fresh dome pieces and such...

Hola! I heard George Pratt the other day give a talk about how some artists force themselves to sketch in their sketchbook every day. It got me thinking about how I've been slacking in the sketchbook department so I'm going to try to sketch for at least an hour a day in the 'ol moleskine. The photo and "chair" sketches are from last night. In honor of Holloween a bunch of us illustrators got together to sketch each others portraits but in our costumes. Those sharp looking cats in the photo are me and my buddy ( http://www.orlandosanchezjr.blogspot.com/) posing...I lasted for about 7 minutes..my leg gave out. I have to give respect to figure models; it's a lot harder than it looks. I did the "eyeball" piece quickly for a t-shirt over at drawn.ca. It turns out right before I was going to upload it I was informed that it had to be vector art...well there goes that...haha. If anyone knows how I could get that image printed I'd appreciate the info. Most of these are done with the famous James Jean pens, the SKB SB-1000. Yes they are that good. Anyone want the info on where to hunt them down, shoot me an email. And finally, after a month of procrastination I put up pics from the "Illest of Ill" show that the Ringling Illustration students put together (complete with El Coro!!). I did caricatures the whole time in front of probably the most people ever...artists too...so I had to bring my A game. Unfortunately I've been forgetting my camera, to that event, and other caricature gigs so the ones I put up are ok....those are images I managed to find. I am experimenting using ink and acrylic for my live gigs but still keeping a 5-10 minute drawing. I hope to develop that more too! Hope you digg!!

take care,

-francis

more new-ness

Hey guys, things have been so busy I haven't had too much time to goof around in the sketchbook. Heres something I put together tonight in my moleskine directly above. The very top image is from an illustration im 80% finished with. The thing I'm enjoying about this piece is that it is a 4x5ft painting...(I don't think I can go back to smaller paintings again..haha). I'll post the final when I finish it. The second image is an 8 hr figure painting. I like that I'm using color in the skin tone, although I think I need to be more subtle with it. The next image is the "finished" Rockwell. It's nowhere near the polish of the original although this piece proved to be a big turning point since I learned so mucha from it. I finished it about a month ago... I just took a pic today so any quality from these recent paintings is a result of what I learned from that painting. Have a good one!!

-francis

*thanks for all the kind comments by the way!!!

Recent work!

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So I'm starting to finish up the projects that I've been talking about! Over the next couple of days I'll update this post with the new work.

1. This guy is done on scratchboard clay board. For those unfamiliar you use a special carving nib instead of a ink nib and scratch into the black layer to reveal the white lines. So you have to work backwards...instead of creating the darks you're creating the lights. It was interesting...haha. But I was bored with the final black and white so I Photoshoped it a little. I must admit I've been on a swirls-of-smoke-design things lately a la Sterling Hundley and David Choong Lee....sorry...haha

2. So I've been doing a decent amount of landscape painting when I need to get out of my apartment.... it's definately a trip to sleep and paint in the same cube... This is the first one I feel decent about. All the other ones end up looking like blobs of paint with no value system...There definitely is something to be said about simplifying the forms, especially pant life....

3. Me trying to learn watercolor. I've never had too much luck with the medium, but my teacher demo-ed a pretty awesome technique so I might have to mess around with them more.

4. Girly watercolor...

5. Oompa loompa watercolor.

6. This image is an oil portrait for a larger illustration that I have on the backburner right now...I'll post the final when I wrap it up.

7. This post is the first figure painting that I'm content with. It's about a 9-10 hour oil painting from life. I think I'm finally starting to see the color in skin tone!!

8. The last image has to do with the controversy with Nas and Bill O'Reilly (http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.5717/title.nas-wants-debate-with-bill-oreilly-much-more ). It started as a oil painting for a student show that I finished painting at the last minute (so much so that the painting was wet all throughout the show). So I scanned it in and had to finish it up digitally. A lot of it was scanned in textures and what not. I'm also wrapping up another digital manipulation of a oil painting and I learned one big rule: do as much as you can traditionally since you'll waste a lot of time after the scan trying to make everything seem cohesive!! I'm not sure how I feel about this piece.....it's too new....any thoughts?

Stay tuned for more!!...

quickie

20 mins.

10 mins.


5 mins.

1 minute

Hey guys. Things have been real hectic lately (but still having a lot of fun). I have a huge post in the works with 3-4 final large illustrations, pictures from a gallery show, finished Rockwell copy, and some more goodies. Stay tuned. Here is a sketchbook page from tonight I thought I'd post since it's been a while. Take care, -Francis

*update* sooo I'm still working on wrapping up some pieces for the post I talked about above, but until then here are some figure drawings from a session I attended yesterday (above).