Brian Moore's Sketchblog

I flirted with the idea of having him cudgeling attacking dinosaurs with the guitar, but thought that was a little too much rock.

It's January, so it's time for some cute n' ghoulish drawings. (Hey, if Xmas can take up 7 months of the year ...)

More on this later.

Most fun to draw: Einstein. Hardest to draw: tie between Max Headroom (tough to do a caricature of a caricature, and indicate that it's a computer-generated character) and Steve Jobs (facial hair is tough to render in vector art.)

Oh, OK. The "Dell Dude" is also sort of fun to draw.

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.)

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

This is a detail from another painting I made for the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, for the play Augusta. Created in Photoshop.

And part of an illustration gig from last week:

It's a little hard to tell without the color, but it's supposed to be a PC shaped like a motorcycle. The guy's probably playing Half-Life 2.

It's been a busy week or so. (I've lost track.)

This is a Photoshop painting I made for guess which recent holiday. It was an experiment: it was for a slideshow presentation, for which I normally make one image per slide. This time I tried to be clever and made one big image, and zoomed in on a different chunk of it for each slide. I don't know if it was any faster than my usual routine, but the final product came out all right. I like the kid with the raygun, and the sullen/quiet teenager setting out the silverware.

Not much success with personal artwork this week. Several doodles discarded.

Another freelance piece. This gentleman has just received an email from someone in Nigeria, who would like him to help get a vast fortune out of the country, etc. etc.

If I had a zillion dollars, I'd want the Batmobile, too. Though I think I'd just rent The Omega Man, rather than buying it.
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I draw a lot of slideshows, which are usually composited in Photoshop; each layer or layer set is eventually exported as a single slide image. I make one background at the bottom of the stack of layers, and make the art for each slide transparent so the background shows through. Here's what happens when I get bored and make a bunch of the layers visible at the same time - maybe a dozen portrait heads in watercolor mashed together. Looks kind of like Wolverine on a caffeine binge, huh?

Here's a test painting for a recent illustration gig. Lately I've been playing with having large areas of black ink in my watercolors - it makes a nice graphic contrast that I can build the painting around. (Which artist was it that called black "the prince of colors"?)

And here's a slight re-design of Micki from Smithson. I'm still playing with the features of most of the characters, trying to tighten up their designs. Micki looks a little angry here, but I kind of like her revamped hairstyle.

The Holidaze Are Upon Us and the work is piling up, so here's a painting from the archives. This was my idea for a mascot/logo for the proposed webcomics anthology site, Rocket Pirates. (Smithson was slated to be part of the initial RP lineup.)

I don't dig the squidgy paint - this was an early effort in gouache - but I do dig the eyepatch-and-cyborg-eye combo. I have no idea where the rocket in the eye idea came from.

A painting based on an old illustration. He really, really wants to check his email.

Three attempts at a painting - top left and bottom are watercolor, top right is gouache. From the same series as the guy on the balcony, earlier. I can't quite get the background color of the plane right, though I think the last version (the bottom watercolor) is on the right track.

A sketch for an upcoming series of illustrations about Mr. Gates' impending retirement from Microsoft. I also did a gouache sketch, but it came out looking more like David Letterman (circa late '80s.) So I'll save that one for my future Letterman illustration gigs.