Time for the Illustration Master Class again, right here in my home town of Amherst, MA. Check-in is tonight, and sketch reviews start in the morning.

While this weeklong class is much more oriented around the commercial / publishing world, and is more about getting assignments (book covers and so forth) cranked out quickly with [...]

Mother nature sneezed very hard on Western Mass the other night. Probably the first storm in 20 years that actually had me scared to go outside. Trees were popping all over the place… four down on the street outside within 75 yards of the house. One driver was pinned between two of them. Nobody hurt, [...]

From a recent long-pose session; drawn from photo reference and life while working on the full figure.

Time flies when you’re swamped with work. Didn’t realize it’d been a week!

This one is called “Contemplation.” Charcoal and chalk on paper.

Doing things like this is really a bit of an indulgence, so I may not play with this one much more. I have plenty of actual study-work waiting for me. Finishing this one would mean more work on the neck and hair, and she has an outrageous diamond earring that’s brilliantly lit, but I couldn’t [...]

I’ve been wanting to make a pair of glasses using the red plastic I found in New York last summer. I’ve been carrying the little squares around to life and figure drawing sessions to use in checking my values as I work, but I’ve wanted a way to be able to work through that view. [...]

Trying a different approach on this one: start really, really soft, mushy almost, and then try to bring it into sharp focus where needed and leaving the rest soft. I think this will take a while, but why shouldn’t it?

I would just like to take this moment to assure everybody that this cartoon is not, no matter what you might think, a depiction of anyone in particular.

It is just a face. It is nobody.

I am going to the trouble to explain this because I do not wish to be killed by religious fanatics, [...]

I’ve been meaning to do one of these for a while now; a low-chroma version of the full-chroma color wheel that Graydon Parrish teaches. I wanted to see how earthtones relate to each other. Unsurprisingly, there is no blue in these colors; this particular set is the Maimeri earthtones, an inexpensive and well-reviewed set of [...]

Tonight’s model was the model we’ll be working with next in the long-figure sessions starting next week. I won’t be getting to too many more of these short-pose sessions in the near future, but I got the itch tonight.