Dr. Sketchy's NYC

I went to my first Dr. Sketchy meet up here in NYC last week, the theme was Godzilla! Dr. Sketchy's is hosted at the Bowery Poetry Club, the costumes are fun and silly and there's booze and prizes for silly drawing!

Warm up, one minute sketch!

I wish they had used the tiny, old school Godzilla head more. This was the only time the model used it.

The theme for this one was an epic battle between Godzilla and someone. Not remembering how to draw Ultraman, I made a knockoff Ultraman and won an enormous, squishy narwhal!

Portrait from Photo :: Process

I'm taking a really great illustration class at FIT with Salvatore Catalano. With some tricks I was able to paint this (fairly impressive, IMHO) portrait in acrylic.

The trick was making a transfer of the original photo then slowly working in each of the values. Finally, using some matte acrylic medium to thin the acrylic a dry brush technique is used to blend the values together.

The finished piece, it looks like me!

Almost done! At this point Sal told me I needed to soften all the hard edges (like around the shirt and the hair) as well as adding a tiny bit more value to the nose. The softened edges really MADE the piece.

The ugly baby phase. Ugh, at this point in the painting I was a little worried it would never look good. An important lesson as an artist is to know that you just need to keep working no matter how fugly a piece is looking -- it will eventually get better!

This is the first pass at the major values over the tracing of the photo.