Above and below are the finished portraits I did of Fluffy the Chinchilla. They were my first ever chinchilla portraits, and I had a lot of fun making them. The client had some great Fluffy photos that I used as references for these.
And now I’m off to work on a red panda collage. Hope everyone has a great week!
Here’s one of the holiday commissions I completed a couple months ago. My client wanted me to make a collage of her friend with his grandson. Since this piece wasn’t the smallest size I work in, it wasn’t as difficult to collage two figures on the 9″x12″ area. However, since 9″x12″ is still somewhat small, it was a bit of a challenge to get the likeness down properly for the grandson. I did have a bit of fun collaging all those colorful badges on the grandfather’s jacket.
I have a few more collages that I completed this year that I’ll post in the next couple of weeks. Anyway, I hope everyone is having a great December!
This is a piece that I completed a few days ago. My client wanted me to make an abstract landscape, somewhat similar to “The Artist from a Distance” collage. So now I just need to frame it and deliver it to its new home. I’m also beginning to do a bit of work on my first chinchilla portrait. Chinchillas sure are cute!
Anyway, I’m off to run a few errands. And I can’t believe it’s almost December and before long it will be 2012. Wow, it still blows my mind how fast a year can creep by.
This was one of the background pieces I created for the Birdy animation project. We ended up using a different collage for the project, but I thought I’d share this one as well. This piece is a bit abstract and uses a lot of rectangular strips of paper – which is what I usually use with scapes.
And here’s the completed collage of the smiling dog. Looking back at all the previous commission work I’ve done, it looks like dog portraits have been the most popular subject. When it comes to tackling pet portraits, I’ve found that it helps a lot if the subject is a happy-looking pup.
In other news, you can check out my article that was just published on Bourgeon Online – Art is a Story. I discuss the writing and illustrating process for Duck & Fish as well as the storytelling I do with my other art projects.
Today the Team Coco crew let me know that my artwork is now on Conan O’Brien’s website. I put together this mini collage the other day as part of my effort to start up a series of famous faces. I’d like to sharpen my illustration skills with capturing the likeness of well-known figures.
And I thought I’d share my favorite Conan quote with you:”Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”
— Conan O’Brien.Anyway, I’m off to start the weekend. Looks like I’ll have a chance to put in a few hours of studio work too.
And here’s the final collage. Those two Bostons sure look like they’re having a lot of fun…
So Bosty decided to squeeze into the picture.
I had a lot of fun with this one – I focused mainly on texture and tried to stay away from solid colors (although I still went ahead and added a few solid color shapes to this). I didn’t take any progress pictures of the “Mallard Duck,” because I was in the zone while working on him. After I completed this piece, I realized that it may have been inspired by all the mallard ducks I collaged for Duck & Fish.
So in my last post I mentioned we had an earthquake here. Then this weekend we had a hurricane alert for Irene. I heard lots of people swarmed the stores for milk and bread, although I stocked up on books and green tea to read my way through the storm. Turns out it only lasted a day, and it wasn’t that bad at all. Just got a bit of rain and strong winds. The only casualty was our grill that got knocked over, but no damage was done to anything near us. Hope everyone else stayed safe during the storm!
I completed this piece a while ago and then I put a stack of magazines on it and forgot about it. While sifting through magazines as I worked on piecing together another collage, I found this one again. It was only made with coated paper, and for some reason the solid colors didn’t look right. So I went ahead and started cutting out bits and pieces of texture from magazines until the collage looked like the image above. Temporarily losing this work of art helped me in the end – I was able to look at it with a fresh pair of eyes and make adjustments that made the collage more colorful.
In other news…did you hear? D.C. felt an earthquake yesterday. I thought it was construction and didn’t think twice, but when folks started evacuating from all the buildings on the street, I decided I should follow suit. It was strange feeling the floor beneath me shaking. Reminds me of the earthquake we had last year – which was much smaller than yesterday’s. Last year, I stayed up until five o’clock in the morning working on a project – felt my chair vibrating and saw my computer monitor shaking, thought I must be hallucinating from sleep deprivation and decided to call it a night and go to sleep. Didn’t realize what had happened until I read the news the next day. Craziness.
Another day, another doggie collage.
Lately I’ve been dabbling with some film work – figuring out how to work with editing, lighting, etc. Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll tackle a few collage-related film pieces. We shall see…
Anyway, I hope everyone is having a glorious week – and happy-almost-Friday!