Spatterings

PART-TIME DOG

"Part-time Dog©" is the graphic novel, more or less, that I'm working on. More about that on a future post. This is the inked drawing for the cover, which I think came out rather nicely. Next, I've got to attack the color problem. A lot of artists I like work with a limited palette over inked work, which creates a look I like a lot, but my natural instinct is to go forth and render with color. I'll experiment some and post the results.

(I asked my three-year old what she thought of this picture, and she said "Dogs," but without that much enthusiasm. Well, she wasn't my target audience anyway.)

Iggy Pop redux, plus Amy Mann

I think I'm giving up on that Iggy Pop painting that I started last week. The composition is good, but the figure of Iggy is too small for me to have any fun with. So I knocked off a quick ink sketch in my sketchpad just to get him out of my system.  I may add some colored inks to him later, because I'd like to experiment with that just a touch. If I do, I'll re-post the color image.

After that, I did a quick sketch of Amy Mann in pencil. If I like how the Iggy comes out with colored inks, I may try it with Amy.

(In case you wondered, Iggy's best song is "I Want to be Your Dog," which he did with the Stooges, followed by "Lust for Life," "Gimme Danger" and "The Passenger." Amy Mann's best song is everything off "Bachelor No. 2." Her second best song is everything else she's ever done. She's awful good.)

Weekend sketching

I believe I mentioned in a previous post that I was getting stale, so I managed to high-tail it down to Minverva Durham's Spring Street Studio in Soho for some Saturday morning sketching. This was a twenty-minute sketch, the last of the morning, before I skedaddled home. ("High-tail", "skedaddle" -- you wouldn't want me to write like a normal person would you? 'Course not.)

Given another ten minutes, I'd go after that unfinished  hand, which is slightly too large, and better resolve the head mass, which looks too big to me. I think what I have is fairly accurate -- the guy had a lot of hair -- but in the end, if it looks wrong, it's wrong. Conversely, if it looks right, it's right, which is the philosophy that has always guided me as an artist. It would be a less useful mantra for a engineer, granted, unless you had one hell of a lawyer.

Still, a pretty good Saturday morning. I went from stiff and sloppy to loose and elegant in just under three hours. Some of my later five-minute sketches came out pretty well too, and I was going to put up one or two here, but they were in a different (cheaper) sketchbook which I don't have with me today.

Friday sketch blogging

Frustrating week. I'm still working on The Office picture. It's almost done, or maybe it isn't. That's the problem with working on the computer. The damn medium is so flexible that you just aren't committed to one version over another. I'll revisit it over the weekend, and see if I feel like giving it another go. When I'm satisfied with it, I'll post it here. The Iggy painting isn't going that well, either. The color, which I wanted to be a rich, glowing red tone, has faded out pretty badly. Shocking, considering I was using Daniel Smith colors, which I usually think of as the best available.

This sketch, on the other hand, which I am calling "Colbert and Stewart Contemplating a Bust of Murrow," is definitely going to be a painting. One doesn't rip off Rembrandt on the computer. I'll be doing it in my standard watercolor on hard board technique. I'd love to do it in oils, but I am too damn slow when it comes to oil paint. Maybe I'll be faster by next year.

I'll try to do a step-by-step of my technique for this piece. Right now, I think the figures are a little stiff, but beccause I'm going to be doing as dark-suited figures against a dark background, I'm going to lose a lot of edges anyway. As  I paint it, that should work itself out. 

After this, on to the cover for Part-Time Dog (about which more later).

Yers,
Tom

Birthday note

Weird. Swore that I wasn't going to do any drawing today after yesterday's burnout, but started sketching heads out of a stock photo book, and things are going swimmingly. Happy birthday to me.

Also, Art Fawcett told me his new hat is on the way.

New drawings tomorrow, I hope.

- Seltz

Bad drawing day

Other people have bad hair days. I have bad drawing days. (I never have bad hair days. See the main site. )

Since about 10 PM last night, I haven't been able to draw worth a damn. Really I'm just stale. I've been working from photos and from memory so much lately that I just can't wrap my head around drawing. I think it has something to do with the fact that drawing in life is translating three dimensions into two dimensions, whereas working from photos is drawing from two dimensions into two dimensions. After too much time working this way, things all go flat. The solution is more life drawing, so I may try to take a night this week to go to Minerva's. In the meantime, I'll work on revising my site and finishing up my new invoice  and letterhead. (And in fact the Iggy Pop painting is going pretty well, but since Iggy barely looks human anyway, that's not as much as an accomplishment as I would like.)

But I can't do anything tomorrow night, because it's my birthday , so I have plans.

-Seltz

Friday sketch blogging

Slow day, so a chance to show off some drawings and some works in progress.

Drawing is central to piece I create. This is usually the case with illustrators but not necessarily the case with designers. Several designers I know say that they can't draw at all. Some tell me that they don't really know anything about type. Some even tell me that they don't read magazines. Without fail, these designers make more money than I do. I am hoping that they spend some of their windfall gains on purchasing original art from me. I am not holding my breath.

Back to drawing. For the curious among you, I like a nice soft lead, usually a 4B, in a Koh-i-Noor lead holder which I sharpen with a Staedler lead pointer. Usually I like paper with a little bit of tooth. Lately, I've been working on Strathmore bristol vellum. (It's good for inking with dry-brush technique, which I'll blog about later.)

Incidentally, I have nothing against wooden pencils, except that sharpening soft leads can be a pain, and as the laziest man in the room, I will often draw with a dull pencil (bad, bad idea) than take the time to sharpen. Someone once suggested that I should just sharpen several pencils before I start drawing. I countered that if I did that, I'd no longer be the laziest man in the room. This ended the argument. It's hard to argue with a person who stands for sloth on principal.

First up, a sketch for sketching's sake. This is a drawing of De Kooning, from a book of photos by Richard Avedon. I've liked De Kooning ever since I read a story about him years back about him and his daughter when he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. They were watching a movie on a plane when he turned to her and said, "This movie stinks. Let's get out of here." That kills me. Also his paintings are  about a hundred and seventy two times better than those of his more celebrated friend, Jackson Pollack.

This is the first drawing in a beautiful Holbein sketchbook I splurged on about two years ago and then have been too terrified to draw in ever since because it cost so much. I usually start a sketchbook great, and then start scrawling pages of hand drawings and eye drawings and gesture poses and to-do lists and skip pages and basically make it look like crap. I am trying not to do that with this sketchbook, but give me time. I did start drawing upside-down in the back of the book, so I have a fine start.

Next up, a drawing of Steve Carrell for a much bigger picture I am doing of the cast of The Office. I'm finishing this one in pen and ink with added computer color, as opposed to many of my other pictures, which are water color on hard board. (More of these in a later post, when I'll step by step through the piece.) I have finished drawing and inking the picture, but I didn't like the face of Steve Carrell. I think I found him a challenge to draw because he's basically a handsome guy and his character on the show, while obnoxious, is oddly sympathetic. Why I find it difficult to draw good-looking friendly people while I enjoy drawing odd-looking or obnoxious people is a question probably best left to professionals. My friends should definitely just keep their big mouths shut.

Finally, a thumbnail for a picture I'm going to do this weekend of Iggy Pop as the last of the rock dinosaurs, which I did in my new Holbein sketchbook. I love drawing Iggy Pop. (Why? See above.) This will be for a pretty large (14 x 20) painting. I include it because someone in my class claimed that he'd never seen a thumbnail from me. Now he has. Although this is a pretty loose, crummy thumbnail, I admit. I'd never submit anything this scratched out to an art director, but as this is a self-promo piece for which I am functioning as art director, it'll do for now. (If you can't read the writing below, it says "Tyrannasaurus, duckbill dino, velociraptors." The scratched out word is me trying to spell "denonychus" before I gave up. The text on the right says, "Iggy, last of the dinosaurs. Radamoom." Or maybe "areshales?" Or "Marshes?" Then it says, "Left to ("toplit" scratched out) w/rim lighting?" If you can figure out what this means, I will give you a lollipop.

Then I've drawn a random eyeball. It's begun. There goes the sketchbook.

-Tom
http://www.seltzerstudio.com/ 

Last finished project

This is supposed to be an illustration blog, but when you finish a nice design, why not share it? This ad for Art Fawcett's hatworks is running in the premiere issue of Classic Style magazine. (Click on the image for a larger version.) It was originally supposed to be a half-pager midway through the issue, but the publisher liked it so much that he gave a special rate for a full-pager opposite the table of contents. Yes, I am getting a free hat out of this one.

I'm almost through the redesign for Art's website, which is Vintage Silhouettes. When you click on the link, you'll see the old site. The prototype for the new one is here.

I did create all the figures on the ad, which are illustrations, come to think of it, albeit not in my standard painterly style. The ad is loosely based on the ads that Paul Rand did for Disney Hats back in the day. If you don't know who Paul Rand is, he's the designer who created the IBM logo, the UPS logo and the NeXT logo, among about a million other things. Steve Heller put together a nice book on him a couple years back that you can usually find at a discount.

All right, not much time. Got to go out and vote. Not that my vote counts for much in Brooklyn. You know, when I lived in Missouri, my liberal votes counted for something. Liberals in Missouri are rare and prized like diamonds. By other liberals.

-Tom

This picture of Charleton Heston is not the best picture I've ever done (no need to send me an email to point that out, thanks) but it's among the most important to me because it's the one that convinced me that I should actually be an illustrator.

To be clear, I've been doing illustration professionally for close to 10 years now, but it's always been as a sideline to my design work (which is how I've made a living). I'd spend all my free time drawing and painting -- sometimes for fun -- but I was never confident that I could make a living as an illustrator, because my illustrations took forever to do.

I was taught in my one year of art school -- yes, I'm an art school drop-out, but I'm also a Columbia University graduate, with a BA in history, so go figure -- that an illustration should be tightly penciled, then carefully recreated on the final surface by means of transfer paper, then tightened up again, then cleaned up, then painted, then tightened up then cleaned up again, then scanned in and retouched. Between the sketch and the transfer and the painting, the minimum number of times I would redrew something would be three.  And any aberration from my original sketch I'd consider a "mistake." I'd never live with a mistake, or try to rework around it; I'd just toss the picture out. I've thrown God knows how many pieces on the floor. And then I'd start again, drawing the picture three more times. From start to finish, the process was nerve-wracking, time-consuming, repetitive and no fun. By the time I was done with any given piece, I was sick to death of the damn thing. Unfortunately, I produced a lot of pretty good work, so I figured that I must be doing something right. I have never been that bright, really.

And the thing about it, my strength in drawing and painting from life was always my confidence and  spontaneity. And my speed! Working from life, I am a speed demon. But getting those strengths into my laboriously created illustration work seemed impossible. 

Which leads me back to old Chuck here. One night, while cleaning up my studio, I found myself sitting in front of a scrap of bristol board, a 4B pencil, some unwashed brushes and the butcherblock and a book with photos  of movie stars that I had been using for reference. And I decided to see what would happen if I just banged out some pictures as fast and loose as a drew from life, slopping on ink, reworking as I went, painting with dash and fun. And an hour later I had five terrific little spot illos done, each better than the last. (Chuck was the first, so no emails, please. See above.) And they looked pretty much exactly like my painfully ground-out work, with one exception: they were better. They were drawn with vigor and confidence, and it showed.

Since that night, illustration has gone from being a stomach-tightening chore to being exactly what I wanted it to be all along. Fun, energizing and even beautiful.

So thanks for everything, Chuck. Except for all those years shilling for the NRA, which really stunk. (Off topic, granted, but nu, who could overlook such a thing?)

-Tom    

Here goes nothing

I'm going to try to keep this blog focused on my illustration, to write about my process, technique and finished projects. I'll likely also post about other artists that have inspired me, techniques that I'm experimenting with, tools that I'm using. And if my mind should wander to politics, or current events or whatnot, I'll probably post a few words on those subjects, too. I'm paying $4.95 a month and I have no readers, so it's hard to see why I shouldn't.

I'll be playing with the site's design over the next couple of days. When you have no readers, why not experiment?

One other thing: my main site, which houses both my illustration and my design work, is www.seltzerstudio.com. Everybody should go over and check it out right now then come back here and shower me with praise. Remember, I hate criticism.

All right, more soon.

Take it slow,
Tom