The If word this week was “Sink”. I sketched up a man sinking in quicksand and ended up using that over on my other page(penandmarker.wordpress.com) where I draw an illustration every day for 365 days. I am just about to hit 100 drawings over on that site! You can check that drawing out here. The illustration ended up being a bit political just because I thought it fit the theme quite well. You can’t go anywhere these days without talk about the economy popping up, and that was the theme that I ran with for that illustration. For my illustration on this page I made something similar. For whatever reason I ended up changing the main person sinking from an old man into the Statue of Liberty. It doesn’t really mean anything, but I thought it would make a nice illustration. It’s a shame I don’t have an article to go along with it because I think it looks like something that would accompany an article in a magazine like the New Yorker, a weekly newspaper or something like that. Anyway, enough blabbing. Here it is:
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Tag Archives: philadelphia
Sink
Separated
This Friday the topic from IF was Separated. I don’t know all that much about the military, but I immediately thought about all the soldiers that go overseas and are separated from their loved ones for long periods of time. I can’t imagine going through that, I would never want to be that far away from my wife. Anyway, I suppose this illustration is in tribute of all the soldiers that will be far away from their loved ones this holiday season.
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Swell Bubble Gum
When I was younger there was a factory a few blocks from my house in my hometown of Havertown. It was called the Swell Bubble Gum Factory. Years before that(and before I had been born) I believe it was called the Philadelphia Chewing Gum Company. It was magical to grow up so close to the factory. I remember summer days when my friends and I would ride our bikes to the 7-11 and get Slurpies, the best part though was that for blocks and blocks the air smelled like bubble gum! Swell made great products that I miss a heck of a lot. They made Crybabies(super sour gum) and Mouth-washers(they would coat your mouth in color) as well as bubble gum cigars and regular bubble gum(and a bunch of other products too!).Unfortunately the factory was torn down a couple of years ago and they are currently building a YMCA in its place. But I still have my memories. I decided that I wanted to mess around with their original logo and see what I could turn out. Well, here it is:
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Here are a couple other variations of the logo that I tried out:
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Here is the original logo that used to hang on the front of the building:
Swell Bubble Gum factory, you will be missed!
Stay
This weeks “IF” word was Stay. I tried working with a limited color palate. I think the use of blue really helps to push the idea that the dog is feeling blue himself. I was originally going to use my chihuahua as the dog in this, but I decided to go with a pug and found a nice reference online.
Here’s how it turned out:
Also, I was featured as the Pick of the Week for this past weeks Illustration Friday topic. The topic was Remedy and my post is just below this one. It is awesome being featured on Illustration Friday’s main page, my total page views yesterday reached 488. Today it is at 209 and the day isn’t even over yet! Thank you Illustrationfriday.com!
Midsummer Night
Just finished an illustration for IF, the theme was “Midsummer Night”. It got me thinking about when I was younger, before I found out about skateboards(those took up all my summer nights after that) and how simple life was. Playing Ghost in the Graveyard and catching fireflies. Well… here is my illustration:
I did the entire illustration while drinking beer, so I’m not sure how it’s gonna look when I’m sober. But I am trying to teach myself to be a little looser in my illustration style so I figured this would be an interesting way to test that out. As of right now I’m thinking that it looks pretty rad, we’ll see how I feel about it later.
Travis Barker
Here are two paintings I made a long while back (maybe 2-3 years ago for Travis and 4-5 years ago for Frank, I still like them both a lot though).
The first one here is of Travis Barker, I never was a huge fan of Blink-182(The Aquabats however I loved) but I thought this made for a cool looking portrait.
The second painting is of Frankenstein. I love working in Acrylics, but its so much faster/less mess to clean up when working with digital.
I am really excited to get to work on my piece for “IF” tomorrow and I don’t even know what the topic is yet! I think I dream about what the topic could be every Thursday night! Lame, I know! Hahahahahahahaha.
Where Eagles Dare…
Something I did for fun over the past two days…
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The scanner makes it look a little different than it really does, but it still looks cool. Acrylic/Pencil/Watercolor.
Here is the initial sketch I did:
I don’t really like sketchbooks and almost all of my sketches end up on scraps of paper, napkins or blank spots on newspaper ads.
Anyway, hope you guys like!
Swept
This weeks “IF” word was “Swept”. I’ve been very lucky recently in that the ideas for “IF” pop into my head almost immediately. I was thinking “swept out to the sea” or something like that. Anyway, here is the finished piece:
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I had a Philly Metro newspaper sitting next to me when I saw the new word and sketched out this idea on the back of the ad on the last page…
There are Monsters
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A flyer I’m working on for my friends band. (Update: The finished flyer is below, I added all the info and darkened the entire thing a bit).
The show was great too! They play acoustic Misfits covers and originals (inspired by The Misfits).
Shadows
The theme for this weeks IllustrationFriday.com piece was “Shadows”. This popped into my head almost immediately and I started work on it at 8:30am. I finished at about 9:30am, not bad for about an hour of work.
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