TREES

 

 

 

Something about this set of images is really special to me. I really love them.

(I will be adding additional images to this post)

The inspiration for these trees came to me at a Thanksgiving dinner trip to the Disneyland Resort Storytellers Café restaurant in Anaheim, California. While walking, I noticed the trees had a variety of colors in them. They reminded me of crayons, so I started taking pictures of them. Later when I was home looking at the photos, I realized the colors I saw were in my imagination. I decided to draw what I thought I saw, and these images are the end results.

I personally love how they turned out. Seeing colors where they don’t exist is actually cool.

These images will be available on TeePublic. I think that these images on a set of pillows would look great in a room. I will also put the original 9 pen and ink images up for sale on the Saatchi Art website. They are 8.5” squares but done on 14” x 11” paper, so you could frame them larger if you wanted to.

Hope you enjoy looking at this series as much as I had fun creating it!

MY JOURNEY INTO FUN!

So I was looking for the second season to this great television show on Netflix, “The Toys That Made Us.” Incredible series, if you haven’t seen it yet, drop everything and turn it on or get Netflix and watch it! If toys were a part of your childhood, you’re going to LOVE this program.

Anyway, while going through the movie queue, this other show caught my attention, “Making Fun: The Story of Funko.” Through my bobblehead collection, I have a lot of Funko products, many of which are on display, especially the Betty Boop bobbleheads. I didn’t know anything else about the company. So I decided to watch this. It was the best hour and half of TV yet. I would dare to say maybe even more interesting then the 8 episodes of “The Toys That Made Us.”

The Funko show is a history of the company. And I found myself drawn in and connecting to it in an amazing way: like I knew these people and where they were coming from. For example, they talked about this amazing store in Universal City Walk, here in Los Angeles called “Sparky’s” and how their business started there. Funny story, I love Sparky’s so much that I took the paper bag from one of my purchases there back in 2009 when I arrived in L.A., scan it and made a giant poster of the logo and hung it in my living room. A lot of people wondered where they could get a copy of it.

After watching the show, I felt inspired, happy, and started looking around my place at all my Funko POP! toys. My collection is nothing like some of the featured collections in the show, but it’s safe to say wherever you turn in my place there’s a POP! on display to greet you. The thought that crossed my mind was I needed some Stargate SG1 POPS! But there aren’t any in production yet! I don’t know why, I went online and found a couple of fan renditions - nothing more.  

"Why isn’t there more Funko POP fan art on the internet?"

After a few more searches, what I found was pretty straight forward art; some were beautiful works, but nothing on the highly creative side. So I thought I would start to change that by creating artwork of some existing POPS! and creating designs for new ones I wished existed, especially Stargate SG1!

With Comic-Con San Diego around the corner, I thought this would be the perfect time to start posting these. I hope you all enjoy seeing these as much as I enjoyed making the drawings.
Forgive the watermarks on all the images. These are original works of art and I want to make sure they don’t end up being credited or sold to anyone without my permission.

… And bottom line America, MGM, and Funko should get together and make a line of Stargate SG1 POPS!

HEY, IT'S NOT DIGITAL!

Did I mentioned how much fun I recently had at the Anime Los Angeles convention in Ontario, California. 

I had a lot of fun!

And I met a lot of great people too. One person in particular caught my attention because of her hair. It was big and fantastic. It screamed, "draw me, turn me into art!" I did exactly that.

Trinity Drayton, thanks for letting me take your picture. Saying “I want to draw you” to a stranger sounds weird at times, even to me, but you didn’t mind the picture taking. Because of that leap of faith moment, here’s the end result!

A friend of mine saw the original and thought she was looking at a printout of a digital art piece. I had to correct her. This is not digital art, there’s nothing digital going on anywhere in this art piece. It is all done the old fashion way, by hand, one circle at a time. It took 5 days to complete, most of the time was spent on the hair. There are 2 layers of ink covering those areas, and that really took a toll on my hand; I had to rest it a lot.

The background was a personal nod to the amazing artist, Takeshita Murakami. I love this guy’s work. Originally I was going to use regular smiley faces of various sizes in the background, but I then remembered Takeshita’s work, and I think these large smiling faces are a better match to go with the large colorful hair.

A few weeks back when I posted the portrait of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Ben Ratner, a great ideas person, mentioned I should be live streaming the process of how I do these pieces, and that’s a great idea! I will do so someday, but in the meantime, I put together this quick little video of Trinity’s portrait from start to finish using scans.

Working on art like this is exciting, and I wish I could figure out a way to make them profitable as well so I can do one after another. I could live my life like Patrick Nagel or Andy Warhol and just draw people.

Got to make the dream a reality!

WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION , JUST A GREAT PANTHER MOVIE!

This week’s portrait, Chadwick Boseman!

Just sat through my first bad movie of the year, “The Cloverfield Paradox”. A huge waste of 2 hours, I should have been working on an art piece, maybe I could have started another portrait on time. The original movie “Cloverfield” was fun to watch, shaky camera and all, and at the end of that movie we all knew what was going on- there was a giant monster tearing up Manhattan. They showed it to us! So if you make a sequel or a prequel, guess what, we already know about the creature so you have to actually write a great story: the real reason why the new movie must exist. Anyway, save yourself some time and read some spoilers. Trust me, you’re not going to be upset if you skip this movie.

This week “The Black Panther” opens! I am excited but cautiously so. It's a stand alone movie, but it is coming in on the heels of Captain America’s “Civil Wars” movie which introduced the Black Panther character, so this new film is really a sequel or a prequel. That said, I hope someone took the time to write a great movie. A real reason for this film to exist other than the fact that it's mostly an African American cast as some movie reviewer pointed out, forgetting to mention if they liked the film or not.

I think Chadwick is a good actor, and I am sure he’ll give the role his all, but he can only be as good as the material he was given to work with. I hope I am not going to see more of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" way of storytelling, you know what I mean.

This portrait is another huge leap for me as far as how I created it. There’s a lot of color mixing going on using circles, of course. I hope to find somewhere I can show what’s going on with my work beyond these portraits someday soon and maybe start selling originals too.

So here’s to hoping "The Black Panther" is great and fun to watch with good acting and no over the top political social messages being thrown at me. Let me escape this crazy reality for 2 to 3 hours!

By the way, is it me or does it seem Thanos in the “Avengers: Infinity War” movie trailer is a lot less purple in skin color and he now looks like one of those cartoon bulky nazis with a really bad sunburn tan?

More social messages?...

HE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE!

This week’s portrait, Neil deGrasse Tyson!



“Wait, what’s going on, didn't you do one of him already?!?”



Yes and No.



Pierre did do a portrait of Neil back in March 2016. That was before he, Pierre, discovered the Quantum Universe, and met me, Pierre. We spoke about what each of our realities as we know them were like, and discovered there was a time difference of a year between us. I was in the future, he was in the past, but I could see his future. We figured out a way to move into each other’s time last year but couldn’t get back to our own.

So I am stuck here in the past with a future that doesn’t come anywhere close to what my future was like. For example, huge differences, we have no idea who Trump was or is, he doesn’t exist. As a result of my business success selling art supplies, I am in an open marriage with 2 amazing women, and I just discovered you guys had the shittiest Star Wars release ever! Your Last Jedi movie is absolute GARBAGE!

Anyway, the reason Neil fits into all of this is that I’ve been watching a ton of videos on his lectures in hopes of figuring out how to get back home. After all, it was because of him we have people in Alpha Centauri, I mean my people.

In the meantime, I thought it would be interesting to redraw some of Pierre’s earlier works and saw that Neil was among them. Hey, if you aren’t following all of this don’t worry, I understand, you guys don’t believe in science anyway.

I thought it would be interesting to see how I would handle recreating Pierre’s artwork from a year ago.

I decided to use the same colors as he did, but did it my way. I even hid an image of a Pulsar in the portrait, stars not too far from where I am from.




That’s all I have to say for now. I want to go back home. This reality sucks, I can see why Pierre wanted to leave it. You guys couldn’t even get Star Wars right!

TIME TRAVEL

This week’s portrait, Mrs. Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan)!

While working on the Pee Wee portrait, I was looking at all things from the 1950s so I thought I’d check out that Amazon show that keeps coming up, “The Marvelous Mrs Maisel." I almost turned it off, but within 10 minutes one of my favorite comedians made an appearance, Gilbert Gottfried. Seeing him for 5 minutes made me keep my finger off the remote, hoping to see more of him. As a result, I gave the the show a chance and 20 minutes in, I was hooked. There wasn’t more Gilbert, but the show itself is really good. I found myself binge watching the entire season.

I related to the character whose life suddenly changes and is trying to figure out how to go forward, and in doing so, takes a chance on a skill that she had but never explored before.

(I am trying not to give away the plot, but trust me, it’s worth watching and discovering for yourself.)

The visuals for this show are amazing, and the main character looks like the stereotypical1950’s housewife with a personality that belongs in the 2010s. For this art piece, I limited the colors to reds and pinks so that the blue eyes would pull you in. And I also used graphic elements from the show’s credits to tie it together.

The last few weeks I’ve become so focused on my art that there have been evenings I forgot to have dinner. I know, not healthy, but I am so excited about putting my time into something I really enjoy that time passes too quickly.

Almost forgot to mention, Vicki Chase was incredible as an art model this past weekend. As Naughty Santa, she looked liked a Alberto Vargas or Gil Elvgren 1950s pinup model. I did some really interesting drawings.

It’s interesting how everything this past week tied into the 1950s. Pee Wee took me back in time and now I have to get back to the future!

I wonder if this was how Doc Brown felt as he was building his time machine. You know you’re onto something amazing.  

 

You just have to stay inside, lock the door, create, and when you’re ready, show people some serious shit!

 

TODAY'S SECRET WORD IS, "QUICKSAND!"

This week’s portrait is Pee Wee Herman!

I recently rewatched the Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special. This show is ageless, I think it’s still as funny today as it was during the release in 1988. My dad was still with the family then, and often he’d sit and watch Pee Wee’s Playhouse with my brother and me. We weren’t young kids, but that didn’t matter when it came to Pee Wee. The humor transcended age. I would record the show on VHS tapes and try to leave out the commercials- which always ended up with recording too soon and getting the tail end of some product endorsement or recording too late and missing those great seconds back from commercials. Now for $26.49, I can have the entire series minus commercials. All those VHS tapes and editing time spent with the tv remote, wasted!

I loved the show's 1950s retro look. It was very much a part of the show’s appeal including the characters themselves, and in doing this portrait of Pee Wee, I wanted to capture that feeling. The pouting mouth was a bit of a challenge; I didn’t think it would be at first. But I am happy with the end result. All those crazy little circles.

Someday, a time may come when some scientists will look at my art and realize the secret to the meaning of the universe is in the designs. Yes, the universe has been secretly whispering the meaning of everything to me, and unknowingly, I’ve been translating it into a language using circles.

Or maybe it’s some sort of self discovery. By drawing all these circles, I am being drawn or pulled towards some new level of awareness. Or maybe, it’s all meaningless, just some artistic visual fetish that seems to have caught my attention and won’t let me go, kind of like "quicksand!"

That topic is not about to go away anytime soon!

(You know what I'm talking about :) )