art critics April 23, 2008

My craft project for the day was making this abstract expressionist masterpiece to illustrate a feature about two art critics: Clash of the Titans.

The "drawing" is just two particularly sloppy tracings. I composited my two reference pics in Photoshop and printed them out on cheap copier paper, then used the poor woman’s lightbox (i.e., my office window) to trace the guys onto the back with a supersize Sharpie. On the first try, the guy on the right came out well but the one on the left was a bit too cubist, because it was a low-contrast photo and I had trouble following the contours. So I printed it out again, used a writing pen on the right side to trace the fainter outlines, and then repeated my tracing with the fat Sharpie from the wrong side. The second time, only the guy on the left was any good. So I mashed them together in Photoshop and then layered on the crap for the background. I’m heavily indebted to bittbox for these splatter brushes.

My office still reeks of Sharpie, four hours later.

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WASPs February 20, 2008

I made this to illustrate a story for work that I’d been hiding on the bottom of the “to do” pile for almost a year because I had no idea what image to use for it. Then yesterday the editor came in and said she’d swapped some stories around, and it was up next, so I had to come up with something, fast. I actually like how it came out, to my great surprise.

The original drawings were done with my handy Pitt Artist Pen—I mean, really, handy: I just grabbed the pen that was closest to the couch; had the nearest pen been a Uniball office pen, I’d have used that, instead. Then I scanned them and Photoshopped the hell out of them, as you can see.

Jacqui 11/27 – Swan Card November 28, 2007

Traveled all day, unpacked some stuff, then sat down to do a drawing.  I decided to give Photoshop drawing a go, inspired by others in Drawmo!