Zoo Sketches

On Sunday I went to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo with Jeff. I'd never been to that zoo before. We brought our sketchbooks and drew pictures of the animals. We couldn't do too much drawing outside because of the rain, but we did get to draw inside the buildings a lot.


I love the penguins. They're just so much fun to watch! I took a bunch of photos at the zoo, but haven't had time to upload those yet. However, I did manage a teeny little video of the penguins swimming. They're like little torpedoes!

Lost Character Art - Ben

Yet another Lost portrait. Benjamin Linus is an extremely interesting character, and people keep asking me to draw him, so voila!

Oh Benry. He's so crazy.

As before, I drew this with brown and white pencil on brown toned paper and then did all of the coloring in photoshop with my tablet.

You can see more of my Lost pictures right here.

Pirate Mailbox

A few years ago I painted this mailbox for my parents for the family's summer house. This mailbox was made to replace one that I had painted for them back in high school. Mom put in a special request for a pirate mailbox, so I sketched out some designs and she picked this one. Over the years, weather elements have caused the mailbox to become a bit worn down, so I'll be painting a new mailbox for them soon.

High School Mural

I was cleaning out some old photos the other day and and came across some pictures of a mural I painted back in high school. I thought it might be fun to share here.

Another student and I collaborated on this mural for our senior art project back in 2000. The mural featured the city skyline, and when you looked more closely at it you could see that the painting was composed of a bunch of smaller pictures. In fact, there were 406 4"x6" blocks that made up that painting. Much of the smaller images contained things that related to our graduating class or the high school in general.

Last time I was back in my old high school, which was the middle of last year, the mural was still there and they still plan on keeping it.

Shipwrecked - Behind the Scenes

I was cleaning up some older files today and thought that this might be worth sharing. It's just a little behind the scenes look at my Shipwrecked picture. This isn't a tutorial, and is really only meant to give people an idea as to how I go about working on a picture. More behind the scenes type stuff can be seen right here in my deviantArt gallery.

Prints of this picture are available right here.

Before and After

I thought it would be fun to share some behind the scenes stuff for the Lost portraits that I've been making lately. On the left you can see the plain pencil work and on the right you can see how it looks once I've scanned the drawing in and gone about digitally painting it. I find that even if I'm planning on completing a picture digitally it still helps to start with some kind of a base on paper, whether the base image is done with pencils, watercolors, ink, or some other medium.

Another Lost character portrait

Here's another Lost character portrait. It's about time I drew a picture of Desmond. As before, I drew this with brown and white pencil on brown toned paper and then did all of the coloring in photoshop with my tablet. More of my Lost related art can be found right here.

1971 - In Progress

Last time I was at my grandmother's house in Pennsylvania, I found an awesome photo of my uncle Jonathan with one of his motorcycles back in 1971. Today I started doing an illustration based on that photo. The first step, which you see here, involved drawing with brown pencil and painting with ink washes. The next step will be digital painting. This picture measures at 18" x 24".