Troll Like An Egyptian

Well, here it is at long last, the project thats been keeping me occupied since Easter that most of you have you heard me talk about lately.

In case you haven't heard though, I submitted a design for the city's annual sculpture contest. This year's sculpture mold is a troll, celebrating the anniversary of this yearly event, which first started off with troll sculptures placed down town ten years ago, before shifting through over themes like foxes, frogs, turtles and even dragons.

The city liked the design that I submitted (which regrettably I am unable to find at this time) and provided me with a pre-form mold to paint.

Four to five weeks of painting later and this is the finished result.

The decision to paint the troll like an Ancient Egyptian started back when my mom wanted to have Midland Christian School, were she works, sponsor and host the troll. The school is well known for its ancient history class, hence the inspiration for the design. I didn't know what the mold would look like when I first submitted by entry back in January, or even how big it would be (you need at least two people to turn this thing on its side in order to get it through a door), so I wanted something simple that could be easily painted on without requiring any fancy attachments or additions. Also, I only found out about the submission contest less than two weeks before the deadline, so I had to come up with something fast.

Not long after I submitted my design, the upheaval in Egypt started, so I figured I could kiss that opportunity goodbye, so you can imagine my surprise when not long after, I got an e-mail saying my design had been selected. Go figure.

This troll and many others can be seen this summer at the Downtown Troll Stroll down by the Tridge.

Oh, and just because I feel I have to complete my own silly pun:

Art Student Show Invitation

A card I designed for my mentor Kathy Sullivan, who is displaying the work of her students, including myself.

Since the reception is at the library I originally had a book motif but it looked a little silly, so I went with an art studio appearance with some Franklin Booth style crosshatching in the background.

Self Portrait, Self Explainitory

Sleep Scales

My latest illustration for sleepcare.com. This one is meant to show that when you don't get enough sleep you need to eat more, but when you get plenty of sleep you don't need to eat as much. I especially enjoyed going through fast food ads for reference and inspiration for the top scale, and rendering all of its greasy grimy glory in fine details with a new set of technical pens. Bacon looks awesome close up.

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.

Horsing Around

I was originally going to title this post "A Horse is a Horse, A Horse of Course" but that seemed like it would be to much work for an obscure reference. Speaking of that theme song, can Mr. Ed really be "famous" if Wilbur is the only one he talks to? I guess television theme songs of the sixties lied to us all the time. I mean, can you really call Gilligan, "a mighty sailing man"?

Anyway, I had a recent freelance assignment that involved drawing a horse. What the client didn't specify is how simple they wanted the horse to be, on par with that of a coloring book page.

So I had all these sketches of horses and as far as the assignment went, all for naught.

Not wanting to waste the opportunity, I finalized a select few with ink for effect.

Enjoy. Click for full size.

X-Men First Class

These are the character posters that were made by paid professionals to promote the upcoming movie "X-Men: First Class". A Floating Head inside of a silhouette. Wow. 

I can't even look at the the Professor X poster without cringing. His eyeball is being cut off by white negative space!

So when SuperPunch announced they were having a contest to design a  new poster for the movie that would be "sleeker and sexier", I jumped onboard, and produced this:

I will say, that this may not be the best entry, because I did put it together rather hasty and because with only so much information available about the actual story it was difficult to judge what would be important. Not the mention the obvious trouble I had with creating a drawing, but not having color in mind at the time. Others might also call me a hypocrite (and hey, it wouldn't be the first time) for using floating heads as well, but this is my attempt at a "take that" to the original posters, a way of saying "I can do that do, but not only can I make it more dynamic, I can do it better by hand!"

Further Comments and Critiques are always welcome and encouraged.