Happy 2013, everyone!

Here's wishing everyone (myself included!) a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. Lawd knows we could use it!

Rainer 2

Often I find myself avoiding starting portraits because the beginning is the most fraught with frustration. You spend time sketching out a rough, then add and erase continuously as a likeness forms. But the more you get correct, the more other parts become wrong and it becomes this continuing cycle of adjustment. It's frustrating especially in the beginning because I can't get a sense that I'm getting it right until the moment when I pull back and deem it looks like the subject.

Robert and his friend Heron

Robert and his friend Heron are a couple of hardcore swingers.

Runway Rowndown 6

I'm kind of dragging my heels on these... but I'm looking for that eureka moment when I feel it again, because as it is now, I'm not sure how to do what I did a couple of months ago. But erasing the scratchy lines and adding in the finished ones is starting to help...

Posed In Repose

I love the attitude of this pose I found on a blog, of a shot of model Douglas Neitzke (photographed by Dario Salamone for The Greatest Magazine #2) so I decided to sketch it and hopefully be able to draw it spontaneously later on. It doesn't look like the model, but I didn't try too hard to get a likeness, just to draw the attitude (although the model's bone structure was pretty damn interesting).

Holiday Zenaida

I realized I hadn't drawn my Venus of the Rice in a while.

Runway Rundown 5

Maligayang Pasko!

That means Merry Christmas in Tagalog. I spent so much time preparing for Christmas Eve dinner with my friends that I Forgot to put a placeholder down for yesterday's entry. This is a quick sketch of a traditional Filipino Christmas decoration, a paper or cellophane lantern called a parol. They're supposed to represent the star of David, and around Christmas time they're neraly ubiquitous throughout Manila (well, all over the Philippines, I'm sure).

Sketchbook Trial Sample 2012

I was looking into new applications like Manga Studio 5, and I remembered someone in my fashion illustration group was quite keen on Sketchbook Pro. I had tried it before but wasn't too enthused about its watercolor brushes (and I had since developed my own versions within Photoshop) but I did like how Sketchbook Pro handled, so I thought Id try the trial again. I'm so unfamiliar with it that I just experimented with every brush preset there was. This looks like the kind of stuff some of the more contemporary illustrators do, stuff I don't necessarily emulate, but still, interesting experiment.

Cowl 2

As I sip my Lemon MarTeani ( a new cocktail I'm trying to perfect and getting drunker as I slog through various trials!), I ad more swirls and drapes to my cowled woman, and I wonder what the hell her backstory is and whether or not I even want to dwell on it.

Cowl

I missed yesterday too, for my makeup drawing from posting too late. I don't know what it is about this particular season, but I'm a bit scattered and unfocused on the holidays. Maybe it's the non-stop barrage of current events (Sandy, the Sandy Hook shooting, the Mayan not-so-apocalypse, even the recent elections) that sucked the influence from the focus on the holidays. Or the recession. Or all of the above. Anyhow, I was readin a blog tpost this morning about how an artist was irked by another blogger's article on why one art style was better than another. He mentioned early in the post that art was an escape for him, and an image of a Mucha-esque figure popped into my head. I remember loving Mucha as a child, and drawing intricate illustrations inspired by the art nouveau great. This one should count as a make-up drawing for yesterday.

Last Night's Hazy Recollection

I was invited to join some friends for a Christmas party at a popular artist's loft in the garment district. I already knew I could get in to the party without necessarily showing up with my friends who were the actual invitees, but I decided to wait for them up front and not seem like a gatecrasher. This is my image of waiting for them in the gritty area near the loft space's building entrance. I had a great time, and ended up staying much later than I thought I would (past 12 midnight), not to mention ending up a lot drunker. By the time I got home I hadn't started nor was I able to post a drawing, so here it is, the day after. Fortunately the Mayan apocalypse seems to have been canceled, so I can post!

And that would be me in the leopard print camo trousers.

Ugly Christmas Sweater

It takes a LOT of effort to draw something this ugly!

Runway Rundown 4

I had a frozen margarita before dinner, so it hit me pretty hard. So this painting isn't exactly a conscious effort... more like an automatic thing. Let's see tomorrow how I feel about it.

Runway Rundown 3

Still putting down the establishing sketches for the final part of the series, but fleshing out details (which I will no doubt redraw again and again later).

Chris and his friend Heron

Chris and his friend Heron sometimes like to push each other around.

Runway Rundown 2

Crap, I totally forgot to update this entry last night, especially considering I finished the intiial sketch. Ah well, it's Sunday...

Runway Rundown

Even if I was doing a behind the scenes look, I'm definitely including runway sketches of my friend Robbie's show. Gotta finish a few in the next couple of weeks, so I'm making all the sketches now. Always easier to alter something that's been started (no matter how badly done the sketch is) than to start from scratch. But some people actually prefer these more immediate, gestural sketches.

Pre-Exit Smile

Despite the often attitude one often expects for runway models and shows, the boys backstage at Geller often smiled for my camera, which was nice. This kid, whose name I'll have to find later, gave the nicest smile for the camera. Usually they're all sullen and serious. Anyhow, I'm getting back to my backstage menswear series, as I gotta finish it up this year. I tripled the image just for fun.

Rainer

I figured, what better to do on 12.12.12 than work on my portrait of my dear friend Rainer again? Still in the color blocking and rough outline stages but that's part of the process. It's easy enough in this stage, because you create something close that's wrong, and then you basically edit it until it's right. At least that's my process, as I'm not one of those who makes a perfect likeness off the bat.

Looking Back on Comics

I'm reading a book, Marvel, the Untold Story, and its fascinating. It's about the comic book company I wanted so much to work for as a child, and when I got my chance I felt I failed, so much so that when I was offered a book to draw, I was so scarred by my initial rejection that I felt I wasn't good enough and turned the famous writer down. Now I look back on my former favorite industry, and it doesn't resonate with me anymore... even if I am still an avid reader, and still do follow them, up to now. But both my interests changed over the years, and reading this book, with all its tales of unhappy artists and tense working situations, II wonder if I would have been truly happy? Or perhaps I was never meant to be in it...

S Curve at the gym

Just as I was leaving the gym, I saw a young man sit on the stretching mat, just sitting on his legs. I can't do that for some reason (well, not comfortably) but he just basically sank into his seat, and his relaxed form created a nice S curve, even down to how his neck craned counter to his curved upper back, with his face pointed up as he listened to his iPod. I may use the pose in a future sketch but for now I just wanted to see if I could capture the feeling ... especially since I just finished a big website, and I'm a bit bereft of creative energy for now.

5 Minute Moment

I haven't done a sketch with a time limit in a while. I wanted to do something quick since I'm in the thick of finishing up a big website project, and as I've said many times before, I feel I only have a finite amount of creative energy, so if I use it for designing, I may have none left for drawing. This is a sketch of what I was wearing yesterday, as I took a break from designing and just walked around the neighborhood. I liked the immediacy of the gesture so much that I colored it up a bit more for another 10 minutes, so it's not quite a 5 minute piece but the original sketch is!

Richard and his friend Heron

Richard and his friend Heron have discovered what appears to be a space-time wormhole inside the bedspread.

Naturally, Done

I had to take a break from all the web work, but I still didn't have the wherewithal to do something new, so I figured, let's polish off this piece once and for all. I removed the undone bits and decided to render it fully. I'm reminded of how I saw the strokes of Frank Frazetta. Ah, if I had only known when I was young that I would grow into those strokes, and that the ease with which the artists I looked up to drew, might be seen in some of my own work. I think people take note of my line, and I never thought much of it before, but it's my own.

Caught In The Solar Wind 2

I like how this doodle looked in sketch. I wondered if developing it further will make it better or worse, as sometimes it's nice to let the simple lines speak for themselves. And as I added color, I realize how lopsided the face actually turned out to be, but that's the charm with the 'pencils': the viewer can fill in the blanks as far as the detail is concerned. It used to be a goal of mine to be able to suggest so fully with such brevity. I guess I've moved on to trying to make things look fuller with...er... fullness.

Mais Oui

A friend asked me for help regarding a tote bag he had to decorate Paris-themed bag, so I suggested a trompe loeil effect.

Caught In The Solar Wind

I'm a bit dismayed with how much I've been working off photos lately. Much of my artistic life was devoted to the goal of being able to draw things without references, because that's what I believed my comic book idols did - they drew because they could imagine something and put it down on paper because they were that good. I wanted to be that good, but I was always finding out how much I had to learn. So I decided to just draw without thinking. I opened up Painter and drew an eye, and immediately the idea came to do a woman with some sort of distressed expression, her hair flowing in the wind (because I'm just on that tangent). In my head it's Jean Grey, in her gown that she wore before she died and turned into Phoenix. I was quite happy with the face. If I were drawing comics, I'd like to draw faces like this.

Naturally 5

Decided to work on the other hand this evening. What's funny is I did a rather full rendering of the hand, but in context of the whole drawing it looked better if I left it only partially rendered, with just some partial lines to delineate the path of the silhouette.

Naturally 4

Figure that while I'm on a pencil brush kick, might as well tackle this one again. For some reason this time around, I want to try and render the line work even more traditionally (well, for me) as I find myself erasing and re-rendering the lines I had put down before. This hand in particular, which is almost the whole point of the sketch, is a bit problematic. (Sketch to be uploaded)

Damir Flow

One of the themes flowing through - pun intended - fashion is the very loose, drapey and flowy, almost Middle-Eastern forms perhaps best associated with Giorgio Armani circa the late 70s, maybe early 80s. Damir Doma was one of the early proponents of the look, and this is a quick sketchy rendering of a photo of a look he did for 2010.