I constructed this mask as a Christmas gift for some close friends. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the mask once it was fully painted, so I can’t show how colorful these masks usually are once they are finished. Masks like this one are traditionally constructed from aluminum foil (for the structural pieces) and paper mache (to add hardness and final texture).

I had never made a mask this elaborate before, so putting it together was challenging. For next year, I resolve to have enough money to buy people presents instead of having to make them myself.

• You’ve already read the book so you know what it’s about and you’re familiar with all of the characters
• Even if you do need to re-read the book to brush up on your memory, it’s a book you actually enjoy so you’ll zip right through it
• You can illustrate scenes or ideas that weren’t touched upon when you read the book yourself

My book cover, above, is for John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The idea is to have the wings start on the front cover and then wrap around to the back cover of the book. The figure is painted fairly realistically using acrylics while the wings themselves were done with colored inks. I wanted there to be a very stark contrast between the figure and the wings in such a way that the body itself is flesh and bone while the wings are a more abstract and graphic idea. Like pork chops with a side of calculus.

Anyway, I chose Satan for the cover because he’s actually quite a conflicted character in Milton’s poem and I feel like he would actually be a cool guy if he weren’t mucking about with evil all the time. You definitely get the feeling that Milton sympathizes with Satan because he is developed as a warmer and more complicated character than even God Himself. Oh, and I was also feeling very strongly about having feathers falling off the wings, so that pretty much cinched the deal for having Satan on the cover.

I was up late last night.

The reason I was up late last night is this: I was having a fabulous time, thank you very much.

A group of friends and I visited a Turkish joint, Cafe Istanbul, and lounged about on the floor cushions smoking hookahs, stuffing our faces, and ogleing the gorgeous belly dancer. It was wonderfully decadent.

My alertness has suffered for it this morning but I think you’ll agree it was totally worth it.

I think that most of the trouble that I was having with gouache is that I treated it too much like watercolor, when in reality it’s quite a different animal. For one thing, although you can make transparent washes with gouache, the medium truly shines when you really pile it on. Before this painting I was very reserved with my gouache usage because it comes in tiny, expensive tubes. You can still see my timidity (and stinginess) with gouache in parts of the background.

The second big issue I was having with gouache (and to some extent, the rest of my paintings) was that the images were coming out much too color-chaotic. As an exercise, I tried to keep this painting almost completely monochromatic by simply using several values and chroma of green. The red was used as a complimentary color and I mixed some greens into it in order to dial down the chroma in the shadow areas.

I’m very happy with the color in this piece and I owe much of its success to James Gurney and his excellent blog posts (especially the series he did on color wheel masking). If you haven’t visited his blog before, you’re in for a treat: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com.

Since I’m not a SCAD student, I didn’t participate in any of the challenges, but I did keep myself busy all night drawing a few endemic Puerto Rican birds. The one seen above is the Puerto Rican Nightjar, a very rare and critically endangered bird that inhabits the southwestern part of the island. The Nightjar’s plumage is mottled with browns and blacks to help it camouflage itself with the forest floor.

The second bird shown here is the Puerto Rican Tody, a very small bird with bright green plumage on its back, white on its belly, and bright red on its throat. This bird is widespread on the island but is generally too small to be seen easily. You know one is close because of their loud and nasally beep calls.

The last bird that I drew at the challenge was the Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo. These birds are quite large and are easily identifiable by the large white spots on their tail feathers. The rest of the bird is grayish tan, but they have red eyes and a reddish underbelly. These birds can be found in forests throughout the island but might be a little hard to see because of their very slow movements. Despite being so slow, they’re actually very good at catching lizards, which are their main source of food.

In all, I was at SCAD from about 8PM to 6AM, so I spent about 10 hours on these (though I goofed off for a while as well, so the actual working time was about 8 or 9 hours). All of these were drawn with technical pens – I mainly used a 0.7mm for outlines and a 0.1mm for shading and small details.

The birds are shown here in the order that I drew them, so if you notice any declining quality, it’s probably due to exhaustion.

Why did I choose to illustrate Puerto Rican endemic birds? I’m a bird maniac and I’m Puerto Rican, so it’s a match made in heaven! Also, I wanted to supplement my portfolio with some technical illustrations because the style comes more naturally to me than editorial work (I am an engineer after all).

After drying the red splatters, I started giving the shapes volume by adding lighter tones. I then finished it up by painting in some scales and other bright highlights, and also adding blues where the intense shadows should be.

This piece turned out pretty well, but I would have liked to plan the colors out a little more because it seems kind of flat in some areas.

As a side note, I’m very happy to have used my own reference photo for this piece. Every time I go to the zoo or the aquarium I bring my camera and take pictures like crazy, and this is the first time that I’ve actually used one of those photos for a painting.

Darren Di Lieto, who conducted the interviews for LCS, wrote a recent blog post about the whole event: how he found out, who he has contacted, and he even put up a gallery of the book so that the affected illustrators can rally together and try to get this book off the shelves.

Since the book was published in Hong Kong, Darren has run into a lot of trouble trying to contact the publisher to notify them of the copyright infringement. Sadly, copyright infringement in China is rampant and has been covered several times in the news; there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about it though.

If you do see this book in a store somewhere, please don’t buy it. Even better, let the book store manager know that the entire contents of the book were plagiarized and kindly request that the book be removed. None of the illustrators featured in this book (or in the book’s CD) have been given a single penny for their work, so don’t help the publisher make money either!

• Acrylic wash – used to give the subjects their lightest base color.
• Watercolor wash – gives the subject their medium tones. Generally, a neutral brown-orange color is washed over the entire image and then lifted off of the the subject’s highlights.
• Oil wash – gives the subject their shadow tones. A transparent mix of purple and green works great for this, especially in portraits. Again, the color can be washed over the entire image and then lifted off of the places where there should be no shadow.

Once the layers are in place, fix the entire image with some clayboard fixative (which leaves a good grain) and give the final coloring details with colored pencils.

I decided on trying to do a portrait of Mike Rowe, from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, for my first C.F. Payne attempt because he has a very expressive face that I thought would be fun to work with. Overall I’m very pleased with how it turned out and I’d definitely try another portrait using this technique soon.

In addition to drawing and painting, I’ve also been putting together several CSS hacks in order to create accessible image rollovers. Traditionally, image rollovers are created with JavaScript or maybe even Flash, so less capable browsers are crippled when trying to view a page that depends on these technologies for navigation. I’ve also been experimenting with making text links available on the image rollovers for text-only browsers or browsers that have disabled images.

Given the technical nature of the work, I was reluctant to publish them here and mess with the Visual Arts theme of this blog. However, since it has been such a long time since I have been able to scan my day-to-day visual work and upload it, I’m beginning to think that it wouldn’t be so bad after all. Plus, it’s either that or nothing at the moment.

Besides, I think my CSS image rollover hack would a beneficial read to other artists who use rollovers on their site. I’ve seen hundreds of artist portfolio sites that depend on JavaScript to function that are completely crippled when JavaScript is turned off. I bet they would be interested in an alternative that makes their content available to an even broader audience.