Eyes over here

The Grad show finally happened! A lot of really great work was put up by a lot of great people. Over 1200 people came out to see, a smashing success if I say so myself. So a big thank you to all the people that helped make that happen. After all that build up it's funny what a blip of time it ended up being. 

As always a lot of people for the art and design industry come out to the show, and some of them wrote about it after. Design Edge Canada picked out a list of artists to watch from the show, and I got on it. So that is pretty damn cool.

http://designedgecanada.com/news/sheridan-illustration-grad-show-7-to-watch/

Damn it Pam

 A piece in progress. Not the final text that is going to go with it, but something that came along while playing with it around friends. And I find it too funny not to share.  

Does anyone else love Archer? Because I do. And that's the Pam I can't help thinking of. 

The Question

I recently did a portrait of Questlove the drummer for the Roots, who now act as the house band on Jimmy Fallon's show. The Roots are a group I really love, so I was jazzed about doing this piece. Here's a run down on some of the process.

After some thumbnailing and smaller portraits drawn from different angles to get a sense of the faces shape, a pencil sketch is worked up. The likeness needs to be on point, but it's going to drift a little and need fixing as I cut the shapes.

I block in most of the major shapers deciding what textures I want as I go along. Some take a couple of tries before I find the one I'm happy with.

More detail gets added in as the shape of the face is filled out. It's close, but something feels a little off in the likness, and will need a little tweaking as expected. One of the texture swatches I use can be seen floating in the background.

A few more details added. I wanted to make it a bit more of a current quest love image, so I threw on the glasses he tends to sport, and a little reference to the "lyin ass bitch" Michelle Bachman incident. The background is fun, but it's way to busy, and its distracting from the portrait.  I do like the question mark thing though...

So simplify simply simply. I get to keep the question mark, but it becomes a subtler, more playful element, and the portrait is front and centre, where it should be. a couple more tweaks are made to the likeness, and textures are filled out in few spots.