Hungry Artist Games

Heads up, today is the last day to enter the ARC salon!  Dave and I have said so before, and I'll say it again: it's a good thing to have a big, central competition for everyone from all the different walks of representational art to compete and mingle in.  One cool thing is how the ARC has been developing equal opportunity for illustrators to compete by adding a category for imaginary realism.  It's nice to have those creative and ambitious jerks drive home for us realist fine artists just how lame our mug shot portraits and overly precious little "life studies" are.

Dopplegangers

Titian's Venus of Urbino has a lot in common with this provocative mastiff.

Merry Christmas

Hope everyone has a great holiday and are thankful the Mayans were wrong about the world ending in a fiery blaze of death.....stupid Mayans. 

ART CATZ

Dave and I don't make it to representational art galleries very often, what with living on an island where the main artistic output is totem poles.  Luckily for us, we make it out to NYC once a year to visit my in-laws, and that's when we nerd it up.  We compile a list of galleries, plot them on a map, and go.  We alternately praise and talk smack about our peers ("Wall-eyed ellipses? Oh no you di'n't!"), and if I'm really lucky, swipe a price list at Eleanor Ettinger Gallery and figure out how much money the featured artist made at their show that month, and what I would buy for myself if I had that much money.  It's easy because Tiffany's is right across the street and I'd only have to purchase one thing.

ARC Salon

 The Art Renewal Center Salon deadline is fast approaching.  I know a lot of people out there like to find excuses why not to enter, but the whole point of the Salon is to bring together the best artists in the fields of fine art, illustration, and concept art.  There is nothing else like it out there. 

I will say the ARC has helped me tremendously in my career and opened up a lot up a lot of opportunities.  If it wasn't for things like the ARC Student scholarship, I would have found myself hard pressed to have attended things like the Hudson River Fellowship.  In addition, Fred and Sherry Ross have purchased many works from both Kate and I.  We have both placed in the Salon with large cash prize awards which always seemed to come right when we really needed it. 

It is my hope that this year more concept artists and illustrators will enter, as they are also truly pushing the boundaries of realism and often go unnoticed.  For more information on entering, click here.

Here's one of the pieces I entered.  The "Happy Huntsman" finished.

Narrative work

For years I have heard people whining about the contemporary art scene with the phrase "but where's all the multi-figure narrative work like they used to do in the 19th century....waaaaaaaah?"  Well, it's time for them to shut their cake holes because I have taken my first steps towards such a thing (not like I'm the first).  A lot of people may wonder why I have not attempted anything similar before.  Quite frankly, because it's hard to pull one off well and it takes a lot of planning.  That's probably why you don't see a lot of people doing them.   I always wished I was like Rouge from  X-Men who could touch someone and adsorb all their powers;  in this case art powers.  I would walk up to some of my favorite artist's like Yuqi Wang, Scott Waddell, and Mian Situ and shake their hand, only to turn around and run off laughing with their skills of narrative painting.

(Sidenote, painting "random naked chick in bed reading book" does not count as narrative painting unless the story is about a woman whose cloths exploded and she decided to do some book research to figure out the enigma of why).

In this piece, there are two fisherman on the hunt for some aquatic creatures to destroy; I don't know, maybe some baby seals or something.  It took quite a bit of time to dig up the correct articles of clothing I needed, a boat, and a model who had a mustache so manly that Burt Reynolds would blush.
 
I did quite a few thumbnails to work out the composition.  One trick for this is not to simply sit down with a sketchbook and try to do fifty in a row.  Some are done in a sketchbook, a scrap peice of paper and even on napkins at a restaurant.  When I get an idea, I jot it down.  By the time I am ready, I have no idea what happened to the first 49 I did, but the winners are kept. 

I also try to do at least 5-10 color studies.  Ironically I always end up going with the one of the ones I did first, but I do a bunch more to make sure to kill time until the show "Shark Tank" comes on.  I was thinking of going on "Shark Tank" and offering them the investment of 50.00 dollars and a ham sandwich for 51 % of the equity in my business.

After that, time for the full-on drawing that will be transferred for the final painting.  In addition to these stages I still have to do ocean studies, boat studies, sky studies, and some portrait studies....man, narrative work sucks.

Start of cartoon

Some of the color studies.