Brian Moore's Sketchblog

Some more sketches with the new crowquill pen.

On a whim, I picked up a crowquill pen at the art store. (BORING ART-SUPPLY NERD TALK AHOY):

I’d briefly played with one many years ago, but ditched it in favor of the Speedball pen points I was used to. But I’m diggin’ it now! It’s nice to have that amount of control, and it doesn’t take all my concentration like the brush.

A collage of some dinner-eatin’ businessman illustrations from last week. I tried to go for an “elegantly loose” style here … which, of course, was created using a lightbox and digital coloring.

Yep, that’s a frog he’s hiding inside his coat.

This is a detail from “Trying”, one of six illustrations I made this summer for the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, one for each play in the current season. The illustrations will be appearing in their season preview book, in print advertising, on some signage, and I believe they’re going to project them on the side of a blimp. I may be wrong about that last one.

The thing that surprised me in making the paintings (they were done with a Wacom tablet and Photoshop), is how much they came to resemble my paint-on-canvas painting style. I made a bunch of custom brushes in Photoshop to get the brush-like textures I wanted.
I guess when you’re really in the heat of trying to get something to look right, your consciousness of the tools being used disappears anyway. (I remember a quote, maybe from Philip Guston, to the effect that when you start a painting, all your friends and critics are in the studio with you; then after awhile the critics leave; following that, your friends leave; and if you’re lucky, finally you leave.)