Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick, for The Weekly Standard. Got a call to do this job late yesterday afternoon. Worked a bit last night, final due today . . . all in all took me about 12 hours to complete. This quick of a turn around pushes me in many areas, definitely a challenge woth the while.

More progress with my Tom Hanks Caricature!

Not finished yet, but getting there . . . just a bit more to go, some more textures, and maybe a little more work on the hair and some of the edges. Currently I'm working on a large two page spread for Golf magazine. Six people and a lot of detail, will post soon.

Tim Burton Split Complementary Palette

Last night after my wife and I put the kids to bed, we watched a bit of T.V. and I painted a bit more on my Tim Burton. I'm painting this with a Split Complementary Palette (see palette). For me painting with a "limited" palette makes sense, even more so when painting with photoshop. In photoshop, there is such a HUGE amount of colors to choose from, if you're not careful, it could be very easy to go nuts with your colors. By using a limited palette in this case a split comp. palette, you're automatically creating harmony within your painting, and from there you can bend or push those colors the way you want in order to make the painting work. It's amazing how much color you can get out of using a limited palette!

Mitt Romney for the Standard!

This is a piece I did this last week for The Weekly Standard. Same thing happened this week as with last weeks Henry Hyde piece. I first started on Wednesday with another portrait of a Senator (thumnail sketch shown below Mitt paintings). But that story was canned late that afternoon. Most of Thursday I spent doing a few sketches of Mitt Romney knowing he was who I was going to draw instead, but I didn't know yet what was wanted as far as pose or story. Honestly it took me a bit to get him right, he seems to look different in almost every reference photo that I have of him. But after seeing videos of him it didn't take long to get him right. Around 10:00 a.m. Friday morning, I was given the final idea for the piece . . . we wanted to show him standing cool, with the Mormon Temple in the background. Problem for me was that I only had one day to paint this, so the temple is a photo that I layered into the painting, absolutely no time to draw or paint that, took me all day to paint Mitt.

Done with the same technique as before, painted in grayscale, and then when fully rendered, I layer color on top of my values.

Currently on the drawing board is a full page illustration of Axl Rose for REVOLVER magazine.