Plate House

A Christmas present for my uncle, an illustration of his house in Pennsylvania. 

Tomorrow: Play Ball!

Party of Two

Yes loyal followers, after two months of work its finally finished!

Loosely based on an event from my own life towards the end of college were I was feeling utterly unprepared for the real world on the horizon. To celebrate the anticipation of graduation some friends were throwing a party at their place. I didn't want to go because I avoid crowds like the plague, but I was too afraid of what I might do to myself if I just stayed home alone. 

As predicted, I was having a miserable time. It was too bright, too loud and the amount of people packed into one room was enough to be a fire code violation. After being accidentally slammed into a back wall and having a strobe light test occur right in my face, I was just about ready to pass out when a gentle hand guided me outside. 

The two of us sat on the back porch in frigid temperatures for over an hour, just talking. During a lengthy lull in the conversation I felt something bubbling up inside of me that just couldn't be contained, and I just burst out laughing. It was the closest thing to joy I think I'd ever experienced. 


To learn what I experienced while making this piece, see The Making of "Party of Two".

Rogers House

I actually started on drawing this house before I started the Eisley House, so I learned a few things in the process. Here, the trees so close to the actual house I had to be careful about applying detail so as not to make it appear that the foliage was swallowing the building itself. I did my best to balance things out my putting the darkest darks in the corners and especially on the far right, while also plotting negative space on the left hand side in the driveway, the bushes on front lawn and the tree by the garage.

If I were to do this again, I'd have done less of this "brush strokes as leaves" approach and maybe go with something more akin to Franklin Booth and render the canopy with of varying degrees of cross hatching. As is, its pretty easy to lose the point were one tree ends and another one begins. That might have also lent a more uniform look to the picture what with the linear nature of the house. Then again, I had originally drawn the grass on the front lawn in a very Booth-ish style which my client didn't seem to care for, so I changed it to the kind of style I did with the Eisley's house.

Eisley House

 I was fortunate to be discovered by two families recently who are selling their houses and wanted a keepsake of their former homes. This is the first, I hope to get the finer details worked out with the client of the second one soon.

Back when I was in high school, I had a little side business of drawing houses in some of the more affluent neighborhoods. My rates were extraordinarily cheap, but looking back, these pictures weren't all that great. I had no sense of economy whatsoever and drew every blade of grass equally.

Here I used a pen that was almost out of ink and ran it very quickly across the lawn to give it a sense of substance but also convey that it was neatly mowed. I had a lot of fun rendering that kooky cloud as well. I original started shooting for a fluffy Franklin Booth cloud but ended up with this hatchy Bernie Wrightson formation that I think works better in this piece, especially with all the line work going on already.

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.