Family Affairs

Last week I took a break from the sketch covers to finish up some projects for my family.

My brother Robert and his wife Stacia have a hive on their property that produces really delicious honey. These are logos I designed for when their budding bee business takes off.

(They live in Tehachapi, CA- hence the pun.)

Also, my Dad's 73rd Birthday is coming up in a few days, so I've taken a favorite photograph of ours and converted it into a pencil sketch.

I'm seriously considering adding a Portrait category to my website, because I tend to do a lot of these simple graphite photo-to-sketch portraits. Gathering them all up is going to be rather time consuming, unfortunately, because almost all of those were created to be gifts.

UPCOMING ART SHOWS:

Collingswood's Second Saturday on August 14th has been cancelled, due to scheduling conflicts with a craft fair of some kind. However, I'm hoping to be in Collingswood, NJ on September 10th. Updates as they become available.

Spinning The Widow's Web

I'm VERY excited about this image! Much more so than the first, although I plan on finishing that one too. I've done a basic value study and have been playing around with the background to figure out what direction to go into. I like the bottom three thumbnails the best, but I'm not completely tied to either one of them just yet.

Scarlett Johansson, pt. 2

An update on the Scarlett/Black Widow image I've been working on:

I've been tweaking the face and working on getting it reattached to the

rest of her body. I haven't transferred it to the sketch cover yet, so here's hoping that the details don't change all that much when I copy it over.

I've also started laying out an image for another Black Widow sketch cover.

Although it's also based off of a reference photo of Miss Johansson, I'm not going to worry about capturing her likeness this time around. I just enjoy the pose she's in. Here's a preview of that one before I get to work on it.

The Trouble with Likeness

I'm finally back from California and I'm getting back into the swing of things with a portrait of Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow.

And I'm discovering that capturing the undefinable Johansson-ness of her face is incredibly difficult. I've drawn her face over and over and

only a few have turned out even remotely successful.

Now I have dozens of images of lovely women who look nothing like Scarlett Johansson...

...and a handful of sloppy looking heads that somehow resemble Ms. Johansson far more than the more carefully modeled sketches do.

Picking out the minute differences is careful and tedious work. For example, here's one face in particular that I like very much, but which looks like someone else. And here's the reference picture I'm working from.

Some careful observations and a little more shading improves things slightly, but it still isn't quite there.

A little bit more work gets us closer, but I'm still not sure it's really recognizable as Scarlett. Try as I might, the lips still need work.

I want to make sure that someone how doesn't know who it's supposed

to be can look at it and recognize it without being told. I'll post updated sketches as the project progresses.

Elektra Evolution

The black & white version of the Elektra pin-up was ready in time for Wizard World, but I didn't have a chance to render it in color until now. Here's a look at steps it took to finish this piece:

Starting with the inked version, I transferred the image onto colored paper. I prefer to use Canson Mi-Teintes and Prismacolor pencils. I start by putting on some of the most extreme highlights and lowlights. This early in the game, I need to be careful to keep my pencil work light, so I can map out the important shapes without really committing to anything.

After the values have been mapped out lightly, I can go in and pull out some of the highlights. At this point I'll usually revisit my reference photos and use them to figure out where the brightest lights and darkest darks are located.

Now that I've pushed the values on the figure just about as far as they'll go, I use photoshop to figure out what I should do with the background. After I've found something that looks good with the foreground, it's just a few more minutes of colored pencil work and it's ready to sign!