Sonic Stangs Update

Further progress on the large pastel. The piece is proving to be a challenge when it comes to cutting the intricate frisket masks for all the details on the car and the background. It helps to keep the frisket film aside in order to replace each piece once any given part of the pastel has been rendered. A lot of work but worthwhile in the end. As with any pastel piece, there is always a lot of burnishing with stomps. The smaller acrylic study can be seen at the top.

RedVIOLET in concert

Yesterday marked my son's band, RedVIOLET's third year playing at the Broken Arts Festival at Memorial Park in Oshawa. Nice job Michael, Sarah and Dan, you all rock!!

Sonic Stangs Update

I've begun the large pastel for this piece. The final size will be 30" wide. The pictures show the working drawing in loose placement on the paper surface in order to work out where the masked frisket templates will be placed. I carefully place all the frisket templates before applying colour to the delicate surface. I did a couple of rough colour swatches to work out the proper colour mix to obtain the blue/purple night sky backdrop.

Porsche Card WIP

Another old WIP, showing the development of a Porsche themed greeting card that was done for a Porsche dealership. This one is based on a pencil drawing I did quite a number of years ago. The client wanted me to portray a Porsche 914, his favourite model, and in several colours. This called for a digital treatment. The original car was painted in gouache, in red. Once I scanned it into the computer, I was able to manipulate the colours to create multiple versions for printing. Step one is to place the original design into Photoshop as a template to create the background. The background will be built using layers of colour. The following few photos illustrate the process utilizing layers in photoshop in order to keep the file fairly organized. The original 911 is erased out to make room for the new image to come later. The final file must be saved as a high resolution file, 300dpi, cmyk format. I decided to add a canvas texture to the piece to enhance the painterly quality I was looking for. A digital file can be easliy sent to a printer via ftp and delivered to the client once they're printed.

Old WIP's

In the spirit of sharing, I'm posting a couple of old WIP's to display my working method. My method will vary depending on the size, subject and medium(s) used. This one is an acrylic painting on gessoed illustration board. The completed size is 30" x 20". With most of my work I beging with a clean "linear" drawing, or a skeleton, on which to build my values, tones, hilites and shadows. Without a clean base it's pretty difficult to execute a decent painting, unless your name is Michealangelo or something, lol. I usually do a small acrylic study to base the larger piece on. The small study can be seen in the second photo below.

Flowers at the Niche

I went to visit Sara at the niche today with my mum and daughter Maddy. Someone had left some flowers by Sara's niche, and I don't know who, but it was a nice surprise.

Sonic Stangs Sketch Completed

The finished sketch, acrylic on board. 13.75" x 5.75". I just need to decide what medium to do the large piece with, gouache or oil pastels. Decisions, decisions!