Front of my Moleskine for CVA’s Illo Minn: Volume 3 exhibit opening this Thursday.

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This is a sketch for an exhibit illo I’m working on, a portrait of a boy, will be a silhouette shape painted with gouache, ink line work added for features. Not sure if this is the face, may try other references. Was looking for more of a punk, tough look. And I still may decide to make it a portrait of a dog instead.

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This is a personal piece about a man called The Ape, kind of a pulp noir, fall from grace type of narrative, a story about failure and resurrection. “Cursed are you among all.” A tragic villain.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was commissioned to do a portrait of An Wang, co-founder of Wang Laboratories and creator (along with Way Dong Woo) of the pulse transfer controlling device in 1949.

For this portrait, I focused on a close-up 3/4 view of Wang in a suit and bow tie with his patented circuitry as a background pattern.

A set of thumbnail sketches allowed me to explore translating his features into line and investigate composition and posture. I used this to create a sketch for the likeness.

Next, I sketched out some circuitry to use as the background pattern.

I combined this with the likeness sketch to create the final rough sketch to show to the client.

For the next step, I painted shapes with gouache for the head, suit, tie, and background. For this step, I was only concerned with the edge quality, the shape, and the texture within the shape from the brush strokes and subtle color value variations. I scanned these gouache shapes in grayscale.

Following the gouache step, I created the line work using a Pentel brush pen. I made an alternative line drawing for some of the facial features. In the first ink drawing, I made three left cheek edge lines intending to choose one of them, but then decided to leave all three.

I used the sketch in Photoshop as a guide for placing the gouache and ink elements.

In Photoshop, I converted the gouache elements to Index Color, limiting them to only two values; a medium gray and a dark gray. I then selected each of these grays and converted them each to a color that matched their value.

Next, I introduced a third value for the face texture and then began replacing the sketch with the scanned ink line work.

I decided to make the darker background and bow tie value match the face texture value.

Up until now, I had been working with a monochromatic red palette. For the final illustration though, I wanted the background to be a second color, and first tried a dull bluish hue…

…but then decided on an acid green…

…and finished by completing the final background circuitry pattern.

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I did a quick assignment for the Wall Street Journal this week, a piece for their October 1 issue for a story about how the market is affecting divorce arrangements.

I really wanted to do the bird cage sketch but the art director wisely chose the house sketch and completely avoided discussing the cat sketch.

Below is my Colorforms version, all the vector paths separated.

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Another Illustrator doodle that developed into a character study. Yves is a delicate boy with a cauliflower ear and perpetual tears and nasal drips. Happy, sickly, sad; but mostly happy really, with a naive unsuspecting manner.

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This is a sketch of David Soul in his pre-Starsky and Hutch days, from The Streets of San Francisco episode “Hall of Mirrors,” 1972.

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Brush pen drawing of a man studying at the Longfellow Dunn Brothers.

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