Custom Nesting Dolls in Five Easy-to-Follow Steps!

Not to sound too self-gratifying, but I make a lot of things. I've been known to make stuff, junk, and even trinkets. One of my favorite things to make, and probably the one that gets the most attention, are custom nesting dolls. I've made five of these over the last few years, and, as mentioned before, they weren't my idea from the start. The brilliant idea was that of my cousin Margo, when she asked me to make a set for her mom, for Christmas. From the first, I feel like my process is a little more refined, and the product so much better for it. This is the latest set, which was commissioned by my friend Lakshmi, as a father's day gift for her husband Prasanth. The report from the front is that he has them, loves them, and I can blog about them, as they are no longer a secret. I took process photos, which I always forget to do, and figured you might like to see them, if you are here anyway.

The first and most common (and ludicrous) question people ask is whether I buy them or carve them myself. First off, I have never used a lathe. Second, if these were hand whittled, the price would rest in the five-to-seven-hundred range, instead of the two-to-three-hundred spot that they currently occupy. I buy them online; The secret is out. Once i have the blanks unpacked and inspected, pencil comes first, of course.

Next I address skin tone, which this time was more fun than usual, as all of the dolls I have made have been caucasian (disregarding the Alice in Wonderland set I made last year). after the skin is the right color, I paint in the whites of the eyes and teeth. This terrified Rachael, who was watching, and really didn't like it when I slowly pushed them toward her end of the table chanting "One of us... One of us..."

Working the highlights and shadows into the skin adds an amazing level of 'life.' i didn't discover this until i had already completed a few early sets, and it boggles my mind that it wasn't always part of the routine. They do become remarkably more friendly with the addition of pupils and iris', don't you agree?

The next step is the biggest, as it sums up the majority of the paint work. Clothes, hair, highlights and shadows. Once this part is finished, the only thing that remains is the ink.

Ah the ink- my love and my enemy. As you may have guessed, there is no erasing at this point. I have been known to break a healthy sweat in the coolest of temperatures when applying the ink details on a set of dolls. The ink I use is India ink from a micron pen, so until it dries, it can be smudged, and once dry, is there to stay. Luckily, I had no twitches or sneezes while inking these, and they turned out really cute. I LOVED the double sided cat, though he/she is kind of hard to appreciate here.

Thanks for reading!

Showtime! 2011 edition

Hey friends and fans! Sorry, I don't mean to assume that you are a friend or fan just because you are tuned in and reading this, but I try to be positive. I would like to assume very few enemies or haters are reading this just to plan revenge or scoff at my general ambition.

ANYHOW! There's a social event coming up, hosted by me and the good people at AlleyCat Comics, in the charming village of Andersonville. Here is the general info, and a peek at one of the new paintings I'll be debuting at the show!

That's the latest work, tentatively titled Intergalactic Bromance. 7 to 10 on July 21st. You bring your feet, I'll bring the beer and snacks! See you in two weeks!

Art Camp! 2011 edition

A few weeks ago, I travelled to Kansas for my annual young artist's retreat, cleverly titled Art Camp! (insert year here). This was our third meeting, and, as usual, our group was mostly composed of students I had the pleasure of teaching back in my Kansas days, at Raintree.

There were a few new faces, but after three days, I felt like I had known them all as long as I'd known myself.

There was a lot of nerdy content in our collection, particularly Pokémon and Halo, as well as a lot of Star Wars talk, so naturally, I felt right at home.

Check out the photo spread below to see the fantastic work produced by Drew, Gabby, Rhiddi, Aidin, Eliot, Payton, Macy, Izzy, Julia, Madeline and Erik!

On the final day my BIL (brother in law) Joel stopped by and regaled the kids (and gave me time to clean up) with a string of terribly hilarious knock-knock jokes. The kids loved it. I loved it. Joel is an absolute peach.

And he can sew one heck of a taco!

Thanks again and again to the parents who make this possible. Without your lunch provisions, snack supplies and last-minute-runs for the supplies I left back home, it would have been a tear-filled misery-camp. You all rule, with much vigor. Really, truly, so much fun. See you all next summer!

NERD!

Yeah, you heard me, nerd! Oh wait, pot, kettle, all that hullabaloo. But, to be fair, I can only assume, being as you are all up in my site, that you are some degree of nerd; art nerd, science nerd, fantasy, sci-fi, comic book... We take all types around here. Speaking of nerd, check out what I did to my helmet!

I admit it- I've gone Imperial. It was the first thing I thought of when I bought the new helmet. Now when I'm on my bike and cars get in my business, all I can think is, "There's on! Set for stun!"

N E R D

It's again been too long, and I have no excuse.

It's hard to keep up on an art blog when art production slides to a halt. Well, a halt might be a little dramatic, but between my day job and the onset of spring, I have been spending VERY little time at my desk. The commission jobs that I have been working on have been sparse and are still in production, so there's almost nothing to report!

So, you, my good and fainthful reader, get to bask in the glory of unfinished character sketches for an upcoming project that I'm ALMOST ready to talk about. Officially, I mean.

These character designs were drawn in my sketchbook and inked in that Adobe ipad thingy I told you about months ago, back when I was a better person, who kept up on his blog. It realy is THE best for digital 'ink' lines. Just look at those edges!

Also... He has, um, a cat. *shameful kitty cat sketches EXPOSED*

Sometimes, You Gotta Spoil Yourself

In this particular case, the spoiling came in the form of an ipad 2, and was justified in that I honestly believed (fingers crossed) that it could be used as a completely portable art-making interface! At the very least, it could serve as a color sketchbook with one sketchbook forever, and one pen forever. It's been two weeks, and the results are, so far, promising. The hitch in the ipad-as-an-art-kit get-up is the lack of a perfect arts app that covers all bases. As of this writing, I have to spread most of my projects over three, with separate but equal strengths and drawbacks.

The first one I picked up, and the most popular among the online artists I stalked to get opinions, is Sketchbook Pro by autodesk inc. It costs $6.99, supports up to six layers, has a seriously great UI, featuring multi-finger swipes and commands that really speed up the menu-juggling that comes with any toolbox as robust as that featured by SBP. Wolverine up above was sketched, inked and colored as separate layers in SBP, in about half an hour. Down below is the 'painted' layer of a carrot car concept, clearly unfinished, but it nicely illustrates the ability of SBP to emulate paint and brush strokes in a really nice way.

Next up is Adobe Ideas, by, er, Adobe. The big benefits here are that it's FREE (!), but you have to pay a fiver to utilize layers, which is kind of a must. The bread and butter of this one is that it is vector based, which means, while you can't do any blending or gradients in this one, it makes GORGEOUS lines, which have no fixed resolution, and you can export to your main computer as a .psd with layers intact.

To be fair, al of the three programs mentioned here can export in a variety of formats, most usefully .psd.

Adobe's got something of a learning curve, and far less features than either Art Studio or Sketchbook, but for boundless resolution of line work, it can be pretty valuable for the artist working on the go. See the carrot-car inks below for an example of what Adobe Ideas can do.

Not surprisingly, Adobe (finally) came out last week and demoed a (mostly) full-fledged ipad-friendly version of photoshop. What they DIDN'T tell us is when it comes out and how many dollars we'll have to fork over once it drops. For the time being, and for just a few bucks, photoshop-friendlies can make due with the admittedly unattractive UI of Art Studio. From app icon to the static loading image to the font they chose for the title screen, this app is goofy looking. The icons for each tool don't give up their names, even when hovered over, and the icons themselves often don't convey clearly what the tool will do. It is my opinion that a user unfamiliar with photoshop, it's tools and it's menu system, might feel lost in Art Studio.

All design complaints aside, of the three apps I've been using, it is easily the deepest and most usable of the three. You just have to get past the design and learning curve. Check out my version of Rooster below.

It's my proudest and most finished ipad-artwork, and, after the initial sketch (which I did in Sketchbook and then imported into Art Studio) made completely on ipad, in Art Studio. It's a great program, it's $2.99, and offers the highest resolution available of the resolution-based apps I'm familiar with.

High five, ART STUDIO! Now let's get an update and fix that user interface!

Once I got my hands on the apps, the stylus (Targus brand, available everywhere, and the best thing until Wacom steps up and makes a REAL stylus) and, of course, the ipad itself, all I needed was a good case. I can't be trusted with anything fragile, and this thing has a big glass pane on the front, and lots of fragile little computers living inside. I scoured ebay, amazon and etsy, and found a lot of cool cases, sleeves and binder-type housings, but nothing that really struck me. THEN I remembered the amazing work of my friend Teressa, of the blog and ETSY shop, Food, Fabric and Paper. And in less than a week, with almost no notice, look at what she came up with!

My only request was "muted colors, preferably grey wool." What a gal - and just look at how well it fits! Tessa went online and got the exact apple measurements, mocked up a foam-core... mock-up... and made a case that fits like a glove.

She even has adorable custom tags... in her own handwriting!

So cute.

Thanks, Tessa, for keeping my big, clumsy self from breaking my new toy. Er, work device. Art tool. Um... video game/internet/drawing/whatever thingy. It's totally justified, right?

Making and Faking

Due to the lack of commissions or big ideas lately, I've been doing a lot of 'technique work,' or in a more pragmatic phrasing, PRACTICE. I'm a firm believer in the idea that learned skills atrophy over time, just as muscles do, if left unchecked. Here are some of the pieces that have come from my continuing efforts to improve my techniques in acrylic and gouache painting.

For a few days in January, all of Chicago was dumped on by a history-making, school-cancelling blizzard, and thusly, Martha and I were going through a little cabin-fever. We set out on day one, after the monumental snow fall, and walked the streets of what seemed to be mostly a ghost town. Nary a business was open, except Starbucks, and we ended up there with the rest of the adventurous idiots that morning. After dipping my stagnant brains in hot caffeine, I came home and painted the snowy picture seen here. I'd been wanting to do a Hoth scene for years, so it was good to get it out and onto paper.

A while later, I went to see True Grit. Due to a general love of the Coen movies, and a penchant for western lore, I went into a complete whirlwind of cowboy culture. I returned to my GOTY pick , Red Dead Redemption (treating it like a full time job, and roping Cary and Joe back into the old west for some online play), listened to a couple of great western books by Cormack McCarthy (The Crossing was my favorite, and is part of his Border Trilogy, which can be read individually, as they are part of a thematic trilogy, not a single story), and filled my ipod with the best contemporary and classic country I could dig up on my hard drive. And there was also a cowboy frog playing the harmonica, which I honestly think might be the best thing my two hands have ever crafted. It's intended to be a concept for a larger painting, in which there would be a whole team of rowdy anthropomorphized animals playing various camp-fire friendly instruments, but that is yet to come.

The next step was a backward one, back into my Nintendo fanboy-art that got its start in 2007. No matter how many times I draw him, there's always room for another Link picture. This one is distinctly more Wind-Waker than my others, but not too close to still be considered original.

And now for something COMPLETELY UNORIGINAL! Back in school, when we wanted to emulate the techniques of a certain artist, we were encouraged to do a copy, and to do it right, really spending the time needed to NAIL it. One of my favorite illustrators of the current age is Amanda Visell. She did this painting, and I've always loved it. I was laid up with a CRAZY fever a month or so ago, and I spent a day of medicated tom-foolery making this copy. It's close, but not a perfect copy. I do feel like I learned what I set out to learn; that being, how she achieves those great dry-brush and solid line textures with acrylic paint. I was lucky enough to meet her last summer at Rotofugi, here in Chicago, but was too nervous to seem cool. She's a pretty amazing illustrator. Click her name and fall in love.