Killroy and Medusa

(Is it a blogging faux paux to post twice in the same day? Oh, well...)

Two recent pieces of very different styles.
The first is a piece I whipped out in a day for Illustration Club's Out of Orbit book. It's a very old character of mine, Killroy the space cowboy. I've neglected him this year, so I figured that he deserved some attention. This was really fun to do. The explosion and stars were made with black ink on a separate paper, then scanned and inverted. I used a custom brush made from a photo of a telephone line for the techy- ground that he is standing on.
Here's the other piece, which was an assignment for Illustration I. It was a pretty straightforward assignment- draw a greek myth. After about two weeks of sketching and indecisiveness and restarting three times, I settled on Medusa. For some reason, I wanted to do something romantic. I think everyone knows the basic story of Medusa, she turns people to stone when she looks at them yadda-yadda. So this guy is wearing a blindfold so he can be with her...Okay I'm going to stop with the cheese now.
Unlike Killroy, Medusa sucked a huge chunk of time out of my life... I don't even want to say how many hours were spent staring at the computer screen. The sad thing is, I feel like I over-rendered it in some areas. Overall though, I'm really happy with how this turned out, especially the tones of color in their bodies.

Visual Journalism Sketchdump#1

Here's a bunch of work done for Visual Journalism, a class where we go out to different places in Baltimore and just draw from observation.

My early work was very much a struggle for me, since I was much more comfortable drawing from imagination then I was drawing from observation. I played around with simplification and color, but I got frustrated and bored. Some of the ways that I was thinking about breaking up space with rectangular shapes carry over to my current work for the class.




















I've been taking a different approach for my more recent work. My goals for these spreads were to fill the pages with as much information as possible (get the most out of this expensive moleskin haha) and to pay attention to the overall composition. I'm interested in a geometric breakdown of the page using line and blocks of writing. I think of it like an intuitive puzzle, trying to figure out where to put lines, blocks of text, organic forms and selectively rendered areas. The fun part is that its all from life, and the pages read to me like a collage of memories, thoughts and experiences.




Please forgive the nonsensical formatting of this post... I'm still trying to figure out how this all works and I'm sick of trying to fight with it right now haha.