Illustration Friday: Bottled

No sooner did I decide to participate in Illustration Friday submissions--an interactive website that gives you a week to do an illustration on a stated theme--than I got too busy to finish on time.  Nevertheless, I have kept on with it and finished.  The theme was "bottled", and here is the sketch for my digital painting to be executed in Corel Painter.  It's just a twist on the old djinn in the bottle story, showing that the djinn has gotten out and imprisoned the man in his place.  I will post the final painting in a day or two.

I really do want to post quite regularly here and will try harder now.

The Two Roosters Final

I'll call this done now.  It was all painted in Photoshop over the imported rough sketch of post one.  I changed the Jeff Bridges proportions quite a bit in the process as I saw I had made his face too long and it was not reading well.

Caricature is an intriguing but sometimes frustrating field.  There have been people I thought would be easy to do, who turned out to be elusive, and there have been some that came to me more easily than I expected.  In a future post I will talk about favorite caricaturists, including some whose art astounds me with its ability to create stunning "likenesses" with abstract or geometric shapes.  For now I will just say that my great hero of caricature has always been Mort Drucker.

Two Roosters Finished...almost

Here they are in color, finished but for more fussing, which of course can go on endlessly if there is no deadline.  I will post the absolutely finished version, with comments, in a day or two.

Along the Graphite Path: an occasional blog about drawing, illustration and animation

The first thing I discovered here: many good blog names are already taken, and I had to put in some thought and effort to come up with a suitable name for mine.  I tried variations on drawing and on line, as that is the basis of my art, but didn't find anything I liked.  Finally I settled on Along the Graphite Path.  Graphite describes the pencil drawing medium, and almost all the artwork I do at least begins with at least one pencil drawing. 

My first subject is whimsical and timely: a caricature of the two Rooster Cogburns together.  Each with his one good eye regards the other with deliberation, a look of sizing-up, of waiting for the other to twitch, to make a move to draw his revolver or perhaps to speak.

Partly, I want to do this before anyone else does, or at least before I see anyone else's version.  So here is the first sketch, appropriately in pencil , of Jeff Bridges and John Wayne as Rooster and Rooster.