Hellhippo Rising

I know I haven't posted here in awhile but I have been involved with various projects and haven't been able to write much of any worth.

I have been figuring out the direction I want to take with my art. I am moving away from primarily focusing on caricatures and portraits and toward doing darker material. To that end I am launching a new brand 'Hellhippo' which takes it's name from the art-book I am working on: 'Hellhippo and Other Denizens of the Dark Dimensions' More info on that is forthcoming.

As you may have noticed my cliffcature website no longer exists and you are redirected here to my blog. The reason for this is that I never gave the site the attention it deserves and as such it wasn't that interesting to visit. I think this was my subconscious telling me I was heading down the wrong path. I am endeavoring to correct that and have a new site int he works. In the meantime you can keep up with my doings on FB orTwitter......or here.

Thank you for stopping by.

Been a bit.....

Well folks a lot has happened over the last month or two. My PC caught a nasty virus and I had to put her down. I made the transition to Mac and I am glad I did. I like the interface and the over all simplicity. Rather than morn the loss of data, I am taking it as an opportunity to start fresh. You can see on my facebook page some of the new work I have been doing.

I have begun work on illustrating a children's book. I am excited about this project and will share more details as I am able.

I have also signed up on Sketchoholic and look forward to participating there. I have more stuff to share but right now I am holding my baby and she doesn't want me typing any more. Can't blame her. Stay tuned!

Happy New Year

Sorry I haven't been updating as often as I would like. The holiday season has been very busy.


I finally got my feet wet doing live caricature work (check out my Facebook page for pics). Unlike many in field, I don't use markers. Instead I use black colored pencil and white charcoal on toned paper. I like the look of it but have to increase my speed.


In other news:
My computer has been rather slow lately due to a burned out graphics card. Mental note- cooling fans don't work so well clogged with dust. I temporarily replaced it with a cheaper model I picked up at a local store. I will be getting a superior card in the near future. I look forward to being able to put my Cintiq back to use. I have tons of new ideas I want to try.

My wife got me an Ipod Touch and I have been playing around with AutoDesk's Sketchbook Mobile. I don't have a stylus for it so it isn't quite as precise as I want, but it is great for toying around. I have been using it's symmetry feature to design aliens which I plan to finish in Photoshop. Below is one of them:

Illustration

I have started work on a practice illustration. I am fairly confident in my ability to get a solid likeness and render it to my satisfaction, however, The piece of the illustration puzzle I need to work on is to place a caricature into context, to that end I am doing a depiction of Sarah Palin as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. I am also going to start taking news stories and thinking about how I would illustrated them.

I want to move into doing illustration work for publication and this seems like good practice. Any ideas you folks have would be greatly appreciated.

Been a bit...

It has been awhile since I have updated this blog, sorry about that. I have been rather busy. I recently completed doing caricatures of my daughters entire Brownie Troop. The troop leaders originally wanted simple pencil drawings but I decided to go with higher quality digital ones instead. This has led to a potential private art lesson gig, so that is great.

I am getting ready to relaunch my website and start a second one for the pets. First I need to get monitor calibrating equipment which I hope to do soon. More on that as things develop.

Here are some of the things I have been drawing:

Here is a sketch I did of the great Mel Brooks for his birthday thread in the ISCA forum.

Here I turned the sketch into a fully rendered caricature painting. You can see all the changes I made between the two.

This one of me and the one below of my brother Scott were both taken from a larger piece I did for my father featuring his three kids.

Evie

Sorry for my lack of recent posts. I made some adjustments to the Randy Travis in my previous post and updated that post to include them. Nothing major just adjusted the ear and made the background all the same color, I had noticed there were some off spots in it.

Above is a caricature of Evie painted in photoshop. Still working out some printing issues but otherwise I am very happy with it. I enjoyed working on all the fur.

In other news I have tendinitis in my right wrist so I have been using my left hand more. This brings me to the below image. There is a thread on the ISCA forum for speedpaintings digital caricatures done in under an hour. Reading through this thread inspired me to attempt one myself........left handed. This is the result. It is Brian Baumgartner who plays Kevin on The Office (the American version). While I am no way completely happy with it, for my left hand I am rather pleased. I intend to do more of these in the near future. I am probably going to take this one to completion eventually as well, but maybe not.

Hopefully soon my wrist will be better so I can get back to working on homework for Seiler's class and the other things I have going on.

Feeling Randy.

Hello again folks. Been rather busy with various projects. Still not done with the next assignment for the class. I was unhappy with the direction it was going so reworked it. My wrist is starting to bother me a bit so I am reluctantly taking a bit of a break from drawing or at least trying to.

Above is a Randy Travis that I am almost finished with. I watch American Idol and as soon as I watched him on the show I knew I wanted to draw him. What an interesting face. I may or may not color this. We shall see.

class sketches

Here are some sketches I did for the first lesson in Seiler's Caricature class.
They are in reverse order.

I will post images from the second lesson soon though I actually watched the third lesson prior to doing the finished drawing so I incorporated the learning from that lesson as well. It is going to be a finished piece of Rowan Atkinson. I have been working on it all morning but went a wee bit too long between my last two saves and when I went to save it photoshop shutdown unexpectedly losing about an hour or so of work. Grrrrr!!!! gotta remember to save more frequently. Oh well it is good practice. Looking back at the Hanks below now, I can't believe I turned that crap in.

Some sketches and a decision.

Here are a few sketches I have done recently in Sketchbook Pro:


I drew Dolly for the March contest over at e-caricatures. I may or may not do a more finished version.

Jon has such a fascinating face. I have drawn it a dozen times and none of them I am completely satisfied with. This probably comes closest to where I want it to be. One day I hope to do a finished colored version of him.

I drew Coulter because I love her long neck. Every time I see her I feel compelled to start drawing her but haven't until now. This one I will turn into a finished colored painting eventually (digital painting that is). Will make a great companion piece for my O'Reilly.

I think I have mentioned in previous posts that I wanted to take a couple courses at Schoolism.com I want to take Character Design with Stephen Silver and A Caricature class by Jason Seiler. Unfortunately I can't afford both. I had decided to take Silver's course this year and Seiler's another year, but re-thinking it I have decided to take them both after all. However instead of taking the full course I will take the self-taught versions. While I have no doubt that the full version is well worth every penny, at present it is more economical for me to take the self-taught versions and take both. I will post progress updates as soon as I begin either of them (hopefully within the week if I am correct in thinking I can start them as soon as I pay being that they are self-taught).

I am almost done working on a dog caricature and will soon begin working on a colored pencil portrait for another client. Haven't done one of those in a bit, I look forward to it. I am also starting preliminary work for a special personal project I want to have completed by April. More on that later.

Life Drawing this coming Monday....

A friend of mine, Zane Degaine told me about a life drawing session that is on Mondays. Next week shall be the first time I attend one of them (if all goes as planned). I look forward to it. I will post pictures when I have some scanned in. I also have more of me to post as depicted by others.

Setting myself up.....

Well I added that followers gadget to this page. I am a glutton for punishment so this should provide plenty of ego crushing experience.

Unfinished business

This is a post that I originally posted awhile ago on one of the blogs that I deleted. Sadly I don't really have an update for them...

There are several projects that I have been working on intermittently that I would one day like to finish. Here I will list a few:

Jenesis-- I know a lot of Jens. There was a time I could easily be sitting at the diner with 3 or 4 of them at a time. I wondered what it would be like to live in a town where EVERY girl was named Jen. Than I thought what if there was a girl who wasn't? How would they treat her? Thus the seed for my story started. I started writing it with an outsider as the main character. Being new in town he goes to a local diner to meet the locals. He sees a beautful woman at the counter and makes the mistake of asking her name........thus it begins. Eventually he teams up with one of only two girls in town NOT named Jen, Sara. The other girl is named Janine and she wishes she was a Jen unlike Sara who things the whole town is insane. The plot gets stranger. I won't go into it further here otherwise there would be little point in you reading it should I ever get around to finishing it.
Although it started off as a short story than grew in scope I think I am going to make a graphic novel out of it instead. I can get more accomplished in more time with less space that way.

Toto's tale- A look at Oz from the dogs perspective. In my version the tale is told from Toto's view. In it while he is at the bitch neighbors garden he eats some shrooms. The world starts spinning and he trips. He than sees something he never saw before....color. The whole story is his journey while tripping until at the end it wears off and normality returns.

Collage of Colbert- I am working on a large sized portrait of Stephen Colbert made out of cut up pictures of George Bush. (edit: although I would have liked to do this I never actually started)

FOF- Another comic strip that is loosely based on my life. The main character Froth has four kids and works in a candy factory. Yes very loosely indeed. (edit: not likely to happen any time soon.)

Deleting other blogs....

I have three other blogs here on Blogger but I am going to be deleting them and rolling whatever content they have into this one. One is the first blog I started here which I kept up with for only a short while. It originally started out as a place for me to share my world but I generally only showed my Sunny and Gloom comic strips. I didn't keep up with it and eventually started this one for my caricatures and this one I have been keeping up with (for the most part) so I have decided to roll the that one into this one. The same goes for the other two blogs I have. One is for my fine art stuff and I never added more than a post or two and the other was for just my opinions on just about everything patterned after one that I have on my employers intranet. I never had quite the same motivation for that kind of thing outside of work so I didn't add anything so away it goes.

Here are some of the Sunny and Gloom strips that I had posted...





I will post the others shortly.

I never quite finalized the character design on them. I will hopefully be taking Stephen Silver's Character Design class and will hopefully finalize them after that.

No art, just words.

Wow two posts in two days,lucky you. I have been working on so many projects some of which I am actually being paid for. Ever since burning my previous graphics card up my photoshop can't be used all day without garnering serious performance issues so I am taking a break from working for a bit.

So far today I have started a new Gary Sinise because I did not like where my previous version was going (except the mouth which I cut and pasted into the new one). I have been continuing to find a cohesive way of working. I didn't work on the Obama yet today because I want to be completely fresh on that when I continue it.

I am working on a logo for an aromatherapy company. That is going well so far (to me anyway) I am using Photoshop for it but I might eventually use Illustrator to get a clean version. I haven't used Illustrator for a long time (since I designed my last tattoo) and am kind of dreading using it, I never did quite get the hang of it.

I want to work on my Monk cast caricature later as well. I like working on several different pieces at once because it keeps me from getting bored, however I sometimes start too many to be practical. Many on the back burner. I figure as I search through my files I might get some inspired to finish one of them.