Recently broke out one of those watercolor sketchbooks that Moleskin make and did a few draintings (just made up that word) of Alaska using GoogleEarth as reference. Volcanoes in the Aleutian islands and the Kenai mountains, rendered with watercolor pencil.
…and so here it finally is! The whole of Never Been, all nine and a bit meters worth, online, for the whole world to see! So if you couldn’t make it to my solo show at Projekts MCR earlier this year, GO HERE NOW!!! I want to say a massive huge thank you to my genius graphic designer brother, Adam Kolakovic, for figuring out a way to get this all online for me! He’s the most rippingest designer in town!
This is one from the dusty depths of the archives…The blur on the boot is a bit too much, but I had just discovered Photoshop (version 2.5 if I am not mistaken), and it looked good enough to me on my grayscale PowerBook 165 at the time.
I made this pattern to use as texture and background for this year’s siren illustration which I just completed. The sea hag of my dreams makes an appearance in up there. Congrats also to my fellow invisibleman and invisiblewomen as this marks our 600th post.
I was psyched to get this super-fun job from Time Out Chicago to do a series of illos for their “Worst Case Scenarios” story in this week’s issue (Thanks Mike!). The editors came up with a list of harrowing situations, and asked various Chicago-based experts their advice on how to keep your cool and survive these stressful calamities. The scenarios I illustrated are: “ATM eats your card”, “Your car brakes fail”, “Your boss asks you to take a drug test”, “You lose your job”, “The condom broke”, “I got doored on my bike”, “My apartment was burgled” and “A bat was trapped in my house”. This is my first job for Time Out Chicago. Read on to see the full illos…
On Friday night I attended my first Pratt Draw-a-thon. This legendary event, held every year since 1988, consists if 12 straight hours of figure drawing in which 18 models circulate throughout 5 drawing studios posing for designated periods of time (20 second action poses, 5 and 10 minute poses, 1 hour poses, and two extended poses of 3 and 6 hours each.) Drawing and posing began at 7pm Friday night and continued through the night until 7am Saturday morning.
This years Draw-a-thon was more popular than even Pratt’s planners expected. Myself and my drawing partner were there for a few hours and only able to squeeze into the hour long poses room. Despite the crowds the event was a very exciting and a very unique experience. These graphite drawings are the results of my evening. It was great night and I hope to attend for the whole 12 hours next next year.
Here’s one of the final images that was used by Barclay’s Bank on a huge billboard outside a new branch in Manchester that celebrates the city’s achievements.
I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts while working on illustrations lately. A great resource for this is LibriVox which features readings of works which are in the public domain. A great one I recently toiled to was The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells which was written in 1897 and is an absolute sci-fi classic.
The image above of The Invisible Man (who is also a co-founder of this website) was done in my sketchbook a while back and tweaked digitally.
A sketchbook experiment with casein and pencil. The image originated from a New York Times T Magazine article entitled “São Paulo’s Concrete Jungle.” Click on it to view the sketch even larger than its original size of 6.5″ x 8.5″.
