new scratchboard

This is a little bird called a bushtit, which flocks in the willow trees behind my house. It hangs upside down like this foraging for these seed pods and for insects. This scratchboard piece only took one night to complete. It was a mad scratching frenzy. Oh, what a deadline can make you do……

Before the Feast

This is an Allosaurus about to eat his victim. Painted in gouache, & it took me under 30 hours = awesome. I’m entering it into an international dinosaur illustration contest. Wish me luck!

Field Guide

Heres one of my first stab at plants, put together as a field guide page. These are all invasive species in Santa Cruz.

How to build a deer

Here is one version of my deer reconstruction. There is also a flesh —> skeleton version as well. The muscles and completed deer were painted separately then inserted into photoshop and combined.

Older stuff

Here’s 2 older digital projects that I never posted. “String theory” & a European hornet.

Final Projects

Well here they are… my final pieces of the semester. This first one is in the style of a “tromp l’oeil”- a “fool the eye” painting that tries to mimic reality as closely as possible. This is a view of Albert Einstein’s desk. Some of the objects include: a letter urging president Eisenhower to develop the atomic bomb, a NY Times from the day the atomic bomb dropped, a paper he wrote in response about his famous equation and its implications in the weapon, sheet music from Schubert (one of his favorites to play on the violin), his book on relativity translated into Hebrew, one of his notebooks, a pocket watch to symbolize his breakthroughs on space & time, his briar pipe which he chewed on deep in thought and a photo of him and his wife Elsa on a ship in Japan. Each one of these was thought out carefully placed in this arrangement, then meticulously painted at life size. (Its about 2′ x ‘) That is why this is the longest I have ever put into a painting… about 75 hours. But it might be my favorite thing ever, so it was worth it.

My second final project is a comparative painting of 2 sauropod dinosaurs: the Camarasaurus(smaller) and the Diplodocus(bigger). I put around 60 hours in this one, so not to far behind the einstein piece. I started with the skeletons, then drawings of the musculature, then I made clay models, color studies & texture studies. In the final painting I tried to render each and every scale on the dinosaurs… no small task. I should have picked smaller dinosaurs! But I am very happy with these 2 guys too.

It has been a long semester. All of the work has paid off though. Both of these pieces were selected to be in our class’s art show in May. Now, only one more project to go!

Here are 2 samples I have done recently:

A Caiman (related to the alligator). This is in Gouache (like an opaque watercolor)

And an Eastern Box Turtle. I used to find these in the woods behind my house. This is done in washes of acrylic with colored pencil over it.

What I’m doing now…

Here are some preliminary sketches I am working on for my final dinosaur project of the semester. In these, I am working out the muscular reconstruction of 2 sauropods: the Diplodocus and the Camarasaurus. I have to work with these before I start my final painting to decide what the dinosaurs will look like. This has been about a 2 week process, along with making clay models, etc.

More Paintings

Here is a lion done in acrylic. I got his photo on my zoo trip.

Here are some various lichens and moss growing on a stick done in guoache. I foraged through the forest to find it. This was a very tricky and time-consuming piece. There was just so much going on in such a little tiny area.

Edmontosaurus

This is an Edmonotsaurus- a type of “duck-billed” dinosaur. Its done in acrylic. I’m so tired thats all I have to say about it. This wore me out. =)