His Infinite Strip
When I was a teenager, growing up in Syracuse NY, I used to spend all of my available money on art books. Not just any art books, not the educational books my parents bought me about “fine” artists, all safely carrying society’s seal of approval. These were books with titles like “The Fantastic Art of Boris Vallejo”. Books crammed [...]
Continue ReadingBlood Magic: Lessons Learned
Over the holidays I painted a commercial assignment in what I call my New Style (improvisational, emotional, painterly, unresolved). The piece was large (~30″x40″), painted in acrylics on illustration board. I’m not at liberty to share the complete image yet, but here are some notes I took at the end of the process: 1. [...]
Continue ReadingThe Power of the Unconscious
This is something of a follow-up to my last post. Over the years I’ve become increasingly aware of how much richer the unconscious mind is, creatively, than the conscious mind. As artists, we use our unconscious minds all the time, if only to let us know when a piece feels finished, or if an element we are introducing to a painting [...]
Continue ReadingWhere Images Come From
I’ve found, as a commercial artist, that personal pieces are surprisingly hard to do. I say surprisingly, because this is what we want, right? No client, no rules, we can paint whatever we want! What I’ve found is that personal pieces resist “designing”. The process I usually go through when preparing for [...]
Continue ReadingSD-2 Golden Scythe
Back in 2006 I published a graphic novel called JLA Classified: Cold Steel which opened with a sleek golden spaceship being pursued across the surface of the moon. I had painted that comic in a new way (for me). Instead of painting each page as a single, 11″x17″ image with a lot of little panels, I painted each panel individually [...]
Continue ReadingSchön Magazine Interview
Interview for Schon Magazine just came out. The full online version of the magazine is here. An excerpt is here: Schön Magazine #13
Continue ReadingLife After Art School: Five Years to an Illustration Career
The one emotion every newly-minted art school graduate experiences is anxiety. Can I really make it? What do I do now? All my friends are getting jobs making $50,000 a year. Where does that leave me? I’ll be lucky to get a job delivering pizza. I graduated from the University of Michigan School of Art back in 1985, ready to take [...]
Continue ReadingVictorious Drake
I set myself the goal of trying to pull off a commercial piece using the approach I’ve been exploring in my personal work (see “Ogygia”, October 2nd, 2010), and this is the result. I’m happy with it, but it took me WAY longer than it should have. The issue for me is that, in my personal work, I’m not starting [...]
Continue ReadingCostume Design
One of the things that always surprises me about doing Iron Empires stories is how much background work is required to build a consistent world. Every time I think I’m done, I sit down to paint a page and am confronted by something I don’t know. “What does the inside of a Comoran spaceship look like? Is it ornately decorated [...]
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