Oh my, has it been a long time since i've blogged!

Oh my, has it been a long time since i've blogged!  Well, I have been hard at work on both my album art and my book cover.  My plan is to spend a lot of time on those and try to avoid doing the cheesy airbrush as long as possible.  Not really, i am just not looking forward to doing it.  I feel like we should have to do the cheesy project on the side of a van, or a t-shirt given out to tourists in Miami or something.  Know what I mean?  I see them all the time, I was at the Jersey boardwalk one time and they had a whole stand for these lame shirts.  Perfectly good space wasted!  And it's not that the airbrush makes it looks cheesy, it's a big part, but the subject matter is really cheesy too.  It's usually like characters, i see a lot of names too.  Do people actually thing these are quality shirts?  I think for the price of a plain white tee, cost of dyes, airbrushes, and a vendor's license I could make a pretty good living as an airbrush artist. These shits were selling at around $15 - $20 each!  EACH!  So let's see: a cheap white tee is about $2 (max), dyes are maybe $50 for a bigger set (i'll say average one or two bucks on a single shirt, we'll say one because most are one or two color), sold at an average $17, THAT'S ABOUT $14 PROFIT!  UNBELIEVABLE!  What was i talking about, oh right progress. Well today we had to show progress on our album cover.  I did a simple wash and then beefed it up with line art.  I will be putting in a ocean-like background.

Airbrush Practice

So, we've started working with airbrushes for some reason or another.  I really see no point in learning to use them, unless one of the projects is retouching a large-scale image; which i hardly doubt.   So for today, we had to paint a planet; with a space-like background on it of course!  So i did this little number, the planet is okay, just okay.  I like the background better actually.  I think scale could have helped here.  I think i was more free to work with the airbrush on the back because i was not working in such a confined space.  I will have to keep that in mind.  Well here it is, I also added a few variations on it as well, because they just seemed to fit in well, enjoy:

The one on the farthest right was my first attempt at the airbrush, it did not work out as planned because my aribrush needed some serious cleaning!  We've only just started working with them and already it's filthy!  Either did a really bad job cleaning it to begin with or someone just left gunk in it!  I think it's the later one, i mean when i pulled the cap off, purple ink fell on my hand!  Who does that!  I looked to see who had used purple the next day.  The other blue one was my first shot at a planet.  I think it's just okay.  I think scale would rally help as well as making it look a little less flat.  the orange ones are just practice again.  

The way I see it, airbrushing can only go up from here.

Comps comps and more comps, actually just two comps.

So for today we were showing off our marker comps for our book cover and cheesy airbrush.  For the book jacket I decided to go with The Red Badge of Courage.  Since most of the really good covers were taken i decided to go with something a little more standard, but slightly modified.  While looking at what most of the other covers look like, i saw a lot with the guy holding a flag in a depiction of the final battle.  I thought this image really sold the idea of the book, so i decided i'll try my hand at it.  However, I am going to have the illustration wrap around to the back so it's not quite as, ahem . . . stale as some others might be.  Take a look:

And for my cheesy airbrush I thought of someone/thing with a cigar.  I came up with a cat or a used car salesman.  I will most likely use the cat.  I will have to work out his legs because they look a bit awkward as is, but then again they should because cat's legs don't rest like that.  I thought orange was a good cheesy color, I don't know why It just is.  I'm also trying to get him to not look like garfield.  Remember, this will be in airbrush, so it can only look worse. Look at this:

Everybody needs a montage!

I have been working on this one for a while now hence my lack of posts.  It is my 3-image gouache montage.  The images are apparent due to my excellent gouache-ing skills.  The scan does it no justice, the mouse has lost all value, but my excellent shading on the front of the mouse shows up.  It's a lot darker than it actually is, despite my effort to adjust it in Photoshop.  Oh well, I'll keep working on it.  It was pretty hard to paint, i kept wanting to add an extra layer of depth into my iguana, and spent most of my time on that part.  Since i spent so much time on it, the other parts look less developed.  Perhaps i'll work on it some more one day.  I also ran into the strangest problem: I had painted my hot dog bun but it looked kind of green so i scrubbed it and then reapplied a better brown, but painting along the edge of the new bun was difficult because the paint would not stay on the illustration board.  It was like it had a layer of laminate/or like i was painting on plastic.  Super weird!  I also think my mouse lines look odd, though very close to my image, still looks out of place, perhaps a lower value next time.

Here's what i'm thinking...

Now that we "have the skills" It's time for some real projects!  Today we presented marker comps for the proposed 'album art' project.  i thought for a while about what i would do for mine, and it eventually boiled down to: What would be the most fun to illustrate?  There were some pretty good contenders:  "Big Lizard in my Backyard" by the Dead Milkmen, "You can Tune a Piano, but you can't Tuna Fish" by REO Speedwagon, and "She Wants Revenge" by She Want Revenge, but the decision finally went to "Shark Sandwich" by Spinal Tap.  As you may or may not know, Spinal Tap is a fictional band features in the 1980s mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap."  The name of the album came from one of my favorite parts in the movie where they are discussing their discography:  "The review for "Shark Sandwich" was merely a two word review which simply read 'Shit Sandwich'."  Wether the album be good or bad, i guess i really just wanted to paint a shark. . . . . . and a sandwich. . . . together.   I wanted to paint a shark sandwich.  Anyways, here's my comp.

comp here: