Hot Off the Press!

This past week I went to go visit friends and family over in Washington D.C. and New York. It was a museum/ memorial walk fest! This time, I remembered to scan in the sketches early on, so here's a few sketches from my journey through D.C. and New York.

A sketch of the Lincoln Memorial done in a cheap Japanese brush pen, a water-soluble Pilot pen, a waterbrush, and a pencil.

Very cute elephant shrews at the National Zoo. Ink pens and pencil.

The only full color image I did on my trip. Watercolor and pencil of Passenger Pigeons from the "Birds of D.C." display at the Smithsonian Natural History Musuem. The female is a little rougher since my arm was getting numb by then.

A giant sloth skeleton at the Smithsonian Natural History Musuem. Pens and pencil.

An Allosaurus skeleton at the Smithsonian Natural History Musuem. Pens, pencil, and a little watercolor.

A Sakhmet statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pens and pencil. Her waist got a little truncated.

A quick sketch of the Greek mythology statue called "Andromeda and the Sea Monster" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with pencil and colored pencil. The hand is a little rough.

Ballpoint pen sketches of NY subway commuters. The lower lady got a little compressed, probably because of the way I was holding the sketchbook.

And the conclusion of the trip! Rough mountain sketches with the brush pen on the plane returning home.

Thanks for coming along!

Urban Ocean Festival 2011

Here's my contribution to the Urban Ocean Festival at the Aquarium of the Pacific.


One of the more fun murals done in about ~12 1/2 hours over 2 days. Part of the Art Miles Mural Project, an amazing project bringing art to children all around the world. I was one of the live artists to draw people in while kids and families were welcome to join in on the fun with one of our other canvases set up to paint.

Thanks to all the volunteers and staff that helped out. Couldn't of pulled off such a speedy mural without all the help I received with water changes, paint distributing, and canvas moving. Everyone was awesome!

The theme was Urban Ocean and I started out with the thought of gears in the ocean and a couple of photos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium of a wolf eel skeleton and an octopus. One of my fastest murals and paintings to date. I had a lot of fun, with free reign and creativity that I don't normally get on work projects.

Fun Fish in Black and White

These are from a while ago now, maybe a couple months ago, but I was going through the education list of fish illustrations they didn't have and chose my favorites to start off with. For me, pen and ink is a very calm affair, zen-like almost. Turn on the music/podcast and slowly watch a piece develop under your hands. The time frame for these illustrations was more than usual since I was just filling time between projects, so they're more detailed than I would normally get.

The best of the recent black and white illustrations:

A frogfish.
They move around on their fins like they're part walking, part hopping along the ocean floor. They're also related to anglerfish and are ambush predators with a lure on their head.



A Pacific spiny lumpsucker.
These guys always remind me of muppets. A very cute fish. Their disk shaped ventral fin lets them hold onto rocks in high tide areas.



A wolf eel.
Not truly an eel—they have pectoral fins—these guys have some brilliant orange and brown colors with blue-green eyes as babies and then turn into grey, spotted, heavy-jawed animals as adults.

Tuco-tuco

A subterranean rodent that lives in South America, the tuco-tuco of the family Ctenomyidae.
Fulfilling an old request to draw one in black and white.

The Process Behind the Madness

Here's a little insight into my own process for black and white drawings. This is the process I use at work, usually takes between 8 to 16 hrs to complete a piece, depending on the complexity. I'll be mostly going over general stages and not into specifics on each step. Next time I do an ink drawing, I'll try scanning in additional steps in the process.

In this instance, I'm going to talk a little bit about how my Crested Caracara ink drawing was done.

First, I gather a nice library of reference photos, these days, mostly performed through a Google search, for both the common name and the scientific name. Generally, I end up with about 6-10 photos that compromise one drawing. This prevents the drawing from looking like any particular photo, and also includes enough detail to work up each part of the animal.

In this case, these photos here and here were used for the head. This one for the wings. Also this one and this one for the wing feathers. This one was referenced for the wing and tail feathers.

Two photos were used as the main references, which give the majority of the look of the final piece. This one was one I used a lot for the pose, wings, shadows, and patterning. Here's another I used the most for the pose and the feet.
A few other photos also played minor roles in detail references.

To save myself the trouble of sketching, then retracing onto tracing paper, I skip a step and sketch directly on tracing paper. The initial sketch is loose and light, with a 2H pencil, lots of erasing and correcting until I get something that looks like it matches all the references I used. Then, I make a few more small corrections in the process of transferring the image onto bristol using graphite transfer paper. All the dark lines on the sketch are the final lines that were transferred to the bristol paper.


Next step is to ink the transferred sketch. I generally start near the head, outlining the shape with a Hunt 512 nib. Anything that still feels strange at this point is erased and redrawn with the 2H pencil. I do most of the interior details with the Hunt 102 nib. Any stippling is done with a Micron .05 pen. And the end result:

As requested, a couple of close-up images.
The upper wing:


And the close-up of the head:

Back to Black

While I have done some color pieces for work, it's all been concept for projects that aren't public yet, so here's a few more ink spots that I've done lately. On the homefront, I am working on a couple of pieces, but they are still WIP.

Here's a whitespotted bamboo shark:


A porcupinefish, no species in particular but the markings were modeled after a Diodon holocanthus:


A male American Kestrel:


A Harris's Hawk; I feel like the head's too big:


And while not strictly black and white, it is fairly monochromatic. Here's an octopus done in Adobe Illustrator in the style of Live Trace for a volunteer name tags board:


Working on a Crested Caracara pen and ink drawing now. Otherwise, mostly working on new signage.

Mural Madness!

Finally getting around to posting pictures of the murals I worked on this year.
The murals are © to Aquarium of the Pacific, but the photos are © to me.
Here's an overview of the Watershed Exhibit mural:

You can see that the mugwort's starting to overgrow the right side of the mural.
These days it's 6 ft tall and completely covers the bottom half of the mural.

Here's a shot of the left side of the mural:


The middle of the mural:


Several close-ups of some of the animals:
Great Blue Heron


Harvest Mouse


Black-Neck Stilt




Here are some photos from the Shark Zone murals on Harbor Terrace. While the watershed mural was painstakingly scientifically accurate, Shark Zone was done to brighten up the area. While the colors are truly that bright on some of the different species, I punched up some colors and shifted others. The mural is also a mix of tropical and temperate species.
The main part of the wall mural on the left wall:

The other side, on the right wall:

The two computer murals printed out as stickers. The one on the food cart is a combination of a watercolor whale shark with some Photoshop filters and a lot of copy-paste fish. That one had a short deadline and was done in a day. The one on the window is a Photoshop creation based on a rough pencil sketch. All the corals are put in there more for aesthetics than for the actual zone and place they grow in:

Here's the actual computer image of the window image, "Harbor Reef."


Some close-ups of the wall mural:
bat ray


bluespotted ray


Anemone! Based off a whitespotted rose anemone.



Hope you enjoyed your tour of the recent murals I worked on. I finally have them up!

Respectfully Dead, Happily Living

A few weeks ago I went to Artist's Night at the Body Worlds III exhibit, live models posing next to the plastinated bodies. It's taken me a while, but I'm finally putting up the sketches I did. Now, bear with me here, most of these are pretty rough, and I can't say I'm happy with some of them, but I was glad to have the opportunity to work out my rusty figure drawing skills. Many of the people that went sketching that night had skills that I envied. So, onto the sketches. I find that I really only like the first one, and that my skills were kind of sporadic after that. Forgive the quality of the reproductions. I took the photos hastily in the evening. WARNING: Artistic Nudes ahead.

Slither and Slink

Some eels for your viewing pleasure. Eels can be more beautiful, with more complex patterns than you'd think, especially since most people jump to the California moray eel or perhaps the eels in The Little Mermaid when thinking about what eels might look like. They are certainly more diverse in form and pattern than I'd ever thought before seeing so many different species. All in black and white with pen and ink of the species that can be found at the Aquarium of the Pacific.

A Few Sharks

So these are some of the watercolor spot paintings I've been doing at work lately for ID signage. For some reason the "save for web" option in Photoshop always makes the images darker. I understand the more limited color palette, but I'm not quite sure why the colors would be darker overall.
As they are:
sandtiger shark Carcharias taurus
blacktip reef shark Carcharius melanopterus
nurse shark Ginglymostoma cirratum

The Simplicity of Black and White

Been working on images for the volunteer information cards at work. I've forgotten how quick and simple black and white can be, plus I really like working with the ol' croquil and ink bottle. Some microns tossed in as well for the stippling. It's a fairly pleasant way to fill the hours. Besides, I can eliminate any major ink smudges with the erase function in PS. Here are just a few of the images.