I'm Star of the Week?

I was featured as the Star of the Week on the NYCSSC blog Action Weekly today, which is the league in which I play Inner Tube Water Polo. Considering how impressive I know some of the people in the league are in their daily lives, I was very flattered. I offered to do a quick illustration for the article, and figured I would cross post here as well as putting up some of the process images. Final, watercolor under-painting, and quick thumbnails.

I actually have really mixed feelings about this piece - Inner Tube Water Polo is supposed to be a light hearted, social first and competitive second kind of league and I wanted to make sure the illustration reflected that. I know that's the direction NYCSSC wants the league to move, and the friendly games are more fun. Unfortunately the fact is, as often as not it's a physical and intense game where cheap shots are easy to get away with and tempers can run high. As a player, I'd like to eventually do another piece for myself that I think reflects actually being in the pool.

Comps That Didn't Suck

Whenever I get ready to paint or ink, I'll usually do a small quick thing in my sketchbook first to get my arm and brushes moving around before anything serious can go wrong. Often they turn out terrible and devolve into me making a bunch of lines and shapes, sometimes I get a small image out of them too. Or in the case of the egg, not so small.

Valentine's Day with The Tin Man

Hey everyone, remember when I did that pencil sketch of The Tin Man for my Wizard of Oz expiremental project? In honors of Valentine's Day, here's the process for this method starring the man with no heart. Photoshop, full underpainting, and first color/ink pass.

Kintaro

A couple months back I was invited to submit a piece for a show down in Brooklyn, the theme of which was "fairy tale". I had been wanting to do something fish related anyway, so I ended up doing an image of Kintaro riding the Giant Carp. The submission of said piece turned into something of a debacle and ended up as ineligible for the show, but here it is.

I literally brought my box of paints home from the post office about two hours ago, and I'm hoping to get a lot more painting done once I'm all set up for it.

Dorothy Watercolor

This is still a pretty bad scan of this painting and eventually I'll make a nicer one for my portfolio; I originally did this just for fun and then decided I wanted to do the whole Wizard of Oz group. I've done a Tin Man since and I'm working on Scarecrow, but in the meantime you get the idea.