Are You My Mummy?

So as of yesterday I am completely caught up with Doctor Who! Now there are quite a few creepy episodes in Doctor Who, but one of my personal favorites is the "Empty Child" storyline. I don't know what it is, but something about a child fused to a gas mask is pretty damn creepy. I decided that I wanted to make a poster featuring the Empty Child. As you all know by now I really like typography posters, so for this one I wanted to try something different. Instead of filling up the image with text, I decided to actually make the image out of text. I'm very proud of this piece and I hope you enjoy it!

 I hope everyone has a great New Year and as always enjoy!

~Josh

WHAT DOES THE FAWKES SAY?!

So unless you are a hermit who doesn't know anything about the internet, which is weird considering you're reading my blog, you've heard of the song "What Does the Fox Say" by Ylvis. There is just something about that song that makes it so catchy. Recently, George Takei posted a something on his facebook that said "What Does the Fawkes Say" and when I read that I knew I had to make a new print! So my question to you is this... what DOES the Fawkes say?

Enjoy!

~Josh

Fantastic!

So as I mentioned in a recent blog post, I have become obsessed with the show Doctor Who. Currently I am in the third season of the shows revival, which means that I am on my second Doctor. While David Tennant plays the character very well, my favorite Doctor still is Christopher Eccleston, who played 9. I'm honestly not quite sure WHY I liked 9 so much, but I have a bit of an obsession with his character, particularly his catchphrase; "Fantastic."

As you all know by now, I quite like Typography posters, so I decided to make one of my favorite Doctor! I plan on making more posters like this in the future, as I get further into the series. I rather like how this one turned out, so I hope you find it equally as...fantastic.

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

EDIT!

So after posting this piece, I got requested to do a few more! I've now done ones for the 4th and 10th Doctors, and I plan on doing ones for the rest of them as well. Here are the new pieces!

Additionally until I get my website up and running, if you'd like to purchase prints from me, head on over to my art tumblr where you can view all of the work I have for sale!

~Josh

Indeed....

So in a few days it will be my good friend Chelsea's birthday! Now since she has given me a RIDICULOUS amount of animation help during the time that I've known her, I wanted to paint her something epic for her birthday. So after a conversation about how whenever she says "Indeed" it reminds me of someone super fancy, I decided to paint a ridiculously fancy version of Chelsea. I've always loved those portraits of celebrities that look like Russian generals so I decided to paint one of Chelsea. Here's the sketch I did first

I actually had Chelsea send me of a picture of her posed like this, but I never told her why. After getting it to look like her, I added some details to make uniquely Chelsea. After that was done, all that I had left was to paint it!

I was quite pleased with how it came out. I ended up printing it and getting it framed in a relatively fancy frame. Oh and for those of you worrying that this post will spoil the surprise... I already gave her the gift last time I saw her, since I didn't think I'd see her again before her birthday.

I have to say I'm really enjoying painting portraits and hope to do more soon.

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Disney Princess Wonder Woman - Piece Breakdown

So earlier this month, my good friend Ward Silverman told me about this auction a local comic shop was doing to raise money for charity. The theme of the auction was Wonder Woman and since I am a MASSIVE DC fan, I decided that I had to participate. I'm pretty pleased with how this piece turned out considering I lined it! Now in the past I've mentioned my dislike of line art and how I finally found a way involving the line tool in photoshop Since that post I've used that method a few times, most recently in this piece, however the one thing I haven't really liked about it is that it doesn't feel natural. With line art, I want to imitate the looseness of my initial sketch and I felt like with the pen tool, I wasn't able to accomplish that. However I recently found this tutorial which covered a way of lining that I had never tried before, and I must say I'm pretty proud of the result! Alright now that I've rambled on about line art, let's jump into the piece breakdown!

So the very first thing I did for this piece was to sketch out the post I wanted. I found some reference pictures online of Wonder Woman in poses and decided that the one I sketched out was the one I liked best.

After I finished the sketch, the next step was the long process of lining the piece. As I was lining this piece, I realized that the face I had was a bit too masculine and that the eyes weren't quite "Disney" enough, so I completely redid those.

The next step was to throw in some color. For this part of the process I just went with the flat base colors I wanted to use, as later I would add dimension with shading.

Now that the piece had color, it really started to come to life! I added shadows using my custom airbrush and used a method of picking color that my good friend Amanda Bell taught my last year.

At this point, I was really happy with the piece as it was all starting to come together.  Throwing in the highlights though, really did the trick.

The final step was to add in a background! I actually lied, because I made this background early on in the process, but I wasn't committed to it until the piece was done. All that was left was to throw in the Wonder Woman logo and to recreate the Wonder Woman title from the comics in a Disney-esque font!

The auction is on December 13th and the deadline to submit art is November 30th, so I hope that I can get this printed, mounted, and turned in on time. I really had fun with this piece as it let me get into my own art style a bit more. Now that I feel a bit more confident with my line art, hopefully I'll have more pieces like this soon. Also over Winter Break I plan on working a lot traditionally to hone my drawing skills, so expect those blog posts to be full of sketches!

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

Time Traveler Minimalist Art

So one thing that I have always loved, is minimalist art. I'm not sure why, but the fact that we can recognize objects or people from such few details, fascinates me. Now anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am a HUGE fan of time travel. My favorite movie of all time is Back to the Future and I even have Doc Brown as my text alert. Now thanks to a few of my friends, I have begun to watch Doctor Who. I'm only on the first season, but I am in love with the show. I decided that because of my recent focus on time travel and my love of minimalist art, it would be cool to do some Time Travel inspired minimalist pieces.

I'm very happy with how these turned out and I definitely plan on doing some more Minimalist art in the future. 

Enjoy!

~Josh

Spock Portrait Tablet Class

So as most of you know, I learned how to paint by going to tablet classes that one of my seniors Trey taught each week. Since I'm now a senior, I decided to continue that tradition, and teach my juniors how to use their tablet. The first tablet class I taught how to paint a portrait and decided to draw Spock as our subject matter. It was a fun class, and the portraits turned out great. Here are some pictures from the class:

As you can see, we had a lot of fun! Now I didn't get a chance to finish my painting during the class, so I went back and worked on it and I finally finished it. First here's the sketch:

I was quite happy with how the sketch turned out, because I think it looks a lot like Zachary Quinto, which was exactly what I was going for. Several hours later, this was the final result:

There are a few things I might have changed, but overall I'm quite happy with the finished product. For someone who only recently started painting portraits, I feel like I have gotten the hang of them early on. As always thanks for checking out my blog!

Enjoy!

~Josh

Figure Drawings!

So the one thing that I have always been told when looking into animation, was to learn how to figure draw. Every single person has told me how important it is to be able to draw from life. Before I got into the program I thought that I was pretty decent at figure drawing, however since I took all of my art classes at a different school, I learned that my peers had an advantage when it came to life drawing. All last year I struggled with figure drawing, so I decided that this year I really wanted to get better at figure drawing. I also realized that when it came to my portfolio, I had very few traditional drawings, so I knew that I needed to beef up my portfolio.

I am currently reading two books that have helped me with my figure drawings. The first is "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way" by Stan Lee. This book talks about starting off each drawing with a wireframe, then building up on that wireframe with cylinders, before finally going back and adding detail. I found this method works pretty well for me as I can quickly capture the pose and then build up the drawing. The other book I'm reading is called "Force: Dynamic Life Drawing for Animators" by Mike Mattesi. This book is fantastic and covers how to capture movement in your drawings. The drawing style taught in this book is the way I've always wanted to draw, so I'm really trying to work my way through this book to get better.

Our final drawing lab for the semester was Friday and these are some of the drawings that I did this semester that I feel were my best.

These were some quick, 15 second warmups.

This was a 2 minute drawing, where I tried to apply some of the concepts from the Force book

I'm pretty proud of these and I can't wait to improve. I plan on going to a zoo soon to do some life drawings of animals as well. I feel that if I can master figure drawing, it will greatly improve all of my art.

As always thanks for reading and enjoy!

~Josh

EMERGENCY BLOG POST! Back to the Future WIP Animation

So for those of you who haven't noticed, I seem to always end up posting four blog posts a month. Well it's the last day of October and I just realized I had only posted three blog posts! Well at the moment, I'm at a friends house and I don't think I'll be home before midnight, so I almost didn't have a blog post tonight! Side note, the aforementioned friend is a pretty bad ass artist as well, so feel free to check out her work here! Anyways, I happened to have a WIP of an animation I started this summer but never finished! I thought it would be cool to see the earlier stages of an animation. I plan on finishing this one eventually, so this post is also serving as a way to make sure I get it done!

As always enjoy and Happy Halloween!

~Josh

Celestial Concept Art... Again!

Hey guys! I'm going to keep this blog post short and sweet. Later this week I'm posting some concept art that our team has done over on the Celestial Blog. So I thought I would post some more of my own! I'll have another blog post up soon with my second Animation assignment!

As always enjoy!

~Josh

Star Wars Icon Poster Series!

So a few months ago I posted this poster series. Afterwards I decided I wanted to do something new, but I wasn't sure what. That is until my friend Phil sent me these super awesome silhouette posters of characters from Toy Story. I love love love posters like these, so I decided to do a similar series, using icon Star Wars characters from the original trilogy. I chose characters that were easy to classify under a single title, had a recognizable silhouette, and had some sort of iconic vehicle or location. I then chose iconic quotes that they said, and wrote it above the poster in Aurebesh. My favorite ones are Han Solo Boba Fett, and the R2-D2 and C-3PO ones. I'll let you decide though which ones you like!

As always, I hope you liked them! Leave a comment below with your favorite one!

Enjoy!

~Josh