Life Drawing

Here is a link to a short selection of conte on newsprint life drawings, one of my favourite things to do...ever. I am compiling as many as I can these days for an upcoming artshow in the fall of the new year.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30338815@N03/sets/72157608243264928/show/

Homemade Banjos

Since I am a musician and in a few bands you can probably see the connection between the earlier work using a handmade approach to gourds and vessels and how it led me to start making my own instruments with the same material. Here are two of my latest pieces. The first one pictured here is one complete gourd and I have just cut away the side to stretch the skin. You tune this one by sliding the strings up and down the shaft. The larger one is still in progress and needs more shaping on the neck which is carved and shaped all by hand.

Compound Ceramic Forms

These forms are like a pot in a pot in a pot. They are not assmebled after firing but actually the compound forms are all thrown at the same time. So for each piece I start pulling up the wall of the innermost form first until it is like a finished pot. Then I pull up the next wall and close it around the first one being really careful not to touch the first wall and rip the piece in two as it spins around on the wheel. Really fun to make and as you can see I usually prefer an unglazed finish to allow the feeling of the original clay to come through instead of a polished, glassy look.

Ceramics

I work in ceramics and now use the throwing wheel for just about all of it. These forms were thrown with the closed ends at the top while being careful to maintain a consistent wall thickness. I then cut them off the wheel at the bottom and carved out the holes you see when the clay was half dried and easier to hold without collapsing the forms.

Vessels and a Comic

Here are a few shots of some drinking vessels and a basket that I made by hand as part of an art project where exploration of the now almost forgotten low tech world of living off the land was seducing me. These items were collected from the landscape and crafted into functional tools, even the cord on the gourd I wove out of corn husk.

Here is a short comic project I drew/inked/wrote in the small slivers of spare time that I could pull out of the finger of my life.....It ended up being published in an anthology. Click on them for a closer look if you want.

t-shirts

Here are t-shirts I designed and illustrated for 2 bands. The first one is a great bluegrass band www.foggyhogtownboys.com and is the new band logo and the second shirt was an image pulled from the CD booklet for www.chriscoole.com . This CD booklet had an image to represent each song instead of a full description, I thought it was a cool idea when Chris pitched it to me and I had a great time working on it. I also included a few of the other booklet images here.

Comic layouts

Here is a very loose pencil layout for a comic page.

just fooling around

Sometimes something just pops out. Here it is.

Another CD cover

Here is another CD cover (front and back) I did for Chris Coole and Ivan Rosenberg, it is a portrait of the two artists and their instruments. It is a great album, check them out at www.chriscoole.com. Someone else is doing the hand lettering which will be on the final CD

Skulls with Skins

Lots coming up soon, working on a comic book, children's book, mini animation and concepts for on line games, whew! it is good to be busy!

Hey, Thought I would post these. I doodled them while watching a movie. Does anyone else do that? Sit and sketch while watching movies? sometimes the movie is more visually inspiring than the story and gives me ideas and off I go...skritch, skraich, shkritch.

Car-bot

Here is a loose sketch of some retro car robots that I am working on. Just idea sketches at this point that will turn into a series of finished illustrations in the new year.

sketch

Just a sketch from inside of my head of an angle I thought might be interesting as I was warming up for the images for the CD. I still may do something with it though...never know.

Cd booklet

Hey,

This past weekend was a CD launch for Chris Coole's CD 'Old Dog'. He asked me to do the artwork for the CD booklet and had a really different approach. He wanted an image that would stand in place of liner notes to communicate something more about the songs, pictures being worth a 1000 words and all that. So we listened to the tunes, talked a bit about them and came up with what I think turned out to be a great project. At the launch of the CD I hung prints and did a limited run of this image here which is a variation on one of the images in the actual CD. It seemed to me a great way to bring together music and image in a way that enriched both and a creative approach to producing a CD, which in the end is always about images and music and their interaction.

The print is 12 X 16 and the original was done with brush and ink.

Check out his site at www.chriscoole.com it is a great CD and all his stuff is top notch.

Lovely Cadaver

Here is my take on a cool character designed by John McNally called The Lovley Cadaver and I did my version of it for the Drawing Board. I thought I would share it here too. His site is www.jonmcnally.net check it out he has some great stuff.

Pocket Watch

I have been doing a whole pile of digital object drawings lately for work, here is one of them. I have always wanted a pocket watch but never find one I like enough to get so for now I am happy to own this one, even if it is only on the computer.

Edward Gorey

I thought I would post a sample of my work in the style of the great Edward Gorey. Hope you like it.

Animation

These are 2 stills from a short animation that I am making. I will post more as it gets done.

That time of year

I have been swamped lately with work and just now got time to post my Christmas card for this year, Merry Christmas to those of you that celebrate it and happy holidays to everyone else.

Memory sketching

I have been doing doodles from memory and usually warm up with a drawing of myself since I should remember what I look like. So here are a few... the first one is of me and the others are just faces I made up, oooh and a cartoonesque car.