Book Cover: The Chieu Hoi Saloon

January has been a very good month, 2 book covers ~ DONE!

The past few weeks have been quite eventful. there was the Holidays, followed by New Year's eve, sprinkle in t he social events, and you've got a busy month. Some where in all that, I made time to paint 2 cover paintings for the "Switchblade Series," from PM Press. As I mentioned in my previous post , Santa brought me a great gig doing 2 book covers. I am happy to say that both covers are done and on time.

The books are stories that were outside the scope my personal work, and so I was challenged to come up with images that would be appropriate for the stories. The cover shown here is for The Chieu Hoi Saloon. The other image will be posted separately.

The folks at PM Press were very nice to work with, and they allowed me full reign on these pieces. In turn I did my best to deliver work that would be conceptually strong and technically well done. I feel good about both those aspects, but as always, there's room to grow.

Here you can begin to see the genesis of the work. I submitted a couple of concepts that were generated off of the initial brief that was sent to me. The thumbnail I chose to use has strong graphic appeal, and speaks to the story with in. As I look at other cover artists whom I admire, I am often really attracted to work that, while based in the literature, resists being literal. This is not the contradiction that it may seem to be. My endeavor is to allow room in the image for mood and tone to creep in. Bearing all this in mind, I felt that this image would work the best.

Next was to expand the image from just a cover image to a wrap-around cover.
I struggled with a few things in this image. One was the gun in the shadow. For a long time I wanted to put something in the character's hand that would possibly cast a "gun-ish" shadow. Then at some point, I remembered that this is an illustration, and not a photograph! It's funny that I should have to give my self permission to do that, but hey that's life. Another area that I worked on was the perspective, you'll notice in the sketch that the street light in the upper left corner moves from the sketch to the final. I realized that if the guy is walking and casting his shadow that way that everything else in the image should be the same. In that way the internal logic of the image wouldn't be broken.

I am very thankful for the opportunity to do these book covers and hope that it will lead to many, many more such wonderful gigs!

Check out the companion image: "Pike"

Rush Job

Yippee! 2010 is starting off wonderfully. A good client of mine contacted me for a rush job to spruce up their product information page. I had about 1 day to work on it. Everything went very smoothly, and I was especially grateful for the new brush pen that my sister gave to me for Christmas that allowed me just to flow from rough pencils to inked final. There was some additional challenge to create a readable flow with the bulk of information that had to be presented.

You can see the end result on the Ring Thing's Product Page. My initial contact with this project was noted as A Quick Fling, earlier on this blog. The astute reader will note that much of the graphics for their poster ended up being used for their website.

Still working on the book covers, those should be up by next week. Cheers, and Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas... now get to work!

Hey all, so Dame fortune and Santa have smiled upon me and delivered me two book covers to paint. I am very happy to be ushering in 2010 with some illustration work.

Here's both the brief's that I've received thus far, hopefully the manuscripts will be emailed to me soon so I can parse out some more details.

The Chieu Hoi Saloon
It’s 1992 and three people’s lives are about to collide against the flaming backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. Vietnam vet Harry Hudson is a journalist fleeing his past: the war, a failed marriage, and a fear-ridden childhood. Rootless, he stutters, wrestles with depression, and is aware he's passed the point at which victim becomes victimizer. He explores the city's lowest dives, the only places where he feels at home. He meets Mama Thuy, a Vietnamese woman struggling to run a Navy bar in a tough Long Beach neighborhood, and Kelly Crenshaw, an African-American prostitute whose husband is in prison. They give Harry insight that maybe he can do something to change his fate in a gripping story that is both a character study and thriller.

Here are the thumbnails for The Chieu Hoi Saloon. After reading the brief on this story, I felt that it was a story about a reconciliation between Harry's past and his present. I drew a strong connection between his Vietnam War experience and that one of the other main characters is a Vietnamese woman. As a supporting element I realized that LA/ Long Beach and Vietnam both have a lot of palm trees in them.
The first thumbnail reads quite well and is graphically very strong. The viewer is looking down on Harry as he's walking along a boardwalk/ sidewalk. The shadow is cast as that of a soldier; his shadow is his past self. The palm trees help to frame him and reference both LA and Vietnam. This is my personal favorite. It works well from across the room, and communicates an idea from the story. There is still some room to communicate the feeling and mood of the story here as well.



The second thumbnail is another variation on the shadowy past, but in this image we're in closer on Harry, and his shadow is cast upon a wall next to him. I think there's some room here to draw connections between a pitted and scarred wall, and the lined and weathered face of Harry. It is a more personal perspective.


{P.S.: see the final product here}

Pike:
Douglas Pike is no longer the murderous hustler he was in his youth, but reforming hasn't made him much kinder. He's just living out his life in his Appalachian hometown, working odd jobs with his partner, Rory, hemming in his demons the best he can. And his best seems just good enough until his estranged daughter overdoses and he takes in his twelve-year-old granddaughter, Wendy.

Wendy bears with her all of Pike’s failures to his family, enough heartache to last a lifetime and a few unanswered questions about her mother's death. And, following in her wake, a dirty cop named Derrick Kreiger, who carries an unhealthy interest in the girl. Pike, Rory and Derrick circle, evenly matched predators in a human wilderness of junkie squats, roadhouse dives and Cincinnati slums, with Wendy at their epicenter.

Here we have the Pike images. I worked around some ideas about what is at the core of this story. There is a "past coming to the present and having to deal with it" theme. Also I noticed a theme of unexpected family, where in Pike has to deal with, and, defend his "new" grand-daughter. As it says in the blurb "Wendy is the epicenter," and so she's integral to the concepts up to now.
In the first thumbnail we see Wendy as a silhouette against a dark tree. I like this image, and feel that it has a graphic punch for a cover image. I like the metaphor of the family tree, and showing it as a dark foreboding shape. There's a lot of potential for this image, there's a great deal that can be communicated through her body language and facial expression. { this is where the details from the manuscript will come in handy } This one gets my vote.


The second image is more narrative by comparison, Pike is shown working on a broke down truck with Wendy close at hand. Here I am showing the broke-down family as the truck, where Pike has get in there and fix it. I've highlighted his forearm which will have tattoos on it, referencing a sorted past. Wendy is shown in contemplation of her grandpa's hand, and it is ambiguous as to whether or not she's actually going to reach up and touch his hand. I think that this image highlights the family dynamic, more specifically the relationship between Wendy and Pike.

And that's all for now folks, stay tuned for details as this develops.

Portraiture in Watercolor

I am super happy to post this painting. I was honored to complete this portrait for some friends of mine who commissioned the piece after seeing the Paintings for Presents that I posted.

The concept to use their daughter as Max from "Where the Wild Things Roam," was serendipity at it's best. I'd been thinking about how to make this a piece that would be something different than the classic portrait. One of the places that I found inspiration was with Gustav Klimpt, in that he often uses the 2d and the 3d to great effect. So initially, I thought it would be something like a Klimpt, in that there'd be a bold shape, and the the figure would fit in it. As I went through some sketches, I happily stumbled upon Max. From there it was shooting reference pics to support the idea. Knowing that the images we'd taken at the playground would be my only reference, I shot many pictures, and endeavored to match one or two to a scene.

Technically speaking, the painting was challenging to work on. After arriving at a drawing that I liked, moving to a painting can sometimes be an opportunity to flub things up, but good. This is of course always the case, but we must persevere through those moments. So, I prepared the board, and smeared Cobalt Blue over everything but the Max suit which was to be white, and set into painting.

I tried my best to keep the momentum going for the painting, and to not allow myself to be bogged down in details to early. Following the 3 rules that I learned when first learning to paint in watercolors: Work big to small, back to front, and warm to cool.

In the end I enjoyed the concept and the process from gathering reference pictures, to drawing and painting the finished piece. There's just no way to express the feeling of making a blend happen 'just so,' or working life into the face. It is just a joy to paint, and to have others enjoy it in the end.

Goggles Comic: Cover Up

Well, here is some work in progress { and I use that term loosely.}

I was working ahead with the cover image when a conversation with the author provided me with some crucial character info that I missed in my reading of the story... baddaboom, big baddaboom.

It turns out that the Goggles themselves need to be more chaotic, and wild. I think I can still save this image and add onto the drawing, it's still early enough in the process to make those kinds of changes. But I feel like a heel for missing that character element to begin with. So, I'll continue to try to save this image, and in the end if I have to burn it, so be it. But I'm not ready for that just yet.

Previous Post: here

Studio Bowes Art Online Store: Grand Opening!

Studio Bowes Art Online Store

I am happy to announce the Grand Opening of the Studio Bowes Art Online Store! I'm posting up prints and posters, mugs, and my favorite, the skateboard! Check it out {here}

The proceeds from this online store will go towards sending Brian to the 2010 Illustration Master Class held in Amherst, MA. Please feel free to stop on in 24/7 to take a look, and if you don't see something that you'd like, I am more than happy to special requests.

Also available are personalized portraits. Handcrafted with watercolor, these can make for great gifts for the Holidays, Anniversaries, or Birthdays. Feel free to contact me directly through my portfolio site {here}, and read more about it on my blog {here}

Goggles Comic: Cover on Board

After sitting on this for a while, life's cleared up, and the next project is up and running. A friend and I have worked out a story, and developed it for release as a comic. And by developed it, I mean that he's written the darn thing, and now I need to deliver the art! Our objective with this project is to have a bit of fun, we're both comics fans, and decided that we'd give it a go. The plan thus far is to produce a sample of the work, and then approach a few different publishers, to see if they are interested, and if that fails, there's always self publishing.

After doing considerable thinking on the matter, the cover is going to be the first thing, then I will work out the pages. So, with out further ado, or a-doo-doo...

Part of my intent with this cover painting is to keep things quick and loose. I feel like often by the time a drawing makes it to the final board, a lot of life has been wrung out of it through tracing. So, I've intentionally left this one looser.

First a few free-hand color comps. I really like the earth tone pallet, but after some consideration, I started thinking about James Bama's Doc Savage covers, images here, I like the tone of his images, he pulls a hue as the major key for his images. Which I thought would work better for a comic cover ( I do actually want people to buy this!)

I started working using white to knock back the background. The image below was started with a wash of orange, then knocked back with chinese white. There's an intentional halo around the edge of the shadow and figure, my hope is to create a little edge vibration, especially between the blue shadow and the orange edge.

Now, the drawing is on the board, and at least one thing has changed from the preliminary drawing, notice the tentacles along the bottom edge, which I am seeing as being in the foreground. I think they help to really emphasize the danger that our heroine has walked into.

I'll apologize now for the quality of the photo, it's just a snap shot that I bent around in photoshop to get the lines to show up.