Trip to Europe

Me overlooking Brunelleschi's Dome

I am not a photographer. When I need photos done I go to a professional. However I do want to share some pictures I took from my trip to Italy. I saw some of the greatest works of art that I've only ever read about. I saw the resting places of some of my personal heroes. There is no way anyone who appreciates art of any variety can go to Florence and not feel totally inadequate and amazed by the works of the masters. Here are a few of my favorite shots.

Michelangelo's Final Resting Place

Personal Hero: Leonardo DaVinci


Temple of Vesta

Waking Elliot Back Cover

Waking Elliot Front Cover

This is the final cover for Waking Elliot's EP: Simply Pathological. Make sure to check out their website for information on the album once it is published. We had a great time sitting down and agreeing on a color scheme together The gang had a vision and I hope I was able to bring it to light for them. I'm very happy with this violet plum feel. It works well with the yellow clock and lends itself to a very eye-grabbing color scheme.

Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd is property of DreamWorks Pictures.
Graphite on Paper 15"x24"

I did this graphite version of a movie still from the Movie Sweeney Todd after it came out. I recently touched it up and tinted it red in Photoshop. I really enjoyed working on the clothing Johnny Depp is wearing the shading brought me back to drawing 1 when we spent days doing folds in cloth. Helena Bonham Carter's hair was a giant pain. In the movie her hair is a crazy rat nest. It was the part I saved for last because I knew how bad it would be.

W.E. Cover- WIP

W.E. Back Cover WIP

Thou Shall Not Kill- WIP

This is a concept piece I started a while back. This rough sketch was inspired by a comic idea I had. It is a dark comic about psychotics who's mental illness manifests in dark powers. Think Carrie minus the prom. This scene depicts one character, a priest, who is tormented by murders he's unconsciously committed. I'm posting this so you can see a little bit of my process. I start with a blue line rough. After that I set up three different layers: mid, shadows and highlights.

Striped Woods

This is another Waking Elliot CD cover possibility. It was inspired by a sketch done by the lead singer. It was a stand alone tree with curled branches and black and white stripes. I had an idea for another cover (which I still may use) involving an "Alice-like" girl wandering throughout a gigantic dilapidated chess board. I brought the girl over to this cover and put her into a wooded area. The piece is not completely done. The whites need to be brought up and the girl needs a lot of work. This may be used as the back cover of the CD jacket. The black space in the middle would be where the tracks would be listed.

Twisted Tower

Graphite on Paper 4"x7"

This is another sketch out of the sketchbook of doom. Not much to say about this one. It is merely a broken down tower that has become as twisted as the tree surrounding it. I often thought about Merlin's tower in Disney's The Sword and the Stone. I took a lot of time on the trees. Drawing the branches individually was an asset but it was also a pain.

Plug Lane- Sketch

Graphite on paper 5"x 7"

This sketch was done in my sketchbook of doom. It came to me one day when I was sitting watching my students all go right for their phones or computers instead of doing something thoughtful and creative. I realized how "plugged-in" our society was. I wanted to put that feeling on paper. As I chewed my pencil in thought I recalled a drawing exercises my Drawing I professor taught us. It involves drawing an item inside of a cube. I had first used this technique to draw an electrical plug back in drawing I and had since used it to keep odd objects such as homes or cars in perspective. Since I used the technique for houses and plugs before I decided to do them at the same time- while also making a statement about society's inability to function "unplugged."

Propagate- IF

Gimp 2

This is a digital piece I've done for Illustration Friday. The topic this week was Propagate. I decided to illustrate the propagation of machines. This end of the world scenario is called the "grey goo effect" by engineer and writer, Eric Drexler. He wrote that once nanomachines could reproduce they could theoretically take over and end humanity as we know it.

"In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough."

-K. Eric Drexler

The illustration shows a wave of machines covering and absorbing the Earth's surface. All material the machines come across is converted into more machines until the entire planet is nothing but machines. The skulls were used to give the sense of foreboding and to allude to the machines' human creators.

Reach- Preview

Gimp 2 Photo editor

This is my first fully digital painting. It is being created for my friends' band Waking Elliot. It is not quite finished so please excuse the watermark. The original concept was quite different. Mary, the lead singer, liked a tree I had drawn in my sketchbook. She wanted me to work up something they could use as an album cover using that tree. I began sketching out the tree on the computer. I figured inspiration would hit if I just started drawing- and it did. As the tree formed I noticed what could be a thigh and an arm. I saw human forms already in the sketch so I emphasized them and the result is two people tangled and frozen in this tree.

Thread City

graphite on paper, 5"x 7"

Here is a piece I was working up for my friends' band Thread City. (They have since broken up and reformed into Waking Elliot.) Thread City had formed during our college years at ECSU. The town ECSU is in was famous for its, now defunct, thread industry. So they named the band in homage to where they all met. When I was working on this I wanted something that would work with their name but also had an almost surreal twist. I chose to replace a girl's brain with thread. This not only is an obvious connection to the band name but it also suggests that the music is infectious and memorable- since she has it "on the mind." ::groan::

A Night of Russian Theater

Ink Wash on Bristol Board 10"x 14"

This dark piece was done for a theater production at CCSU. The production was of two Russian plays. In one an aging actor falls asleep during the performance. No one wakes him and the play goes off without anyone noticing his absence. In the second a business man contemplates suicide as he is forced to drive back into work while he and his family are away at a cottage on vacation. I fused the two ideas of these plays into one image of an actor portraying a business man contemplating suicide on an empty stage. It was done with an ink wash.

Screwdriver Mosquito

Pastel on Brown Pastel Paper 15"x 24"

This piece comes from way back. My art professor handed us a bag of tools and said do something with them in a drawing. I picked up a pair of needle nose pliers and made an ant out of them. My professor liked the idea and told me to do another in the same way. So I picked up the screwdriver and thought it resembled a mosquito's proboscis. The mosquito became the second in a series of four.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Watercolor and ink on Bristol Board, 15"x 24"

This watercolor painting is an illustration of the poem The Love Song of J. ALfred Prufrock by poet TS Eliot. The poem is full of rich yet daunting imagery. The main focus of the poem as I interpret it is on man's lifespan. At one point Eliot writes "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons." This inspired me to show a man progressing though life as if it were nothing more than a preset number of coffees. To help illustrate that I used the imagery of a piece of bread being eaten. The bread is eaten away slowly as the man ascending it ages until the bread has been eaten and the man is dropped into the pot. Other imagery from the poem is included but I encourage you to read the poem for yourself. This was done as part of a class I took a while back. It forced me to experiment with painting and color.

The Fall

Graphite on paper, 6"x10"

This is a small piece I did in my sketchbook. It depicts Satan's fall from heaven. Satan is the figure in the chains. The chains form a pentagram behind him. Further down you see Satan's fallen army wailing as their angelic facade is taken away and made demonic. Finally the long white wyrms are the biblical serpents who reside in Hell and eat the flesh of the damned.