Breakthrough Contest

A few months ago, I entered a contest that Richard Solomon {artist representative} put on for new illustrators. The winner was to be flown to New York and introduced to a whole bunch of new contacts, in addition recieving a cash prize. There was only one winner, and alas, it was not I, but I did just recieve notice today that among all of the entries, myself and nineteen other artists were selected as staff favorites and given a little bit of the spotlight on their web page. Check that out here! I'm towards the bottom of the page (alphabetical), but there I am! All of the artists up there are so talented -- it's such an honor to be included.

Stay tuned for some art later this week!

Dragons

I've been burning through George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" books lately. I usually fluctuate between biographies and fiction, but I find that most of the books that have really absorbed me fully over the years have been really good epic fantasies. It's funny, because my art goes in such a different direction, but I keep getting drawn to these big stories. I first noticed A Game of Thrones a while back when HBO started their series, but I really got interested when a whole bunch of completely different artists that I follow professed their love for it to the internet on their own blogs and started making art inspired by it.

Dragons play a fairly major part in the series. I've always thought that they were the coolest -- I spent a lot of time drawing them as a kid, and I've actually spent a lot of time drawing them quickly recently with kids that I teach. But I haven't really tried to piece one together using reference like I do my actual work. Here's a start? I found a bunch of cool looking lizards to put together as inspiration.

Joisey

New illustrations for Inside New Jersey Magazine. They are for the December 2011 issue, so printing is a bit of a distance off, but here they are now! The assignment was not a particularly edgy concept -- the article was about native New Jersey-ans love/hate relationship with their own state, and I was told to base both compositions on American Gothic -- but I had a lot of fun playing around regardless. My goal was both to give these paintings their own style, and to make them as technically interesting as I could.

The first image, with the less happy theme, is going to be the magazine's cover. Later, when I get samples, I'll post a picture. The second image is a full page for the feature article.

In unrelated news, I am going to try something seriously, seriously, seriously new for this blog: weekly posts. From here on out, I am going to post SOMETHING at least once a week. It might have something to do with a project I'm working on, it might be simple drawings and sketches, or it might be something that is particularly inspiring to me at the moment. It's going to be something, and it's going to be once a week. For serious.