Wednesday, February 29, 2012

I'm off to the Spectrum Wars




















I mean Spectrum Awards. 
After missing a few opportunities to sit on the jury for the Spectrum Awards I will finally get my chance this weekend. On Friday I fly off to Kansas City where my esteemed fellow jurors and I will spend the weekend looking at over 6000 entries. From among them we will choose what we feel is the very best illustration done during the past year for the genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy and the simply Fantastic.

Who am I kidding?
This was just an excuse to draw a dragon.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Pachyderm's Progress




I love to sculpt and I never sculpt.
Every time I've taken the opportunity to explore a character in clay (or sculpy as the case may be) I've found it incredibly satisfying. For me, it is such a perfect extension of drawing and in some ways a fuller experience. Drawing a figure in a pose is one thing, but it is often a cheat. It's only when committing that drawing to 3D that you see how much you faked for the sake of that one angle. That's the challenge and the pleasure of it though. In clay, you have a chance to spin your drawing around, to add and subtract. And not just lines, but real volume. Real weight. 
As with almost everything I do, this piece is an assignment. Left to my own devices, I would probably noodle this to death or only get it half done. But fortunately my pal, Michael DeFeo, formerly head of the sculpting department at Blue Sky and now a formidable gun for hire, is also something of an entrepreneur. He's come up with a scheme to sell a line of small sculptures by prominent illustrators and character designers as limited editions. This may be one of them if we like the final result. The line is called Designer Rock Stars (his title, not mine) and is in it's still in it's early stages. By the way, check out the video about his L'Ecorche app. It looks like it will be an astonishingly good tool for understanding human anatomy in a really complete way. You can find it here.

So anyway, I am putting my little maquette out here not only to prove that I am still alive, but to force me to finish the thing.

Wish me luck.

(Point taken, MacDougall!)