A busy weekend ahead, so I’ll be taking a two day break from the ‘portraits’. Instead, today I worked on revising my band’s unofficial “cartoon” logo. Two years ago, when we started as a duet, I drew a quick cartoon as a way of advertising the band on their ‘promo disc’
Been a while since I’ve done any scratchboard, so I figured I better ‘keep in practice’ and did today’s portrait in that style (and since I’ve been trying to keep myself from ‘over working’ these things, I decided to stop with the black and white version rather than muddying it up with color). This one is of Annie, another of the ‘Woody Guthrie’ crowd from that local theater production a few years back (who we lovingly nicknamed ‘Ma’).
I’ll probably have a ‘blown covers’ sketch to post later today once the winners have been announced, so stay tuned.
2nd week in a row making the Blown Covers runner-up position. I was surprised, because I had such a hard time conceptualizing this one, but once I settled on something, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. I had my doubts about how ‘original’ the concept was, but nice to see it get noticed.
Today’s ‘facebook portrait’ is of the wife of a disc golf buddy from a few years ago, Megan (married to #26 whom I did last month). I stumbled upon some beautiful drawings online a few days ago done in charcoal on colored paper, with white highlights, and I remembered how I used to do a number of drawings in this style in some of my life drawing classes years ago, and so tried to emulate that style with this portrait (not quite there yet, so I may do a few more along these lines). Not a lot going on today, so I may do another portrait or two in the afternoon to push on towards #50).
Next I tried another one in the same style, but this time mixing the tools up a bit and introducing a little bit of color. Started with the intention of ‘not overworking it’, but had a hard time stopping and probably ended up going in the other extreme and worked it too much. This one is of another high school ‘band buddy’, Doug, a percussionist.
Later in the afternoon, after a long bike ride on a beautiful sunny day, I tackled one more in the same style. This one I think I did a better job of ‘not overworking’. This one features Dale, a local musician who I had the pleasure of playing with in a guitar jazz trio last summer.
Today I finished up the second illustration for US Catholic (click on the image above to see a larger version), plus I got my weekly sketch for ‘Blown Covers’ done this morning and submitted (I post these on Fridays after the winners are announced). Not much else on the docket today, so I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon on a long bike ride, and then playing an outreach concert with the St. Cecilia Adult Student Orchestra later today (and maybe get in another facebook portrait, time permitting).
Not much free time this afternoon, so I had to do a quick pencil sketch portrait. This one is of a high school friend, Beth, who currently works as a freelance writer.
Today I finished up one of my assignments for US Catholic (there’s another one that I’ll probably finish tomorrow). Since it is such a strong horizontal illustration with lots of little details, I’ve also posted a larger detailed version that you can access by clicking the above illustration. I’ll probably post another ‘portrait’ from my ongoing series later today.
For today’s ‘facebook portrait’ I found another ‘cowboy hat’ photo, this one on the noggin of Steven. Steven played banjo on three tracks of our new JJHD cd, and is with a band who we’ve paired up with for several gigs around town. I decided to try this one in oils, and, while it’s not a great likeness, I was pretty happy, stylistically, with the end result.