9:30, $15 at the door. There is also a session on the third Thursday of every month as well.
So on the right, I’ve posted a small sketch, done in the last 2 minutes of the evening, which I kind of like the most. And on the left, we have a rotund and jolly police officer, which is a sketch from my moleskine (further work done in the Lab), drawn from a picture i snagged somewhere on the web.
Why are they together? What’s the story between them? Is she whispering something in his ear that’s making him smile?
Click on the photo for a larger image of the cop. Sorry, no more of the lady to see.
Here are some sketches of some women from my current mini-moleskine. This is mainly full of drawings done while riding on the subway (though not always people on the subway). Every once and a while I start a page with a thought like “I need to draw more women” and you get some stuff like this. The red across the scared woman’s eyes was bleed from the scanner light. Works perfect!
