Here are four bugs and some with wings. This is a simple design to draw and I’m not that crazy about some bugs but some are very beautiful. The text is simple Ariel font and each letter is outlined in a different color. The purpose of this exercise was twofold: how to make a design look good on medium range of background colors and 2: hide some of the text so that the viewer does not notice he can’t see the whole thing. enjoy and see it here on different colors
I have redrawn and recolored a vintage comic book page in photoshop. The experiment took a long time and turned out very different than what I had pictured in my head. The line art was drawn in black and I thought I would play and make the shadows with line art as a design element. I colored the illustration using bright colors and brushes that mostly look like air brushes. The bubble texts shapes were done by hand as well. I love the dialog in the bubbles and it is circa 1940’s.
The font is “Hello Pencile” which is an art deco style. I think the most successful part of the drawing is the brilliance of her dress. The characters end up having the same hair color. I love her long yellow gloves and orange bracelet. Compositionally, the eye naturally goes to the bottom of the art where there is so much dark towards the activity of all the lines. This was fun. I have listed it on teepublic.
This lovely kitty is very confident in herself. She is sporting huge tattoos of various orchids all over her body. In a more real world, the tattoos would be smaller and molded to her body shape. I have tattoo brushes and I want to do another version with them and it would be a fun piece to experiment with them. Since I have drawn in scratchboard for 30 years, I think the style would be like a walk down memory lane for me.
She’s different on all levels too because she is basically a blue girl. I did some remodeling on the sketch by fine tuning the edges. Since it was drawn as a pen and ink and then scanned, it needed to have the background removed so it could be a png file so it could be used printed over many different colors. I took advantage of this necessity to add a few more details since I was at it. I think it would be adorable on childrens’ clothing.
The font is a brush font and I thought it would look like a fun companion to the drawing. I did another illustration like this kitty a while ago and I want to redo it with scratchboard/tattoo brushes. I need to find her on my hard drive. Locating art on the hard drive is the hardest thing for me. I have promised to reform my ways to a better filing system. When I switched from a mac to pc, that’s when all the trouble began as that’s when I abandoned using bridge. onward. Here’s the little blue cat on teepublic.
I have had this sketch in my portfolio for a long time. It’s india ink on paper with a caligraphy nib. I love the immediacy of it and I have used it before on greeting cards. I bought a font a while ago called Modernissimo. I love this font but could not find a use for it until today. When I saw the sketch, I remembered the font and put them together. So much of making things is like doing puzzles. You are always trying to fit things together the best way.
I thought about adding color but I think it will work on it’s own. The elements are strong and black and white is simple and strong. Here’s the link to see it on TeePublic.
I guess you could call this a composite drawing and the category would be surrealist art. That’s ok with me. It is a composite because the Hopi girl with firecrackers is an old scratchboard from years ago.
I masked her and her firecrackers out from the black textured background and got the idea for the gates from a snapshot I took from the tv in an old black and white basil rathbone film of Shirlock Holmes. I loved the moodiness of the view of the foggy atmosphere and the far away landscape in the film.
So I started putting pieces together in photoshop 2018… I just wanted to basically create a mood with the art. It went through a lot of changes. I had an idea in my head of a piece of art where the subject was coming out of the background frame. This turned out differently., Don’t ask me how I ended up with this but that a learning curve for you.
As usual, the problem with this kind of art is that it’s really hard to put into a specific category for commercial use. So when I go to fill out tags for it, the category that came the closest was I’m guessing is surrealistic. Who would buy this and how would they search for it in their tags? I would buy it since I like it but what do I know. I’m prejudice.
Nonetheless, it was fun and fairly quick and turned out completely different than I thought. I’m perfectly ok with that since I would not even do it if it wasn’t fun. Here’s the link if you want to check it out…..
Painting Mexico 
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