A Gift, from my home to yours (Christmas Cards 2013)

Well, I've started to get confirmation that the cards I sent out last week have started to arrive so it's as good a time as any for this year's big reveal!

A Gift, from my home to yours. 2013

Photoshop. 8 1/2 x 11 original. 

Last December, in an attempt to stay better connected with my creative colleagues, friends from college especially, I sent out homemade Christmas cards with original art and a brief summary of how I was doing and what I had been up to in the past year.

Seeing as how last year I only got this idea after Thanksgiving, it was a real fight to the finish. This year I started trying to come up with ideas as early as Halloween. Now I have an inkling of what retail outlets go through when it comes to changing their holiday decorations.

INSPIRATION: 

Last year's card was of a dark room lit by the soft glow of a Christmas tree and by the heavenly light of comforting angels. After finishing a piece that involved such heavy blacks, I decided that next time would feature a scene with lots of white, likely an outdoor scene with lots of snow. 

Throughout the year, I collected various images in hopes of helping choose a subject.

  

From left to right: Wally Wood, Hal Foster, Norman Rockwell, Rudolph Guenoden, Ellison Hoover, Frank Cho

SKETCHES:

My first idea was for a romantic "winter wonderland" kind of scene with a couple and their dog climbing up a sledding hill. Not a bad idea, and I may come back to it later, but my compositions just felt too much like the cover of a Land's End catalog. It also seemed to lack substance. It was a winter scene, but not a "seasonal" scene, and felt somewhat insincere for a Christmas card. 

The idea for using squirrels came about as a result of a Skype conversation I was having with my friend Kirsten Zirginbl, were I mentioned the squirrels in the back yard which were "as big as housecats" and "always coming to the door looking for handouts. They have no fear of man!"

Thats when it hit me, the idea of a simple creature coming to the big intimidating house, to not ask for something, but instead offer a humble gift that was in essence, all they had. It just struck me as a better message for the spirit of Christmas.

However, even that got off to some rough starts:

Eventually I settled on a high angle shot inspired by similar shots in Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace. 

PROCESS:

When I started getting towards the finishing stages, I started getting in the habit of taking screen caps at the end of the day so that I could get a sense of my own process and be able to identify what I accomplished each day and use it as motivation for the next.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Straw Farmer

My latest entry for Dow Goarden's card contest (much like last year's Waterfall and Piggy)

This card depicts a sculpture made of straw of a farmer raking straw.

Chippewa Nature Center

I had a chance to drive down to the Chippewa Nature Center this afternoon to draw some of the stuffed animals they had on display in hopes of eventually working my way up to gesture drawing the live animals at the observation window.

Each took about an hour.

Click to enlarge.

Winter Window

A blizzard blew in on Monday and blanketed the city in snow. I'm at home, discouraged that I haven't real drawn anything in the better part of a week, and was just so captivated by this view outside of my studio window, that I just felt compelled to drop everything and put this image on paper.

I got a little more adventurous with the Photoshop colors than I have before, using gradients and transparencies. There may not be as dynamic or have as much happening as a lot of my other illustrations, but it felt good to do something different for a change and I had a lot of fun with it.

Piggy and The Waterfall

I learned of a pen and ink drawing contest for the local garden park just shy of week before the deadline I knew I had to make a quick turnaround. So I worked hours of the day and night to guarantee these would be done in time. It really felt like I was back in school again (a feeling both good and bad) when it came to working such a close deadline. Here are the results.

Waterfall. Self Explainitory. It was just something I thought would make for a decent composition.

Piggy. A bronze sculpture of a pig in a clearing in a cornfield, which in this early August autumn was starting to decay. I couldn't help but look at his expression, as if he were looking up and above his crumbling surroundings and to something distant that we might never know.

Trees

Trees have always been a challenge for me, until not too long ago I realized I was going about it all wrong.

I got up early (7 am in the summer) and observed how the light from the sun cast shadows on the leaves and helped give the tree a distinct shape rather than just being a bunch of stray branches darting out every which way.