I see Irene...

This is one time I'm not interested in seeing what anything named Irene is working with, cuz it ain't good.  So far we've had flickering lights, but no flat out power loss yet.  However, the worst of it is about to come. 

Miss Chelsea Diznee

I remember a friend, and fellow blogger introducing me to this fine young woman a good while ago.  He had a done a picture of her that made me stop and take serious notice.  So here I am right after that on Google looking up pictures.  And more pictures.  And even more pictures.  It got to a point to where I was like "I HAVE TO PAINT HER!!!"  It took me about 10 different photos and a video to get a grasp on her face, as almost ALL of the images were heavily "fixed up" (FYI, she don't need fixing, she's fine as she is) through Photoshop.  Meaning, I had to mostly work from photos that smoothened out contours and facial planes a ton.  Because of this, she turned out a bit more on the cartoon end than I usually do for these kind of things but ultimately I think it worked out for the best.  As with anything, there's always room for improvement but on a whole it was a fun piece to work on and I learned a ton from it.

I don't think she does any sort of modeling anymore, which I know for some is probably making them sad pandas.  On the other hand, one's gotta do what you gotta do.  While modeling she's majored in journalism, with a 3.9 GPA at that, AND is now on track to getting her masters degree in educational psychology.  To that I say, if for some reason you, Miss Diznee, DO catch this blog post,  YOU GO GIRL!  Rock that world with your ambition!

Little bit more live sketchin'.

The Lab.

Anything that I consider "Lab work" is typically park style sketching done with pencils to test out ideas and concepts with faces and such.  They're usually no longer than 10 minutes a sketch.

With these sketches in question, I was doing a lot of looking at old sketches from my second year of work.  All of these are re-interpretations of those old sketches using the newer methods that I employ in my work currently, just having fun messing around with them and seeing how I think now as opposed to then.  I should show some of the newbies these.  I think they'd get a kick out of it.

Some stuff from the park...

First of several sketches this day, which began the onslaught of nonstop bodies.  I believe out of all of the ones I did on Wednesday, only about 3 of them were just the face.  I dig it though.  These guys for the most part were fun to draw, though, she warned me NOT to give him a 5 o'clock shadow.  SERIOUSLY!?

 Going for the Marilyn Monroe thing.  Epic fail on the skirt IMO as it was one of those things that you know HOW it should look, but still manage to screw it up anyway.  I approve of everything else though, the look on her face is spot on.

 She wanted to look like Nicki Minaj.  Sorta winged the outfit, but it still gets the job done as the "assets" are there.  Otherwise, those guys in the back wouldn't be drooling over her.  *lol*

 Simple sketch.  She wanted a parrot on her arm.  Can't argue with that.

 Finally had someone ask for Jessica freakin' Rabbit!  This one was entertaining in more ways than one.

 Face sketch from the day before.  I believe it was the first of the day too.  Actually turned out pretty good considering that.  The chick in the chair was a good sport too, and the rest of the family was loving it.

Every once in a while, shit happens.  Sometimes it's avoidable, in others like this, not so much.   Apparently, her mom didn't want her eyes to be drawn small.  Wouldn't be an issue if her eyes actually weren't, but they were so in a situation like this it boils down to two things.  Do you trust your instincts and what you REALLY see, draw it up and see where the chips fall?  Or do you try to appease them, knowing that often times there's still a high risk of losing the sale anyway because something else will be wrong?  I went with the former, and unfortunately it didn't get past this point.  I tried to explain to her that if you want the likeness the eyes are going to have to be that way otherwise you run the risk of losing it, but she wouldn't hear it.  She then complained about having a portrait done that didn't work out either (I wish I knew this earlier), so being the nice guy I can be I decided to try and work with her.  I drew out a couple mock images with examples of eye sizes that we could potentially work from.  Unfortunately, I guess she wasn't feeling that either as she bailed right after that.  Oh well, it's how the cookie crumbles.

Some random doodles.

Just a few people I run into while sketching over at the food court.  The people and kinds of expressions you see on them at times can be a thing of beauty all on it's own.

Sketching outside of the box.

This was a small sketch I did of a lady sitting in one of the chairs by the easel in front of me.  Somehow, this actually turned out, dare I say it, good?  One can be so used to sketching people one way (in our case it's front face) that to go about it another way without some sort of planning (at least for me sometimes), can end in epic failure with features all over the place and a likeness that's dead upon the first mark on the page.  For some reason, that didn't happen this time.  Maybe this is my brain reminding me that I have to trust the images it projects more.  Makes life a lot easier when you do.

Oh, that hint of a guy beside her.  He's the epic fail I was talking about when you don't trust yourself.  I should've took the complete picture of it anyway but I was too annoyed with it at the time to bother.

Just some examples of stuff from work.

 Demo.  Just trying out some things here and there.

 Fellow artist A.J. Scott.  Was a slow day so I actually spent a bit more time on it.  Was trying to push line and color a bit here.

Mom and daughter combo.  I kinda like this one for the shapes and expressions.

The two above are a bit more typical of what the guests generally get.  You try to make them pleasing to the guests, yet somewhere around the line try to keep them pleasing to yourself as well.  It's a balance that on some days it's easier done than on others.  Always will be things I'm wishing I did when doing them, but when you're doing these in 6 minutes or less per person, something ALWAYS gets thrown on the chopping block.  Even moreso when there's a line of impatient people behind you like there was here.

Portrait of Christie

I've decided that for my very first actual blog post I'm going to put up something that is very dear to me.  Those who kept up with my stuff on the other sites will have already seen this one but for those of you new to my work, this is a portrait of my precious little cousin. Her folks came up to me about it over Christmas dinner after looking at the work I've done in my portfolio and of course I jumped all over the prospect of that.  I took two photos of her to work from when I did this (in actuality I should've taken more and in better lighting) and then a few weeks later got around to starting on it.  36 hours later over the span of a week and a half, there she was.  I went through a lot of pains to get this done though, especially the pains of fighting my caricature tendencies and actually getting stuff accurate without over doing this or that.  In fact, the in-fighting continued right up until I started adding detail to the hair and such.  That moment taught me a valuable lesson in terms of seeing the big picture ahead of time in order to judge the likeness and overall direction.  I should've done the block in a bit more shapely, especially with the hair in the beginning, but hey you live and you learn.  That's how you get better.

Looking at the end result was one of the most endearing things I've ever experienced.  Almost brought me to tears and I typically don't budge.

First posting on a blog, ever.

I've been contemplating doing this for a long long time, and it's right now that I decided to FINALLY make the first post on this blog and break the ice a little bit.  I've been busy with deviantART for the past year and a half or so and figured that I should have another outlet for the stuff that I do.  What is it you ask?  Drawing.  Art work.  Sketching.  I work in a theme park where all I do all day, every day is draw funny faces of people (or at least funny in my world, don't know about theirs), what started off as sorta another job ended up turning into a much bigger thing for me on a personal level than I could've ever imagined it being.  It is on this blog that I'll share some stuff with you and all, whether it's a simple sketch, something from work, or even something grander.  For the time being though it will more than likely be smaller stuff since work is keeping me super busy and all but once things slow down a little bit, there'll probably be more things on the way to see.  

With that said, this blog is now officially open for business.