Doing this and then taking an iPhone photo of the same subject always remind me of how a painter can try to convey the feeling of a place or a sight when a photograph can often miss it.

41˚25’56”N, 81˚25’17”W – 4/1/2012

202˚S, 41˚25’58”N, 81˚25’8”W – 4/1/2012

??? 4/1/2012

143˚SE, 41˚25’56”N, 81˚25’18”W – 4/12/2012

Here’s the animation:

iPhone Brushes

Dylan Thomas – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
BIC Ballpoint on Moleskine – 10/6/11 

So here are the results of my experiments:

This is a portrait of jesus done with organic coffee on watercolor paper.

This self-promotional piece was done when Apple had just started selling The Beatles White album.  The idea was to show Steve Jobs as a Beatle.

After a few sketches I selected the image below as the most promising.  Notice the small Apple icon in the pupil.

And below is the final illustration in a sample layout.

I did a few sketches, trying to simplify his profile, find the power lines.  I picked this one as the most promising:

An hour or two in photoshop and here he is simplified and cleaned up:

This was a self-promotional piece done as Mubarak was being overthrown.

The idea was to show how popular uprisings, not necessarily military actions, were starting to topple dictators in the middle east.  And how this would result in a domino effect in other places.

At this point I’d already drawn and had a cartoon published in the online foreign affairs magazine Current Intelligence.

Here’s the initial sketch:

First colors.

The colors I selected were Green, Red and Black.  In countries in the middle east green can represent new life, red can represent victory, white; purity.   Using this palette could be tricky because, to western eyes, these colors could have completely different meanings.

Below is my analysis of the movement in the drawing:

As you can see, I added some people at the bottom to represent the popular source of the uprising.  The arrows represent the movement I could see in the drawing, and it wasn’t turning out very dynamic.  The dudes were also looking a bit angry and the dimensions called for in the layout would have made their expressions and features unreadable.  Their style was also not matching the rest of the illustration.

On to the next iteration:

I replaced the figures with arms and now you can see how the lines of movement are more dynamic.

I made the arms a little smaller and worked them into the background.

Here is the final illustration in a sample layout.